Fair enough on the “scientific research is super broad” point, but I think this also applies to other fields that I hear described as “not neglected” including US politics.
Not talking about AI safety polling, agree that was highly neglected. My understanding, reinforced by some people who have looked into the actually-practiced political strategies of modern campaigns, is that it’s just a stunningly under-optimized field with a lot of low-hanging fruit, possibly because it’s hard to decouple political strategy from other political beliefs (and selection effects where especially soldier-mindset people go into politics).
But neglectedness as a heuristic is very good precisely for narrowing down what you think the good opportunity is. Every neglected field is a subset of a non-neglected field. So pointing out that great grants have come in some subset of a non neglected field doesn’t tell us anything.
To be specific, it’s really important that EA identifies the area within that neglected field where resources aren’t flowing, to minimize funging risk. Imagine that AI safety polling had not been neglected and that in fact there were tons of think tanks who planned to do AI safety polling and tons of funders who wanted to make that happen. Then even though it would be important and tractable, EA funding would not be counterfactually impactful, because those hypothetical factors would lead to AI safety polling happening with or without us. So ignoring neglectedness would lead to us having low impact.
Fair enough on the “scientific research is super broad” point, but I think this also applies to other fields that I hear described as “not neglected” including US politics.
Not talking about AI safety polling, agree that was highly neglected. My understanding, reinforced by some people who have looked into the actually-practiced political strategies of modern campaigns, is that it’s just a stunningly under-optimized field with a lot of low-hanging fruit, possibly because it’s hard to decouple political strategy from other political beliefs (and selection effects where especially soldier-mindset people go into politics).
But neglectedness as a heuristic is very good precisely for narrowing down what you think the good opportunity is. Every neglected field is a subset of a non-neglected field. So pointing out that great grants have come in some subset of a non neglected field doesn’t tell us anything.
To be specific, it’s really important that EA identifies the area within that neglected field where resources aren’t flowing, to minimize funging risk. Imagine that AI safety polling had not been neglected and that in fact there were tons of think tanks who planned to do AI safety polling and tons of funders who wanted to make that happen. Then even though it would be important and tractable, EA funding would not be counterfactually impactful, because those hypothetical factors would lead to AI safety polling happening with or without us. So ignoring neglectedness would lead to us having low impact.