Indeed these sorts of issues will be covered in the deeper reports but itâs 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 â 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 âEA has already looked into that and it should not longer be consideredâ. In many ways, this would be the opposite of the goal of the org so I think would be important to consider when itâs 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.
Indeed these sorts of issues will be covered in the deeper reports but itâs 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 â 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 âEA has already looked into that and it should not longer be consideredâ. In many ways, this would be the opposite of the goal of the org so I think would be important to consider when itâs 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.