I think EA may have picked the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s lots of low-ish hanging fruit left unpicked. For example: who, exactly, should be seen as the beneficiaries aka allkind aka moral patients? EAs disagree about this quite a lot, but there hasn’t been that much detailed + broadly informed argument about it inside EA. (This example comes to mind because I’m currently writing a report on it for OpenPhil.)
There are also a great many areas that might be fairly promising, but which haven’t been looked into in much breadth+detail yet (AFAIK). The best of these might count as low-ish hanging fruit. E.g.: is there anything to be done about authoritarianism around the world? Might certain kinds of meta-science work (e.g. COS) make future life science and social science work more robust+informative than it is now, providing highly leveraged returns to welfare?
There is also non-AI global catastrophic risk, like engineered pandemics, and low hanging fruit for dealing with agricultural catastrophes like nuclear winter.
I think EA may have picked the lowest-hanging fruit, but there’s lots of low-ish hanging fruit left unpicked. For example: who, exactly, should be seen as the beneficiaries aka allkind aka moral patients? EAs disagree about this quite a lot, but there hasn’t been that much detailed + broadly informed argument about it inside EA. (This example comes to mind because I’m currently writing a report on it for OpenPhil.)
There are also a great many areas that might be fairly promising, but which haven’t been looked into in much breadth+detail yet (AFAIK). The best of these might count as low-ish hanging fruit. E.g.: is there anything to be done about authoritarianism around the world? Might certain kinds of meta-science work (e.g. COS) make future life science and social science work more robust+informative than it is now, providing highly leveraged returns to welfare?
There is also non-AI global catastrophic risk, like engineered pandemics, and low hanging fruit for dealing with agricultural catastrophes like nuclear winter.