In your Principles doc, you write about âAgnosticismâ, and say:
As a result, we expect to provide recommendations within multiple cause areas, such as global health, animal welfare, existential risk, institutional decision making, mental health, climate change, broad societal improvement and more.
Could you say a bit about how broad a set of cause areas you expect to cover/âmention, and how youâll make those decisions? E.g., might you also discuss things like psychedelics (arguably a subset of mental health), anti-aging, and macroeconomic policy? (I donât intend to push those areasâI focus on existential risks myselfâIâm just using them as examples.)
I guess Iâm asking something very similar to one of your âOpen Questionsâ. (âWhat cause areas and career paths do we want to focus on? Do we want to start with specific fields and slowly grow, or do we want to provide shallow introductions more broadly and slowly deepen our content?â) So Iâm just after your current guesses, key considerations, or thought process, rather than expecting crisp, final answers :)
Hi Michael, as you mentionâthe issue of accurately defining our scope is still an important open question to us. Iâm happy to share our current thinking about this, but we expect this thinking to evolve as we collect feedback and gain some more hands-on experience.
I think itâs worth making a distinction between two versions of this question. The first is the longer-term question of what is the set of all cause areas that should be within scope for this work. Thatâs a difficult question. At the moment, weâre happy to use the diversity of views meaningfully held in the EA community as a reasonable proxyâi.e. if thereâs a non-negligible portion of EAs that believe a certain cause area is promising we think thatâs worth investigating. As such, all three of the examples you mention would be potentially in-scope in my view. This is not, in and of itself, a cohesive and well-defined scope, and as I mentioned, it is likely to change. But I hope this gives at least an idea of the type of scope weâre thinking of.
The second version of this question is what we actually intend to work on in the upcoming months, given that we are just getting started and we are still constrained in time and resources. This question will dominate our actual decisions for the foreseeable future. Within the large scope mentioned above, we want to initially focus on areas based on two criteria: First, unmet needs within the EA community, and second, cause areas that are easier to evaluate. Both of these are very weak signals for where we want to focus long-term, but drastically influence how quickly we can experiment, evaluate whether we can provide significant value, and start answering some of our open questions. As a concrete example, we believe the Global Health & Development fits this bill quite well, and so at least part of our first career paths will be in this space.
I hope this helps clarify some of these questions. I apologize if there are more open questions here than answersâitâs just really important to us to experiment first and make long-term decisions about priorities and scope afterwards rather than the other way around.
I apologize if there are more open questions here than answersâitâs just really important to us to experiment first and make long-term decisions about priorities and scope afterwards rather than the other way around.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. And no need to apologise! I think sharing your current thinking at this stage seems like a really good move, and that necessarily means having lots of remaining uncertainties (indeed, thatâs part of why itâs a good move). So I wouldnât at all want to disincentivise that by demanding that someone has all the details figured out when they first post on the Forum about a project :)
In your Principles doc, you write about âAgnosticismâ, and say:
Could you say a bit about how broad a set of cause areas you expect to cover/âmention, and how youâll make those decisions? E.g., might you also discuss things like psychedelics (arguably a subset of mental health), anti-aging, and macroeconomic policy? (I donât intend to push those areasâI focus on existential risks myselfâIâm just using them as examples.)
I guess Iâm asking something very similar to one of your âOpen Questionsâ. (âWhat cause areas and career paths do we want to focus on? Do we want to start with specific fields and slowly grow, or do we want to provide shallow introductions more broadly and slowly deepen our content?â) So Iâm just after your current guesses, key considerations, or thought process, rather than expecting crisp, final answers :)
Hi Michael, as you mentionâthe issue of accurately defining our scope is still an important open question to us. Iâm happy to share our current thinking about this, but we expect this thinking to evolve as we collect feedback and gain some more hands-on experience.
I think itâs worth making a distinction between two versions of this question. The first is the longer-term question of what is the set of all cause areas that should be within scope for this work. Thatâs a difficult question. At the moment, weâre happy to use the diversity of views meaningfully held in the EA community as a reasonable proxyâi.e. if thereâs a non-negligible portion of EAs that believe a certain cause area is promising we think thatâs worth investigating. As such, all three of the examples you mention would be potentially in-scope in my view. This is not, in and of itself, a cohesive and well-defined scope, and as I mentioned, it is likely to change. But I hope this gives at least an idea of the type of scope weâre thinking of.
The second version of this question is what we actually intend to work on in the upcoming months, given that we are just getting started and we are still constrained in time and resources. This question will dominate our actual decisions for the foreseeable future. Within the large scope mentioned above, we want to initially focus on areas based on two criteria: First, unmet needs within the EA community, and second, cause areas that are easier to evaluate. Both of these are very weak signals for where we want to focus long-term, but drastically influence how quickly we can experiment, evaluate whether we can provide significant value, and start answering some of our open questions. As a concrete example, we believe the Global Health & Development fits this bill quite well, and so at least part of our first career paths will be in this space.
I hope this helps clarify some of these questions. I apologize if there are more open questions here than answersâitâs just really important to us to experiment first and make long-term decisions about priorities and scope afterwards rather than the other way around.
Thanks, that all sounds reasonable to me.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. And no need to apologise! I think sharing your current thinking at this stage seems like a really good move, and that necessarily means having lots of remaining uncertainties (indeed, thatâs part of why itâs a good move). So I wouldnât at all want to disincentivise that by demanding that someone has all the details figured out when they first post on the Forum about a project :)