I think your question is: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
Let’s go through which countries are good for specific causes:
Artificial General Intelligence: USA, China, UK
Engineered Pandemics: USA, China
Earning-to-give: rich countries like USA, Qatar, Singapore, Norway, UAE, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland
Nuclear Security: Russia, USA, North Korea
Climate Change: Countries developing rapidly like Brazil, India and countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases as of now like USA, UK, etc
Improving Institutional Decision Making: Corrupt countries like Colombia, Brazil, India Mexico, Ghana, Bolivia and influential countries like USA, UK
Malaria Interventions: A lot of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Influencing long-term future: Potential superpowers like Russia, China, India, Brazil
Alternative meats: Brazil, China, USA, Israel, India
Food/Water Fortification: India, West African countries
The countries that are good for specific problems/interventions are good because they exhibit certain “structural” properties. For example, countries good for earning to give are rich; countries good for factory farming have high consumption of meat; countries good for institutional decision making are corrupt or influential; countries good for influencing long-term future are potential superpowers; and so on.
These “structural” properties are present in multiple (on average around 5) countries, and thus there are around 5 countries that are high-impact for a specific cause area/intervention. Also, these countries are generall geographically and culturally dispersed—often belonging to different continents.
Coming back to the original question: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
If what I have argued above is correct, the premise that “a problem/intervention is specific to my country” is generally false. Going by the trend that the top ~10 problems/interventions today are not region-specific, I see no reason why a very promising problem/intervention would be found that is region-specific. And, so I argue that region-level cause prioritization research is not particularly valuable.
EDIT: I’m proposing that a majority of the promising problems are not restricted to a particular region. Ofcourse, there are some exceptions to this like war, US immigration, (maybe) health development in Sub-saharan Africa, etc.
Some other examples of stuff that seem to benefit a lot from local knowledge:
1. Source control of epidemics/pandemics. A DRC native is presumably much better equipped to understand and deal with the 2020 Ebola outbreak than I am.
3. Improving Institutional decision-making in the “laboratories of democracy” sense. I think part of the value is the direct impact of reducing corruption, etc, but a lot of it is having sufficient experimentation with local politics and then being able to copy over the lessons to other larger, more influential, governments. For example, you can imagine that if Europe’s GDPR or Brazil’s LGPD are good ideas, other countries will copy the better ones over. Similar stories may be true for micro-experiments in congestion pricing or pandemic preparedness. That said, the Western world’s bizarre unwillingness to listen to East Asia about the current pandemic undercuts my point a lot.
4. Local animal activism. I think (medium-low confidence) there are a lot of optics and logistical issues with outsiders being overly “pushy” about animal activism, and it’s usually better for such things to arise mostly organically from within.
What about the Cameroonian Civil War that (or at least of which effects) can be mitigated by a combination of EA and local knowledge? This can be a potentially high-impact problem/intervention that has not been covered by other EA research, perhaps due to its localized nature.
I think your question is: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
Let’s go through which countries are good for specific causes:
Artificial General Intelligence: USA, China, UK
Engineered Pandemics: USA, China
Earning-to-give: rich countries like USA, Qatar, Singapore, Norway, UAE, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland
Nuclear Security: Russia, USA, North Korea
Climate Change: Countries developing rapidly like Brazil, India and countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases as of now like USA, UK, etc
Improving Institutional Decision Making: Corrupt countries like Colombia, Brazil, India Mexico, Ghana, Bolivia and influential countries like USA, UK
Malaria Interventions: A lot of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Influencing long-term future: Potential superpowers like Russia, China, India, Brazil
Alternative meats: Brazil, China, USA, Israel, India
Food/Water Fortification: India, West African countries
The countries that are good for specific problems/interventions are good because they exhibit certain “structural” properties. For example, countries good for earning to give are rich; countries good for factory farming have high consumption of meat; countries good for institutional decision making are corrupt or influential; countries good for influencing long-term future are potential superpowers; and so on.
These “structural” properties are present in multiple (on average around 5) countries, and thus there are around 5 countries that are high-impact for a specific cause area/intervention. Also, these countries are generall geographically and culturally dispersed—often belonging to different continents.
Coming back to the original question: Is there some problem/intervention that is high-impact that EA has missed out because it is specific to my country, and so nobody has thought of it?
If what I have argued above is correct, the premise that “a problem/intervention is specific to my country” is generally false. Going by the trend that the top ~10 problems/interventions today are not region-specific, I see no reason why a very promising problem/intervention would be found that is region-specific. And, so I argue that region-level cause prioritization research is not particularly valuable.
EDIT: I’m proposing that a majority of the promising problems are not restricted to a particular region. Ofcourse, there are some exceptions to this like war, US immigration, (maybe) health development in Sub-saharan Africa, etc.
Some other examples of stuff that seem to benefit a lot from local knowledge:
1. Source control of epidemics/pandemics. A DRC native is presumably much better equipped to understand and deal with the 2020 Ebola outbreak than I am.
2. Wars, especially local wars, H/T brb243
3. Improving Institutional decision-making in the “laboratories of democracy” sense. I think part of the value is the direct impact of reducing corruption, etc, but a lot of it is having sufficient experimentation with local politics and then being able to copy over the lessons to other larger, more influential, governments. For example, you can imagine that if Europe’s GDPR or Brazil’s LGPD are good ideas, other countries will copy the better ones over. Similar stories may be true for micro-experiments in congestion pricing or pandemic preparedness. That said, the Western world’s bizarre unwillingness to listen to East Asia about the current pandemic undercuts my point a lot.
4. Local animal activism. I think (medium-low confidence) there are a lot of optics and logistical issues with outsiders being overly “pushy” about animal activism, and it’s usually better for such things to arise mostly organically from within.
Thanks Linch, these are very good points (I´m particularly interested in number 3, I never thought of it that way, but I agree).
Thanks a lot!
What about the Cameroonian Civil War that (or at least of which effects) can be mitigated by a combination of EA and local knowledge? This can be a potentially high-impact problem/intervention that has not been covered by other EA research, perhaps due to its localized nature.
Yes, I completely agree. In fact, most wars would probably require local-level knowledge and need to be prioritized by local altruists.