The document discusses the intersection of five communities—artificial intelligence and society, effective altruism, quantified self, applied rationality, and transhumanism—in academia, emphasizing the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and research. It outlines challenges and steps for creating a new academic field, including establishing a memespace, fostering collaborations, and securing funding. The final sections suggest topics for further discussion and advertise a job opportunity in the author's lab.

1. 6 Worlds Collide
ACADEMIA
Opportunities for reconciling the
5 worlds community with
mainstream academia
Asst.-Prof. Dr. Matthias Samwald
Institute for Artificial Intelligence
and Decision Support
Medical University of Vienna

2. What is special about the 5 worlds
Surprising overlap of communities with seemingly disparate goals
 Artificial intelligence & society
 Effective altruism
 Quantified self
 Applied rationality
 Transhumanism
There might be lots of meaningful overlaps / synergies
Online communities have been vital
Lots of kind-of-scientific work and debate outside of academia
http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/

3. Academia -- how big is it?
How many people graduate from universities per year? (a)
 Austria: 49.635
How many PhD students are there? (b)
 Austria: 26.052
 Germany: 208.500
 EU-28: 717.320
How many researchers are employed in the higher education sector? (b)
 Austria: 13.100
 Germany: 100.500
 EU-28: 667.800
Billions of Euros of research funding per year
a) Year 2012; Source: Bildung in Zahlen https://www.bmbf.gv.at/ministerium/vp/2015/20150422a.pdf?4ut4xd
b) Year 2013; numbers are full-time equivalents; Source: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/R_%26_D_personnel

4. So you are about to suggest it is a good idea to aim for a long-term
career in academia?
Never without viable alternative
options that also fit your
personality!
https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2010/4294970126.pdf

5. Okay, so… why do you want to talk about academia?
Potential for tapping into vast pool of existing resources and
harnessing them for very high-impact progress
Significant additional prestige and credibility of ideas among
important decision makers
High standards of writing more clearly, and in a way that is better
connected to the relevant empirical literature
Subjecting work to critical review from academics helps prevent
building intellectual echo-chambers

6. So what do you suggest we should do?
Step 1) Establish the 5 Worlds memespace as a new interdisciplinary field of
academic research!
 Global cause prioritisation, strong emphasis on intellectual ‚mobility‘ between cause
areas
 Pragmatic technoprogressivism
Technological transformation and interlinking of individuals, society and networked intelligent
machines
Important: Steered by expected benefit, not by blind technofetishism
 Being serious about challenging established paradigms
Goals and subjects of research
How scientific community is organized
Challenges:
 Identifying and either filtering out or reformulating the small fraction of ideas that
might hold back adoption?
 Finding a name for this field of research?

7. So what do you suggest we should do?
Step 2) Start organized collaborations and publish in modern, peer
reviewed journals
 Huge untapped potential for trying out new models for international, fluid
collaboration over the web
 Novel peer-reviewed journals could help make process less sluggish (e.g.,
PeerJ)
Step 3) Get research funding (profit!)
Step 4) Influence funding priorities (even more profit!!)
 Governmental research funding seems by far the most viable funding source
outside a small number of global hubs

8. So what do you suggest we should do?
If people are interested, we can have a break-out session tomorrow
Possible topics:
How to make bost of bachelor/master/PhD thesis,
How to established a new interdisciplinary research field (and how
to name it)
How new models of collaborative paper writing could work
Working on concrete research ideas
General career advice for academia

9. Shameless advertisement
Open position for a developer/researcher with focus on medical
decision support in my lab – please contact me if interested
 Developing pragmatic, scalable interventions to enable paradigmatic change
 Focus of the position on pharmacogenomics, but generally EA-friendly group
 Other current topics: decision support for health and animal charity
donations