cross-posted from niplav.site

What I might do if I magically got hold of a very large amount of money, and couldn't spend it maximally altruistically.

I sometimes like to engage in idle speculation. One of those speculations is: "If someone came up to me and told me that they would give me a lot of money, but only under the condition that I would spend most of it on unconventional and interesting projects, and I was forbidden to give it to Effective Altruist organizations narrowly defined, what would I do? Not disallowing the projects from having positive consequences accidentally, of course."

The following is a result of this speculation. Many of the ideas might be of questionable morality; I hope it's clear I would think a bit more about them if I were to actually put them into practice (which I won't, since I don't have that type of money, nor am I likely to get hold of it myself anytime soon).

Lots of these ideas aren't mine, and I have tried to attribute them wherever I could find the source. If guess that if they were implemented (not sure whether that's possible: legality & all that) I'd very likely become very unpopular in polite society. But the resulting discourse would absolutely be worth it.

Intervention	Cost
Snowball fights	?
Buy a small island nation	$5 bio.
Personal futarchy on steroids	$100 mio.
Save dying languages	$2 bio.
Raise native speakers of an engineered conlang	$30.8 mio.
Philosophically solve language	$10 mio.
SCP series	$1 bio.
Antimemetics Division spinoff	$200 mio.
Discontinuous & fast AI takeoff movie	$500 mio.
Double Crux podcast	$2 mio.
Fictional ethnography of native Antarcticans	$100k
Studying foreveraloners	$900 mio.
Really Out There Stuff Institute	$60 mio.

Sum	$ 9.81 bio.

Culture

Snowball fights: I remember having a lot of fun with snowball fights during breaks in school, but I haven't seen them happen anywhere outside since leaving school. People sign up for participating in (moderated) snowball fights, and are notified on weekends with especially good snow. Large open grassy fields (or perhaps even stadiums) are rented, and separated into at least 2 parts, each parts gets a large pile of fresh snow (to minimize the chance of stones in snowballs). People are encouraged to bring protective gear to allow for rougher fighting. If one is to allow for physical encounters, one'd

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Quests / Projects Someone Should Do