as far as I can tell the answer to this type of question is always that someone did a napkin calculation 10 years ago and decided that either (a) lots of funding within an arbitrarily-defined “cause area” means everything within that cause isn’t neglected, or (b) affecting a large pool of funding isn’t tractable enough and therefore not worth spending EA resources on, and then because of path dependency in the development of EA as a community of practice it’s now just hard to gain traction or interest in cause areas outside of the EA canon
There could totally be truth to both of these points. I would add a third that the EA community is insular, and attracts a particular kind of person that tends to be frustrated / turned off by things like bureaucracy and process. I suspect there’s a cultural bias (which I share! to be clear) against ideas like going as a diplomat to huge frustrating conventions every year full of irrational people parroting doublespeak, even if those conventions represent opportunity to do good. Much more appealing to go work in an AI lab, make a bunch of money, and have friends who also grew up reading LessWrong.
as far as I can tell the answer to this type of question is always that someone did a napkin calculation 10 years ago and decided that either (a) lots of funding within an arbitrarily-defined “cause area” means everything within that cause isn’t neglected, or (b) affecting a large pool of funding isn’t tractable enough and therefore not worth spending EA resources on, and then because of path dependency in the development of EA as a community of practice it’s now just hard to gain traction or interest in cause areas outside of the EA canon
There could totally be truth to both of these points. I would add a third that the EA community is insular, and attracts a particular kind of person that tends to be frustrated / turned off by things like bureaucracy and process. I suspect there’s a cultural bias (which I share! to be clear) against ideas like going as a diplomat to huge frustrating conventions every year full of irrational people parroting doublespeak, even if those conventions represent opportunity to do good. Much more appealing to go work in an AI lab, make a bunch of money, and have friends who also grew up reading LessWrong.