Thanks! Cool perspective. I’ll just make a quick comment on the neglectedness point:
Much of diminishing returns in an area come not from crowdedness or inefficient economies of scale but because the low hanging fruit are gone. Most EA top reccommended cause areas are so neglected that the majority of the work is still focused on basic/applied research and basic policy advocacy, strategy etc. Work that can have huge ripples, steering global markets and governments where they otherwise would have done nothing for potentially many years.
Another way of evaluating neglectedness is to ask ‘what’s the chance I’ll have an outsized counterfsftual impact by doing X’ and the base rates are just going to be lower for that now given the sheer number of people working on it.
It’s also worth noting that the impact of direct work in climate is inherently limited due to the huge scale of emissions today, so I think it’s very fair to say it has a low neglectedness score.
I think the argument for climate does have to be focused on the scale of the bad outcomes that can be mitigated through additional work, and it still looks very good under that lens. We don’t have to work on neglected problems, it’s just a heuristic for affecting larger speed ups.
Thanks! Cool perspective. I’ll just make a quick comment on the neglectedness point:
Much of diminishing returns in an area come not from crowdedness or inefficient economies of scale but because the low hanging fruit are gone. Most EA top reccommended cause areas are so neglected that the majority of the work is still focused on basic/applied research and basic policy advocacy, strategy etc. Work that can have huge ripples, steering global markets and governments where they otherwise would have done nothing for potentially many years.
Another way of evaluating neglectedness is to ask ‘what’s the chance I’ll have an outsized counterfsftual impact by doing X’ and the base rates are just going to be lower for that now given the sheer number of people working on it.
It’s also worth noting that the impact of direct work in climate is inherently limited due to the huge scale of emissions today, so I think it’s very fair to say it has a low neglectedness score.
I think the argument for climate does have to be focused on the scale of the bad outcomes that can be mitigated through additional work, and it still looks very good under that lens. We don’t have to work on neglected problems, it’s just a heuristic for affecting larger speed ups.