Thanks for making this! The idea, reasoning, and initial draft all seem promising/reasonable to me.
Some quick thoguhts:
I’d think of this project as essentially a distillation project, and I think good executions of such work on important topics where not much distillation has occurred yet tend to be very valuable. I think EA-aligned cause prioritization is an important topic, and that a fair bit of distillation has occurred on this topic (e.g., 80k articles) but that a flowchart approach could probably add a bunch of value if done well and then endorsed/promoted by some people with big followings in EA. So I think my biggest uncertainties would be how well it’s executed and how useful the other ways you could use your time are, rather than the basic idea.
I think the non-huge karma levels of your post and my somewhat related posts My personal cruxes for focusing on existential risks / longtermism / anything other than just video games and (less so) Crucial questions for longtermists are weak evidence against this (like weak evidence that this isn’t as useful as I think or that it simply won’t get that much attention even if it would be useful if read widely). But I’d see it as only weak evidence, in part because only your post takes the flowchart approach and a more effortful project here would be higher quality.
(Btw, you or readers might find those two posts of mine useful in this context.)
A related idea would be something like a “cause prioritization quiz”.
This could just be an additional/alternative way of presenting the same ideas and info (like the quiz could basically walk you through one path along the flowchart, one step at a time, rather than showing you the whole thing).
80k made a “problem quiz” that was like this. It can be found here.
I’m not sure if they still feel that this is useful
I know they took down their “career quiz”, but I’m not sure if that was because of the quiz format or just because their views on lots of topics changed since then and they didn’t want to take the time to update the quiz in light of that
Thanks for making this! The idea, reasoning, and initial draft all seem promising/reasonable to me.
Some quick thoguhts:
I’d think of this project as essentially a distillation project, and I think good executions of such work on important topics where not much distillation has occurred yet tend to be very valuable. I think EA-aligned cause prioritization is an important topic, and that a fair bit of distillation has occurred on this topic (e.g., 80k articles) but that a flowchart approach could probably add a bunch of value if done well and then endorsed/promoted by some people with big followings in EA. So I think my biggest uncertainties would be how well it’s executed and how useful the other ways you could use your time are, rather than the basic idea.
Somewhat related: Suggestion: EAs should post more summaries and collections
I think the non-huge karma levels of your post and my somewhat related posts My personal cruxes for focusing on existential risks / longtermism / anything other than just video games and (less so) Crucial questions for longtermists are weak evidence against this (like weak evidence that this isn’t as useful as I think or that it simply won’t get that much attention even if it would be useful if read widely). But I’d see it as only weak evidence, in part because only your post takes the flowchart approach and a more effortful project here would be higher quality.
(Btw, you or readers might find those two posts of mine useful in this context.)
A related idea would be something like a “cause prioritization quiz”.
This could just be an additional/alternative way of presenting the same ideas and info (like the quiz could basically walk you through one path along the flowchart, one step at a time, rather than showing you the whole thing).
80k made a “problem quiz” that was like this. It can be found here.
I’m not sure if they still feel that this is useful
I know they took down their “career quiz”, but I’m not sure if that was because of the quiz format or just because their views on lots of topics changed since then and they didn’t want to take the time to update the quiz in light of that