I think the premise of your question is roughly correct: I do think it’s pretty hard to “help EA notice what it is important to work on”, for a bunch of reasons:
It could lead to new, unexpected directions which might be counterintuive / controversial.
it requires the community to have the psychological, financial and intellectual safety to identify / work on causes which may not be promising
It needs a non-trivial number of people to engage with the result of exploration, and act upon it (including people who can direct substantial resources)
It has a very long feedback loop, which can be a) demoralising, and b) difficult to predict if it ever has an impact.
Given those challenges, it’s not suprising to me if we struggle to find many projects in this area. To overcome that I think we would need to take a more active approach (e.g. RFPs, etc). But we are still in the early days of thinking about these kinds of questions
I think the premise of your question is roughly correct: I do think it’s pretty hard to “help EA notice what it is important to work on”, for a bunch of reasons:
It could lead to new, unexpected directions which might be counterintuive / controversial.
it requires the community to have the psychological, financial and intellectual safety to identify / work on causes which may not be promising
It needs a non-trivial number of people to engage with the result of exploration, and act upon it (including people who can direct substantial resources)
It has a very long feedback loop, which can be a) demoralising, and b) difficult to predict if it ever has an impact.
Given those challenges, it’s not suprising to me if we struggle to find many projects in this area. To overcome that I think we would need to take a more active approach (e.g. RFPs, etc). But we are still in the early days of thinking about these kinds of questions