One thing that’s very useful about having separate cause areas is that it helps people decide what to study and research in depth, e.g. get a PhD in. This probably doesn’t need to be illustrated, but I’ll do it anyway:
If you consider two fields of study, A and B, such that A has only one promising intervention, and B has two, and all three interventions are roughly equal in expectation (or whatever other measures are important to you); then it would be better to study B, because if one of its two interventions don’t pan out, you can more easily switch to the other; with A, you might have to move onto a new field entirely. Studying B actually has higher expected value than studying A, despite all three interventions being equal in expectation.
One thing that’s very useful about having separate cause areas is that it helps people decide what to study and research in depth, e.g. get a PhD in. This probably doesn’t need to be illustrated, but I’ll do it anyway:
If you consider two fields of study, A and B, such that A has only one promising intervention, and B has two, and all three interventions are roughly equal in expectation (or whatever other measures are important to you); then it would be better to study B, because if one of its two interventions don’t pan out, you can more easily switch to the other; with A, you might have to move onto a new field entirely. Studying B actually has higher expected value than studying A, despite all three interventions being equal in expectation.