Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as “EA cause areas” translate to “areas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunities”. And the things you think of as “not in major EA cause areas” are overwhelmingly “areas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunities”.
Many of the “haven’t tried hard” areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably aren’t great opportunities (very few people are affected, very little harm is done, or progress has been made despite enormous investment from reasonable people, etc.)
But many other areas are ignored because there just… aren’t very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like “full-time researcher”, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and you’ll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers aren’t very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isn’t going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, there’s a lot of funding available for people to do impact-focused research, at least in areas with some plausible connection to long-term impact (not sure what’s out there for e.g. “new approaches in global development”). It just takes time and skill to put together a good application and develop the basic case for something being promising enough to spend $10k-50k investigating.
I’ll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that “EA doesn’t prioritize X highly enough”) sometime in the next few months.
Props for writing the post you were thinking about!
Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as “EA cause areas” translate to “areas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunities”. And the things you think of as “not in major EA cause areas” are overwhelmingly “areas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunities”.
Many of the “haven’t tried hard” areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably aren’t great opportunities (very few people are affected, very little harm is done, or progress has been made despite enormous investment from reasonable people, etc.)
But many other areas are ignored because there just… aren’t very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like “full-time researcher”, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and you’ll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers aren’t very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isn’t going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, there’s a lot of funding available for people to do impact-focused research, at least in areas with some plausible connection to long-term impact (not sure what’s out there for e.g. “new approaches in global development”). It just takes time and skill to put together a good application and develop the basic case for something being promising enough to spend $10k-50k investigating.
I’ll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that “EA doesn’t prioritize X highly enough”) sometime in the next few months.