I just stumbled upon this definition of a “cause” from GiveWell in 2013:
we’ve since moved to the cause as our fundamental unit of analysis. We’d roughly define a “cause” as “a particular set of problems, or opportunities, such that the people and organizations working on them are likely to interact with each other, and such that evaluating many of these people and organizations requires knowledge of overlapping subjects.”
That definition seems useful to me, though of course many other definitions are possible too.
Where I found that was a link from an 80,000 Hours post from 2013 on Why pick a cause?, in which they discuss 4 key reasons:
Picking a cause is one of the best things you can do to increase your impact.
We think picking a cause provides you with a useful level of direction in planning your next steps, which is neither too narrow nor too broad.
Picking a cause seems to be a useful way to narrow down careers based on personal factors and deeply held value judgements.
Having a cause can be motivating.
So that post seems relevant here.
(I think this largely repeats the sort of points made in other answers/comments, but I felt I might as well share these links and quotes anyway.)
I think this definition of “cause area” is roughly how the EA community uses the term in practice, and explains a lot of why/how it’s useful. It helps facilitate good discussion by pointing towards the best people to talk to, since others in my cause area will have common knowledge and interests with myself and each other. On this view, “cause area” is just EA-speak for a subcommunity.
That makes it a bit hard to justify the common EA practice of “cause prioritization” though, since causes aren’t really particularly homogeneous with regard to their impact. I think doing “intervention prioritization” would be a lot more useful, even though there’s way more interventions than causes.
I just stumbled upon this definition of a “cause” from GiveWell in 2013:
That definition seems useful to me, though of course many other definitions are possible too.
Where I found that was a link from an 80,000 Hours post from 2013 on Why pick a cause?, in which they discuss 4 key reasons:
So that post seems relevant here.
(I think this largely repeats the sort of points made in other answers/comments, but I felt I might as well share these links and quotes anyway.)
I think this definition of “cause area” is roughly how the EA community uses the term in practice, and explains a lot of why/how it’s useful. It helps facilitate good discussion by pointing towards the best people to talk to, since others in my cause area will have common knowledge and interests with myself and each other. On this view, “cause area” is just EA-speak for a subcommunity.
That makes it a bit hard to justify the common EA practice of “cause prioritization” though, since causes aren’t really particularly homogeneous with regard to their impact. I think doing “intervention prioritization” would be a lot more useful, even though there’s way more interventions than causes.
That one is linked from Owen’s post.
Nice find!