The lobbying pressure seems more important than the common knowledge.
EA orgs already spend a lot of time identifying and sharing important and simple ideas â I wouldnât call them âuncontroversialâ, but few ideas are. (See âbuilding more houses makes housing cheaperâ, which is a lot more controversial than Iâd have expected before I started to follow that âdebateâ.)
I do think it would be worth spending a few hours trying to come up with examples of ideas that would be good to spread + calculating very rough BOTECs for them. For example, whatâs the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? Whatâs the value of getting one more person vaccinated?
Development Media International is the obvious parallel, and the cost-effectiveness of using ridiculously cheap radio advertisements to share basic public health information seems hard to beat on priors. But there are a lot of directions you could go with âcivilizational epistemicsâ, and maybe some of them wind up looking much better, e.g. because working in the developed world = many more resources to redirect.
(Speaking of which, Guarding Against Pandemics is another example â their goal isnât just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)
The lobbying pressure seems more important than the common knowledge.
EA orgs already spend a lot of time identifying and sharing important and simple ideas â I wouldnât call them âuncontroversialâ, but few ideas are. (See âbuilding more houses makes housing cheaperâ, which is a lot more controversial than Iâd have expected before I started to follow that âdebateâ.)
I do think it would be worth spending a few hours trying to come up with examples of ideas that would be good to spread + calculating very rough BOTECs for them. For example, whatâs the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? Whatâs the value of getting one more person vaccinated?
Development Media International is the obvious parallel, and the cost-effectiveness of using ridiculously cheap radio advertisements to share basic public health information seems hard to beat on priors. But there are a lot of directions you could go with âcivilizational epistemicsâ, and maybe some of them wind up looking much better, e.g. because working in the developed world = many more resources to redirect.
(Speaking of which, Guarding Against Pandemics is another example â their goal isnât just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)