Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as âEA cause areasâ translate to âareas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunitiesâ. And the things you think of as ânot in major EA cause areasâ are overwhelmingly âareas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunitiesâ.
Many of the âhavenât tried hardâ areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably arenât 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⌠arenât very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like âfull-time researcherâ, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and youâll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers arenât very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isnât going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, thereâs 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 whatâs out there for e.g. ânew approaches in global developmentâ). 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.
Iâll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that âEA doesnât prioritize X highly enoughâ) sometime in the next few months.
Props for writing the post you were thinking about!
Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as âEA cause areasâ translate to âareas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunitiesâ. And the things you think of as ânot in major EA cause areasâ are overwhelmingly âareas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunitiesâ.
Many of the âhavenât tried hardâ areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably arenât 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⌠arenât very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like âfull-time researcherâ, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and youâll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers arenât very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isnât going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, thereâs 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 whatâs out there for e.g. ânew approaches in global developmentâ). 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.
Iâll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that âEA doesnât prioritize X highly enoughâ) sometime in the next few months.