Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as āEA cause areasā translate to āareas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunitiesā. And the things you think of as ānot in major EA cause areasā are overwhelmingly āareas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunitiesā.
Many of the āhavenāt tried hardā areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably arenāt 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 justā¦ arenāt very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like āfull-time researcherā, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and youāll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers arenāt very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isnāt going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, thereās 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 whatās out there for e.g. ānew approaches in global developmentā). 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.
Iāll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that āEA doesnāt prioritize X highly enoughā) sometime in the next few months.
Props for writing the post you were thinking about!
Overwhelmingly, the things you think of as āEA cause areasā translate to āareas where people have used common EA principles to evaluate opportunitiesā. And the things you think of as ānot in major EA cause areasā are overwhelmingly āareas where people have not tried very hard to evaluate opportunitiesā.
Many of the āhavenāt tried hardā areas are justifiably ignored, because there are major factors implying there probably arenāt 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 justā¦ arenāt very many people in EA. Maybe 150 people whose job description is something like āfull-time researcherā, plus another few dozen people doing research internships or summer programs? Compare this to the scale of open questions within well-established areas, and youāll see that we are already overwhelmed. (Plus, many of these researchers arenāt very flexible; if you work for Animal Charity Evaluators, Palestine isnāt going to be within your purview.)
Fortunately, thereās 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 whatās out there for e.g. ānew approaches in global developmentā). 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.
Iāll follow in your footsteps and say that I want to write a full post about this (the argument that āEA doesnāt prioritize X highly enoughā) sometime in the next few months.