Find promising candidates for “Cause X” with an iterative forecast-guided thinktank
Epistemic institutions
How likely is it that the EA community is neglecting a cause area that is more pressing than current candidates? We are fairly confident in the importance of the community’s current community areas, but we think it’s still important to keep searching for more candidates.
We’d be excited to fund organisations attacking this problem in a structured, rigorous way, to reduce the chance that the EA community is missing huge opportunities.
We propose an organisation with two streams: generalist research, and superforecasting. The generalist researchers create shallow, exploratory evaluations of many different cause areas. Forecasters then use these evaluations to forecast the likelihood of each cause area being a top cause area recommended (e.g. by 80,000 Hours) in 5 years time. The generalist researchers then perform progressively more in-depth evaluations of the cause areas most favoured by forecasters. Forecasters update their forecasts based on these evaluations. If the forecasted promising-ness exceeds a threshold, the organisation recommends that an EA funder funds in-depth research into the cause area.
Find promising candidates for “Cause X” with an iterative forecast-guided thinktank
Epistemic institutions
How likely is it that the EA community is neglecting a cause area that is more pressing than current candidates? We are fairly confident in the importance of the community’s current community areas, but we think it’s still important to keep searching for more candidates.
We’d be excited to fund organisations attacking this problem in a structured, rigorous way, to reduce the chance that the EA community is missing huge opportunities.
We propose an organisation with two streams: generalist research, and superforecasting. The generalist researchers create shallow, exploratory evaluations of many different cause areas. Forecasters then use these evaluations to forecast the likelihood of each cause area being a top cause area recommended (e.g. by 80,000 Hours) in 5 years time. The generalist researchers then perform progressively more in-depth evaluations of the cause areas most favoured by forecasters. Forecasters update their forecasts based on these evaluations. If the forecasted promising-ness exceeds a threshold, the organisation recommends that an EA funder funds in-depth research into the cause area.