There are many reasons why I think this post is good:
This post has been personally helpful to me in exploring EA and becoming familiar with the arguments for different areas.
Having resources like this also contributes to the “neutrality” and “big-tent-ness” of the Effective Altruism movement (which I think are some of the most promising elements of EA), and helps fight against the natural forces of inertia that help entrench a few cause areas as dominant simply because they were identified early.
Honestly, having a “Big List” that just neutrally presents other people’s claims, rather than a curated, prioritized selection of causes, is helpful in part because it encourages people to form their own opinions rather than deferring to others. When I look at this list of cause candidates, I see plenty of what I’d consider to be obvious duds, and others that seem sorely underrated. You’d probably disagree with me on the details, and that’s a good thing!
Finally, this post helped me realize that simply listing and organizing all the intellectual work that happens in EA can be an effective way to contribute. As a highly distributed, intellectually complex, and extremely big-tent social/academic/intellectual/philanthropic movement, there is a lot going on in EA and there is a lot of value in helping organize and explain all the different threads of thought that make up the movement. For this reason especially, it would be good to include this post in the Decadal Review, since the Decadal Review is also an attempt to wrangle and organize the recent intellectual progress of the EA movement—it’s a reasonably up-to-date map of the EA cause area landscape, all in one post! (On the downside, it might not work well in a printed book since it’s so heavy on hyperlinks.)
There are many reasons why I think this post is good:
This post has been personally helpful to me in exploring EA and becoming familiar with the arguments for different areas.
Having resources like this also contributes to the “neutrality” and “big-tent-ness” of the Effective Altruism movement (which I think are some of the most promising elements of EA), and helps fight against the natural forces of inertia that help entrench a few cause areas as dominant simply because they were identified early.
Honestly, having a “Big List” that just neutrally presents other people’s claims, rather than a curated, prioritized selection of causes, is helpful in part because it encourages people to form their own opinions rather than deferring to others. When I look at this list of cause candidates, I see plenty of what I’d consider to be obvious duds, and others that seem sorely underrated. You’d probably disagree with me on the details, and that’s a good thing!
Finally, this post helped me realize that simply listing and organizing all the intellectual work that happens in EA can be an effective way to contribute. As a highly distributed, intellectually complex, and extremely big-tent social/academic/intellectual/philanthropic movement, there is a lot going on in EA and there is a lot of value in helping organize and explain all the different threads of thought that make up the movement. For this reason especially, it would be good to include this post in the Decadal Review, since the Decadal Review is also an attempt to wrangle and organize the recent intellectual progress of the EA movement—it’s a reasonably up-to-date map of the EA cause area landscape, all in one post! (On the downside, it might not work well in a printed book since it’s so heavy on hyperlinks.)