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 — I wouldn’t call them “uncontroversial”, but few ideas are. (See “building more houses makes housing cheaper”, which is a lot more controversial than I’d have expected before I started to follow that “debate”.)
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, what’s the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? What’s 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 “civilizational epistemics”, 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 — their goal isn’t 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 — I wouldn’t call them “uncontroversial”, but few ideas are. (See “building more houses makes housing cheaper”, which is a lot more controversial than I’d have expected before I started to follow that “debate”.)
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, what’s the value of getting one middle-class American to embrace passive rather than active investment? What’s 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 “civilizational epistemics”, 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 — their goal isn’t just to reach a few specific politicians, but to reach people who will share their message with politicians.)