MichaelA🔸 comments on A central directory for open research questions

[MichaelA🔸]

Here’s a section that was in this post until today but that I’ve now decided is no longer worth having in the post itself:

What this could become (with your help!)

[Edited to add in April 2021: I’ve now drafted a post that goes into more detail on a better version of the sorts of ideas given below.]

As noted earlier, I hope this can help some of the many wonderfully curious EAs out there to find important questions they can start plugging away at, to help guide us all in our various efforts to improve the world.

But I’m sure that:

• I’ve missed various collections of questions, especially for cause areas other than longtermism (my personal focus)

• New collections will be made in future

• There are many individual questions that haven’t yet been collected anywhere, or new individual questions that could be suggested (I’ve added some as “Comments” in the google doc already)

• Some people would find this more useful if someone actually pulled out all of the questions from those collections and organised them, by topic and subtopic and so on (with the original source of each question referenced).

  • This could be in one central document, in a “family” of interlinked documents (e.g., one for each broad cause area), in a spreadsheet, or in a wiki-style page.

And I think we could do more to inspire and support people to actually investigate these questions than just assemble a big list. For example, we could somehow “attach” to each question, perhaps as comments or indented bullet points, things like:

• thoughts on how to approach the question

• potential breakdowns into subquestions

• links to relevant resources

• links to draft documents where someone has begun answering certain questions

• “tags” indicating what sort of skills or backgrounds are required for answering each question or set of questions

• offers of “prizes” (payment) for sufficiently high quality explorations of the questions

  • Ideally, it’d be easy to offer the prizes, stipulate the terms, and see the total amount offered by everyone for a particular question

And this could all be done collaboratively. (Plus, I don’t expect to have time to do it myself.)

So here’s a Google Doc version of this post. [Edit: I’m no longer updating that when I update the post version.] Anyone can comment and make suggestions. Please do so, to make this as useful as it can be! (You can either say “someone should probably do X”, or just do go do X yourself.)

Also feel free to:

• Duplicate the doc

• Create other docs and suggest links to them from this central directory

• Let me know if you want to get full editing permissions and be the person “in charge” of this doc

I’d be really excited to see this develop into something that can really help people advance our movement’s collective knowledge, and to see people actually executing on that—actually making those advancements.

Thoughts from Aaron Gertler

I emailed Aaron Gertler of the Centre for Effective Altruism to ask his thoughts on how valuable something like this would be, and what its ideal eventual form might be. His reply, which he confirmed it was ok for me to quote here, included the following:

I’m not sure how often people actually look at these “open question” lists to decide on research priorities, so I don’t know what kind of return you’d get on your time. However, some kind of Google Doc for this should exist, and if your post is what causes that to happen, I think it will be valuable (over time, some number of people will eventually go looking for this sort of thing—I’ve been asked for it before, and it will be nice to have a good place to send people).

A really comprehensive list of open questions (which is regularly updated both with new questions and with new resources relevant to old questions) would be an interesting resource, and is the kind of thing one could apply for an EA Funds grant to support; however, I think you’d first have to make a case that such a thing would be used by at least a few people who otherwise wouldn’t have picked very good research topics (the Effective Thesis use case is a classic example of this). It seems to me like any such list should be research-oriented (pointing out where work can be done to resolve confusion) more than debate-oriented (pointing out what different people believe), though of course your ability to emphasize that will vary from question to question.

Hopefully that can provide food for thought for people who might want to develop this idea further.