Some of the disconnect here might be semantic—my sense is people here often use “moral progress” to refer to “progress in people’s moral views,” while you seem to be using the term to mean both that and also other kinds of progress.
Other than that, I’d guess people might not yet be sold on how tractable and high-leverage these interventions are, especially in comparison to other interventions this community has identified. If you or others have more detailed cases to make on the tractability of any of these important problems, I’d be curious to see them, and I imagine others would be, too. (As you might have guessed, you might find more ears if you argue for relevance to x-risks, since the risk aversion of global health and development parts of EA seems to leave them with little interest in hard-to-measure interventions.)
I can understand not prioritizing these issues for grant-making, because of tractability. But if something is highly important, and no one is making progress on it, shouldn’t there at least be a lot of discussion about it, even if we don’t yet see tractable approaches? Like, shouldn’t there be energy in trying to find tractability? That seems missing, which makes me think that the issues are underrated in terms of importance.
Thanks for the thoughtful post!
Some of the disconnect here might be semantic—my sense is people here often use “moral progress” to refer to “progress in people’s moral views,” while you seem to be using the term to mean both that and also other kinds of progress.
Other than that, I’d guess people might not yet be sold on how tractable and high-leverage these interventions are, especially in comparison to other interventions this community has identified. If you or others have more detailed cases to make on the tractability of any of these important problems, I’d be curious to see them, and I imagine others would be, too. (As you might have guessed, you might find more ears if you argue for relevance to x-risks, since the risk aversion of global health and development parts of EA seems to leave them with little interest in hard-to-measure interventions.)
I can understand not prioritizing these issues for grant-making, because of tractability. But if something is highly important, and no one is making progress on it, shouldn’t there at least be a lot of discussion about it, even if we don’t yet see tractable approaches? Like, shouldn’t there be energy in trying to find tractability? That seems missing, which makes me think that the issues are underrated in terms of importance.