I suspect that it will be hard to find neglected opportunities in this space, but we should look for situations that fall into some Tragedy of the Commons–like category where a large group of people suffers slightly but not enough to cause them to organize:
If you want to maximize your effect by spreading your resources as thin as possible over the largest possible number of people, then it is intuitive to focus on those for whom small improvements have the greatest marginal effect, e.g. or esp. beings in great poverty. But this space is subject to research already. Human poverty surely is, and we’re already aware of neglected areas like WAS, so that category of area is not neglected within EA. The reason that in human poverty “grants” (of all forms) take certain sizes is that research indicates (I’m drawing from Poor Economics here) that there are sometimes poverty traps, which can be overcome with certain amounts, earning us leverage effects. So spreading those grants more thinly would often not be a good idea.
If we want to avoid this space because we don’t consider it neglected or because it is much harder to reach millions of the poorest of the poor than millions of somewhat less poor people on the Internet, then we could focus, for example, on improving online resources, open source software, etc. But here it is much harder to find any neglected opportunities, because if something really improves someone’s quality of life in this space, then that person is able to pay for it, so countless entrepreneurs are already looking for these opportunities, and even free and open source software and things like HTTP/2 (or rather SPDY) are being developed by for-profits or their employees on company time.
What’s left (but I may be forgetting more categories here) are said Tragedy of the Commons–like situations. Groups like the EFF are already working on many of those, but there may be more. (This addon falls into that category for me. ^^)
I suspect that it will be hard to find neglected opportunities in this space, but we should look for situations that fall into some Tragedy of the Commons–like category where a large group of people suffers slightly but not enough to cause them to organize:
If you want to maximize your effect by spreading your resources as thin as possible over the largest possible number of people, then it is intuitive to focus on those for whom small improvements have the greatest marginal effect, e.g. or esp. beings in great poverty. But this space is subject to research already. Human poverty surely is, and we’re already aware of neglected areas like WAS, so that category of area is not neglected within EA. The reason that in human poverty “grants” (of all forms) take certain sizes is that research indicates (I’m drawing from Poor Economics here) that there are sometimes poverty traps, which can be overcome with certain amounts, earning us leverage effects. So spreading those grants more thinly would often not be a good idea.
If we want to avoid this space because we don’t consider it neglected or because it is much harder to reach millions of the poorest of the poor than millions of somewhat less poor people on the Internet, then we could focus, for example, on improving online resources, open source software, etc. But here it is much harder to find any neglected opportunities, because if something really improves someone’s quality of life in this space, then that person is able to pay for it, so countless entrepreneurs are already looking for these opportunities, and even free and open source software and things like HTTP/2 (or rather SPDY) are being developed by for-profits or their employees on company time.
What’s left (but I may be forgetting more categories here) are said Tragedy of the Commons–like situations. Groups like the EFF are already working on many of those, but there may be more. (This addon falls into that category for me. ^^)