Executive summary: The author argues that while effective altruism excels at optimizing within established cause areas, its funding structures and epistemic norms systematically suppress bottom-up discovery, causing it to overlook transformative opportunities visible within its own community.
Key points:
EA is highly effective at evaluating interventions within predefined cause areas but lacks a reliable mechanism for discovering entirely new categories of opportunity.
New priorities typically enter EA through top-down funder interest, external elite validation, internal iteration, or insider pivots, while outsider-origin ideas without prestige or proximity to power rarely receive serious consideration.
Although EA has formal intake channels such as the Forum and EA Funds, these lack “throughput,” meaning rough or novel ideas are not developed or routed to decision-makers with real capital.
The community’s epistemic culture overemphasizes skepticism and red-teaming while neglecting “green-teaming,” the institutional practice of nurturing fragile ideas before subjecting them to adversarial scrutiny.
Funding concentration and status incentives orient researchers and organizations toward existing priorities, selecting against original thinkers and discouraging exploration outside established cause areas.
The author proposes building a functional “Path 5” with dedicated exploration roles, small fast grants, structured development pipelines, and tolerance for high miss rates to better harness the distributed knowledge of EA members.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The author argues that while effective altruism excels at optimizing within established cause areas, its funding structures and epistemic norms systematically suppress bottom-up discovery, causing it to overlook transformative opportunities visible within its own community.
Key points:
EA is highly effective at evaluating interventions within predefined cause areas but lacks a reliable mechanism for discovering entirely new categories of opportunity.
New priorities typically enter EA through top-down funder interest, external elite validation, internal iteration, or insider pivots, while outsider-origin ideas without prestige or proximity to power rarely receive serious consideration.
Although EA has formal intake channels such as the Forum and EA Funds, these lack “throughput,” meaning rough or novel ideas are not developed or routed to decision-makers with real capital.
The community’s epistemic culture overemphasizes skepticism and red-teaming while neglecting “green-teaming,” the institutional practice of nurturing fragile ideas before subjecting them to adversarial scrutiny.
Funding concentration and status incentives orient researchers and organizations toward existing priorities, selecting against original thinkers and discouraging exploration outside established cause areas.
The author proposes building a functional “Path 5” with dedicated exploration roles, small fast grants, structured development pipelines, and tolerance for high miss rates to better harness the distributed knowledge of EA members.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.