I love all three ideas and I hope to see them come to life in the coming years :)
Regarding Exploratory altruism, I want to make explicit one (perhaps obvious) failure case—the explored ideas might not be adequately taken up by the community.
There seem to have been many proposals made by people in the community but a lack of follow up with deeper research and action in these fields. Further down the line, Improving Institutional Decision Making has existed as a promising cause area for many years and there are various organizations working within that cause, but only recently begun an effort to improve coordination and develop a high-level research agenda.
Both of these seem potentially good—it might make sense that most early ideas are discarded quickly, and it might make sense that a field needs a decade to find a common roof. However, these raise more opportunities for meta-work which might be better than focusing on generating a new cause-X, and might suggest that a lot of value for such an organization could come from better ways of engaging with the community.
A different concern, related to “The Folly of EA Should”, is that there could be too much filtering out of cause areas. I think that it might be the case that a set up like CE’s funnel from 300 ideas to a few that are most promising might discourage the community from (supporting people who are) working in weeded-out causes, which might be a problem if we want to allow and support a highly diverse set of world-views and normative views.
(I’m sure that these kinds of concerns would rise (or perhaps already had) while developing the report further and when the potential future founders would get to work on fleshing out their theory of change more explicitly, but I think that it might be valuable to voice these concerns publicly [and these kind of ideas are important to me to understand more clearly, so I want to write them up and see the community’s reaction])
Indeed these sorts of issues will be covered in the deeper reports but it’s still valuable to raise them!
A really short answer to an important question: I would expect the research to be quite a bit deeper than the typical proposal – more along the lines of what Brian Tomasik did for wild animal suffering or Michael Plant did for happiness. But not to the point where the researchers found an organization themselves (as with Happier Lives Institute or Wild Animal Initiative). E.g. spending ~4 FT researcher months on a given cause area.
I agree that a big risk would be that this org closes off or gives people the idea that “EA has already looked into that and it should not longer be considered”. In many ways, this would be the opposite of the goal of the org so I think would be important to consider when it’s being structured. I am not inherently opposed to researching and then ruling out ideas or cause areas, but I do think the EA movement currently tends to quickly rule out an area without thorough research and I would not want to increase that trend. I would want an org in this space to be really clear what ground they have covered vs not. For example, I like how GiveWell lays and out and describes their priority intervention reports.
I love all three ideas and I hope to see them come to life in the coming years :)
Regarding Exploratory altruism, I want to make explicit one (perhaps obvious) failure case—the explored ideas might not be adequately taken up by the community.
There seem to have been many proposals made by people in the community but a lack of follow up with deeper research and action in these fields. Further down the line, Improving Institutional Decision Making has existed as a promising cause area for many years and there are various organizations working within that cause, but only recently begun an effort to improve coordination and develop a high-level research agenda.
Both of these seem potentially good—it might make sense that most early ideas are discarded quickly, and it might make sense that a field needs a decade to find a common roof. However, these raise more opportunities for meta-work which might be better than focusing on generating a new cause-X, and might suggest that a lot of value for such an organization could come from better ways of engaging with the community.
A different concern, related to “The Folly of EA Should”, is that there could be too much filtering out of cause areas. I think that it might be the case that a set up like CE’s funnel from 300 ideas to a few that are most promising might discourage the community from (supporting people who are) working in weeded-out causes, which might be a problem if we want to allow and support a highly diverse set of world-views and normative views.
(I’m sure that these kinds of concerns would rise (or perhaps already had) while developing the report further and when the potential future founders would get to work on fleshing out their theory of change more explicitly, but I think that it might be valuable to voice these concerns publicly [and these kind of ideas are important to me to understand more clearly, so I want to write them up and see the community’s reaction])
Indeed these sorts of issues will be covered in the deeper reports but it’s still valuable to raise them!
A really short answer to an important question: I would expect the research to be quite a bit deeper than the typical proposal – more along the lines of what Brian Tomasik did for wild animal suffering or Michael Plant did for happiness. But not to the point where the researchers found an organization themselves (as with Happier Lives Institute or Wild Animal Initiative). E.g. spending ~4 FT researcher months on a given cause area.
I agree that a big risk would be that this org closes off or gives people the idea that “EA has already looked into that and it should not longer be considered”. In many ways, this would be the opposite of the goal of the org so I think would be important to consider when it’s being structured. I am not inherently opposed to researching and then ruling out ideas or cause areas, but I do think the EA movement currently tends to quickly rule out an area without thorough research and I would not want to increase that trend. I would want an org in this space to be really clear what ground they have covered vs not. For example, I like how GiveWell lays and out and describes their priority intervention reports.