Thanks for this! Something that came to my mind as I was reading this was that it might be time for an update of CEA’s list of good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet).
You wrote that “It seems like, given an already-existing basket of policies we’d be interested in advocating for, we can make lobbying more cost-effective just by allocating more resources to (e.g.) issues that are less salient to the public.” This made me think it might be useful be to make a list of EA-relevant policy ideas and start organizing them into a Charity Entrepreneurship-style spreadsheet. Something I’ll keep musing on!
I’m also curious about what motivated you to take on this project, and what you’re planning to work on next?
I’m replying again here to note that I’ve struck the salience point from my conclusions. I’ve noted why up top. I now have a lot of uncertainty about whether this is the case or not, and don’t stand by my suggestion that salience is a good guide to resource allocation.
I like this spreadsheet idea and think I may kick it off (if you haven’t already done so!)
I took the project on because I got interested in this topic, went looking for this, couldn’t find it, and decided to make it so that it might be useful to others. I wasn’t feeling very useful in my day job, so it was easy to stay motivated to spend time on this for a while. I tend to be most interested in generalizable or flexible approaches to improving welfare across different domains, and this seemed like it might be one of those.
Some areas I’m thinking about exploring. These are pretty rough thoughts:
Some more exploration of strategies for ameliorating child abuse in light of the well-known ACES Study. GiveWell and RandomEA have both explored Nurse-Family Partnerships. This problem is just so huge in terms of people affected (and in terms of second-order effects) that I think it’s worth exploring a lot more. I’m particularly interested in focusing on child sexual abuse in particular.
Aggregating potentially cost-effective avenues to improve institutional performance. I’m curious about thinking at a higher level of abstraction than institutional decision-making. It seems worthwhile to put together the existing cross-disciplinary evidence on the question: what steps outside of those explicitly focusing on rationality and decision-making can companies/nonprofits/government agencies take to increase the probability that they make good decisions? A good example of one such step is in the apparent evidence that intellectually diverse teams make better decisions.
Long-term cost-effectiveness of stress reduction for pregnant women (with potential effects of infant mortality, maternal health, and long-term outcomes like brain development and violence).
Review of recent innovations that seem to like they might have potential for expediting scientific progress (like grant lotteries)
Thanks for this! Something that came to my mind as I was reading this was that it might be time for an update of CEA’s list of good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet).
You wrote that “It seems like, given an already-existing basket of policies we’d be interested in advocating for, we can make lobbying more cost-effective just by allocating more resources to (e.g.) issues that are less salient to the public.” This made me think it might be useful be to make a list of EA-relevant policy ideas and start organizing them into a Charity Entrepreneurship-style spreadsheet. Something I’ll keep musing on!
I’m also curious about what motivated you to take on this project, and what you’re planning to work on next?
I’m replying again here to note that I’ve struck the salience point from my conclusions. I’ve noted why up top. I now have a lot of uncertainty about whether this is the case or not, and don’t stand by my suggestion that salience is a good guide to resource allocation.
I like this spreadsheet idea and think I may kick it off (if you haven’t already done so!)
I took the project on because I got interested in this topic, went looking for this, couldn’t find it, and decided to make it so that it might be useful to others. I wasn’t feeling very useful in my day job, so it was easy to stay motivated to spend time on this for a while. I tend to be most interested in generalizable or flexible approaches to improving welfare across different domains, and this seemed like it might be one of those.
Some areas I’m thinking about exploring. These are pretty rough thoughts:
Some more exploration of strategies for ameliorating child abuse in light of the well-known ACES Study. GiveWell and RandomEA have both explored Nurse-Family Partnerships. This problem is just so huge in terms of people affected (and in terms of second-order effects) that I think it’s worth exploring a lot more. I’m particularly interested in focusing on child sexual abuse in particular.
Aggregating potentially cost-effective avenues to improve institutional performance. I’m curious about thinking at a higher level of abstraction than institutional decision-making. It seems worthwhile to put together the existing cross-disciplinary evidence on the question: what steps outside of those explicitly focusing on rationality and decision-making can companies/nonprofits/government agencies take to increase the probability that they make good decisions? A good example of one such step is in the apparent evidence that intellectually diverse teams make better decisions.
Long-term cost-effectiveness of stress reduction for pregnant women (with potential effects of infant mortality, maternal health, and long-term outcomes like brain development and violence).
Review of recent innovations that seem to like they might have potential for expediting scientific progress (like grant lotteries)