EA - $1,000 Squiggle Experimentation Challenge by Ozzie Gooen

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: $1,000 Squiggle Experimentation Challenge, published by Ozzie Gooen on August 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Motivation The team at QURI has recently released Squiggle, a very new and experimental programming language for probabilistic estimation. We’re curious about what promising use cases it could enable, and we are launching a prize to incentivize people to find this out. Prize We offer a $600 first-place prize, a $300 second-place prize, and a $100 third-place prize. The prize will be paid for by the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI). Rules To enter, first make a public post online between now and September 1, 2022. We encourage you to either post directly or make a link post to either the EA Forum or to LessWrong. Second, complete this form, also before September 1, 2022.We’ll aim to make decisions by October 1, 2022. Support & Feedback If you’d like feedback or would like to discuss possible projects, please reach out! (via direct message or email.) We’ll invite you to our Slack and can give feedback and advice. Also, feel free to file issues or comments/questions/suggestions on the Squiggle Github page. Judges The judges will be Nuño Sempere, Ozzie Gooen, and Quinn Dougherty. The rest of the Squiggle team will also consult. We’ll select winners for their importance, novelty, and presentation. Ideas Some ideas, any of which could be taken from the recent post: Software Ideas Build integrations with other tools. Google Docs, Airtable, Roam Research, Obsidian, Python, other forecasting platforms, etc. Integrate Squiggle in other software platforms or tools. Maybe use it to power an online calculator to return probability distributions instead of numbers. Make open-source React components around probability distributions better visualize the outputs of Squiggle models. Build neat tools on top of Squiggle. For example, Squiggle could help power a node-based graphical editor or a calendar-based time estimation tool. Users might not need to know anything about Squiggle; it would just be used for internal math. Make Observable dashboards that take in real-time data from the web, and use Squiggle to do some simple math on them and return probability distributions or functions. (For instance, see this post that uses Squiggle in Observable.) Research Ideas Estimate the entire value of the far future over time. Estimate EA funding over time. Convert several of the AI timelines estimates into Squiggle, then use Squiggle to help aggregate them, e.g. Cotra’s report, or Carlsmith’s. Carlsmith’s report mostly uses probabilities, but one could try to use distributions over probabilities representing the range of expert opinion instead. Some existing tools that use Squiggle (for inspiration) This tool converts Guesstimate models into Squiggle models, by Lorenzo. Google Sheets integration by Nuño Sempere An API to interact with Squiggle by Nuño Sempere A work-in-progress interactive tool for making hierarchical estimates by Nuño Sempere An experimental Squiggle CLI for allowing imports, by QURI. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.