I’m excited to see this post! Thanks for the suggestions. A few I hadn’t considered. In general though, this is an area I’ve thought about in various ways, at various points, so here’s my list of an additional “9 history topics it might be very valuable to investigate” (with some overlap with your list)!
I’ll start with some examples of categories of historical projects we’ve worked on at Sentience Institute.
1. The history of past social movements
Some overlap with your categories 3 and 8. This is to inform social movement strategy. At Sentience Institute, we’ve been focusing on movements that are 1) relatively recent, and 2) driven by allies, rather than the intended beneficiaries of the movement. This is because we are focusing on strategic lessons for the farmed animal movement, although I’ve recently been thinking about how it is applicable to other forms of moral circle expansion work, e.g. for artificial sentience (I have a literature review of writings on this coming out soonish).
I’ve written a fuller post about “What Can the Farmed Animal Movement Learn from History” which discusses some methodological considerations; some of the discussion could be relevant to almost any “What can we learn about X from history” questions of interest to the EA movement. (As a talk here)
2. The history of new technologies, the industries around them, and efforts to regulate them.
This overlaps with your category 4. Sentience Institute’s interest has been in learning strategic lessons for the field of cellular agriculture, cultured meat, and highly meat-like plant-based foods, to increase the likelihood that these technologies are successfully brought to market and to maximise the effects that these technologies have on displacing animal products.
3. Assessing the tractability of changing the course of human history by looking at historical trajectory shifts (or attempts at them).
Covered briefly in this post I wrote on “How tractable is changing the course of history?” (March 12, 2019). I didn’t do it very systematically. I was trying to establish the extent to which the major historical trajectory shifts that I examined were influenced by 1) thoughtful actors, 2) hard-to-influence indirect or long-term factors, 3) contingency, i.e. luck plus hard-to-influence snap decisions by other actors.
One approach could be to create (crowdsource?) a large list of possible historical trajectory shifts to investigate. Then pick them based on: 1) a balance of types of shift, covering each of military, technological, and social trajectory shifts, aiming for representativeness 2) a balance of magnitudes of the shifts, 3) time since the shift, 4) availability of evidence.
Some useful feedback and suggestions I had when I presented this work to a workshop by the Global Priorities Institute:
Gustav Arrhenius of Institute of Future Studies suggested to me that there was more rigorous discussion of grand historical theories than I was implying in that post. He recommended reading works by Pontus Strimling of the Institute of Future Studies, plus work by Jerry Cohen on Marxism plus by Marvin Harris on cultural materialism.)
Christian Tarsney (GPI) suggested that a greater case for tractability is in shaping the aftermath of big historical events (e.g. world wars) rather than in causing the those major events to occur.
William MacAskill (GPI) suggested that rather than seeking out any/all types of trajectory shifts, it might be more useful to look specifically for times where individuals knew what they wanted to change and then investigating whether they were able to do that or not. e.g. what’s the “EA” ask for people at the time of the French Revolution? It’s hard to know what would have been useful. There might be cases to study where people had a clearer ideas about how to shape the world for the better, e.g. in contributing to the writing of the bible.
Some other topics I’ve thought about much more briefly:
4. The history of the growth, influence, collapse, etc. of various intellectual and academic movements.
Overlaps with your category 3. I think of this as quite different to the history of social movements. Separately from direct advocacy efforts, EA is full of ideas of research fields that could be built or developed. The ones I’m most familiar with are “global priorities research,” “welfare biology,” and “AI welfare science” but I’m sure there are either more now, or there will be soon, as EAs explore new areas. For example, there were new suggestions in David Althaus and Tobias Baumann, “Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors” (April 29, 2020). So working out how to most effectively encourage the growth and success of research fields seems likely to be helpful
Various historical research to help to clarify particular risk factors for s-risks will materialise in the future
These could each be categories on their own. Examples include:
5. To what extent have past societies prioritised the reduction of risks of high amounts of suffering and how successful have these efforts been?
6. Historical studies of “polarisation and divergence of values.”
7. “Case studies of cooperation failures” and other factors affecting the “likelihood and nature of conflict” (some overlap with your category 5. This was suggested by CLR. I had a conversation with Ashwin Acharya who also seemed interested in this avenue of research)
8. Study how other instances of formal research have influenced (or failed to influence) critical real-world decisions (suggested by CLR.)
9. Perhaps lower priority, but broader studies of the history of various institutions
The focus here would be on building an understanding of the factors that influence their durability. E.g. at a talk at a GPI workshop I attended, someone (Phillip Trammel? Anders Sandberg?) noted a bunch of types of institutions that have had some examples endure for centuries: churches, religions, royalty, militaries, banks, and corporations. Why have these institution types been able to last where others have not? Within those categories, why have some lasted where others have not.
Other comments and caveats:
Hopefully SI’s work offers a second example of an exception to the “recurring theme” you note in that 1) SI’s case studies are effectively a “deeper or more rigorous follow-up analysis” after ACE’s social movement case study project—if anything, I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them, and 2) I at least had an undergraduate degree in history :D
On the “background in history” thing, my guess is that social scientists will usually actually be better placed to do this sort of work, rather than historians. (Some relevant considerations here)
Any of these topics could probably be covered briefly, with low rigour, in ~one month’s worth of work (roughly the timeframe of my tractability post, for example), or could literally use up several lifetime’s worth of work. It’s a tough call to decide how much time is worth spending on each case study. Some sort of time capping approach could be useful.
Relatedly, at some point, you face the decision of how to aggregate findings and analyse across different movements. I think we’re close to this with the first two research avenues I mention that we’ve been pursuing at SI. So if anyone reading this has ideas about how to pursue this further, I’d be interested in having a chat!
Many of the topics discussed here are relevant to Sentience Institute’s research interests. If you share those interests, you could apply for our researcher opening at the moment.
To write this post I’ve essentially just looked back through various notes I have, rather than trying to start from scratch and think up any and all topics that could be useful. So there’s probably lots we’re both missing, and I echo the call for people to think about areas where historical research could be useful.
It’s long been on my to-do list to go through GPI and CLR’s research agendas more thoroughly to work out if there are other suggestions for historical research on there. I haven’t done that to make this post so I may have missed things.
I was told that the Centre for the Governance of AI’s research agenda has lots of suggestions of historical case studies that could be useful, though I haven’t looked through this yet.
These topics probably vary widely in terms of the cost-effectiveness of time spent researching them. Of course, this will depend on your views on cause prioritisation.
Once I’ve looked into the above lists and thought about this more, I might improve this comment and make my own top-level post at some point. I was planning to do that at some point anyway but you forced my hand (in a good way) by making your own post.
I’m definitely interested in your interest in research for topic 10 on your list, so please keep me in the loop!
Thanks for sharing those topic ideas, links to resources, and general thoughts on the intersection of history research and EA! I think this post is made substantially more useful by now having your comment attached. And your comment has also further increased how excited I’d be to see more EA-aligned history research (with the caveats that this doesn’t necessarily require having a history background, and that I’m not carefully thinking through how to prioritise this against other useful things EAs could be doing).
It’s long been on my to-do list to go through GPI and CLR’s research agendas more thoroughly to work out if there are other suggestions for historical research on there. I haven’t done that to make this post so I may have missed things.
Yeah, that sounds valuable. I generated my list of 10 topics basically just “off the top of my head”, without looking at various research agendas for questions/topics for which history is highly relevant. So doing that would likely be a relatively simple step to make a better, fuller version of a list like this.
Hopefully SI’s work offers a second example of an exception to the “recurring theme” you note in that 1) SI’s case studies are effectively a “deeper or more rigorous follow-up analysis” after ACE’s social movement case study project—if anything, I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them, and 2) I at least had an undergraduate degree in history :D
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I’ve now edited in a mention of SI after AI Impacts. I hadn’t actively decided against mentioning SI, just didn’t think to do so. And the reason for thatis probably just that I haven’t read much of that work. (Which in turn is probably because (a) I lean longtermist but don’t prioritise s-risks over x-risks, so the work by SI that seems most directly intended to improve farm animal advocacy seems to me valuable but not a top priority for my own learning, and (b) I think not much of that work has been posted to the Forum?) But I read and enjoyed “How tractable is changing the course of history?”, and the rest of what you describe sounds cool and relevant.
Focusing in on “I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them”—do you think that that can’t be resolved by e.g. cross-posting “executive summaries” to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; I’m working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Also, that last point reminds me of another half-baked thought I’ve had but forgot to mention in this post: Perhaps the value of people who’ve done such history research won’t entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having “resident experts” on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the “go-to person” for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc. Do you have thoughts on that (rather vague) hypothesis? For example, maybe even if few people read SI’s work on those topics, if they at least know that SI did that research, they can come to SI when they have specific, relevant questions and thereby get a bunch of useful input in a quick, personalised way.
(This general idea could also perhaps apply to research more broadly, not just to history research for EA, but that’s the context in which I’ve thought about it recently.)
Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that we’ve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each others’ lists.
Focusing in on “I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them”—do you think that that can’t be resolved by e.g. cross-posting “executive summaries” to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; I’m working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Huh, weird, I’m not sure why I didn’t do that for either of the case studies I’ve done so far—I’ve certainly done it for other projects. At some point, I was thinking that I might write some sort of summary post (a little like this one, for our tech adoption case studies) or do some sort of analysis of common themes etc, which I think would be much more easily readable and usable. I’d definitely post that to the Forum. I don’t think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression / intuition is that people who identify with EA and are focused on animal advocacy use the EA Forum less than people who identify with EA and are focused on extinction risk reduction, so it wouldn’t increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal Advocacy—Discussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesn’t apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
Perhaps the value of people who’ve done such history research won’t entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having “resident experts” on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the “go-to person” for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc.
I think there’s some value in that. A few concerns jump to mind:
Historical case studies tend to provide weak evidence for a bunch of different strategic questions. So while they might not single-handedly “resolve” some important debate or tradeoff, they should alter views on a number of different questions. So a lot of this value will just be missed if people don’t actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think I’m pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/summarising the empirical evidence), I don’t think I’m much better placed than anyone else to interpret what the evidence should suggest for individual decisions that an advocate or organisation might face.
In practice, I’ve hardly ever had people actually ask me for this sort of summary or recommendation. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two occasions where this has happened.
Slight tangent from the discussion here, but you might like to add “and their summary of “Foundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacy” after where you’ve listed SI’s research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/should be explored through further research. Once I’ve published my literature review on artificial sentience, I’d be keen to add that too, since that contains a large list of potential further research topics.
I’m excited to see this post! Thanks for the suggestions. A few I hadn’t considered. In general though, this is an area I’ve thought about in various ways, at various points, so here’s my list of an additional “9 history topics it might be very valuable to investigate” (with some overlap with your list)!
I’ll start with some examples of categories of historical projects we’ve worked on at Sentience Institute.
1. The history of past social movements
Some overlap with your categories 3 and 8. This is to inform social movement strategy. At Sentience Institute, we’ve been focusing on movements that are 1) relatively recent, and 2) driven by allies, rather than the intended beneficiaries of the movement. This is because we are focusing on strategic lessons for the farmed animal movement, although I’ve recently been thinking about how it is applicable to other forms of moral circle expansion work, e.g. for artificial sentience (I have a literature review of writings on this coming out soonish).
Conducted by SI:
Kelly Anthis, “Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement: Focused on Applications to the Movement Against Animal Farming” (December 1, 2017)
Me, “Social Movement Lessons From the US Anti-Abortion Movement” (November 26, 2019)
Me, “Social Movement Lessons from the US Anti-Death Penalty Movement” (May 22, 2020)
Me, “Social Movement Lessons from the US Prisoners’ Rights Movement” (should be out before the end of the month)
Not conducted by SI, but highly relevant:
Włodzimierz Gogłoza, “Abolitionist outrage: what the vegan movement can learn from anti-slavery abolitionism in the 19th century” (January 20, 2020)
Animal Charity Evaluators, “Children’s Rights” (February 2018)
Animal Charity Evaluators, “Environmentalism” (February 2018)
I’ve written a fuller post about “What Can the Farmed Animal Movement Learn from History” which discusses some methodological considerations; some of the discussion could be relevant to almost any “What can we learn about X from history” questions of interest to the EA movement. (As a talk here)
2. The history of new technologies, the industries around them, and efforts to regulate them.
This overlaps with your category 4. Sentience Institute’s interest has been in learning strategic lessons for the field of cellular agriculture, cultured meat, and highly meat-like plant-based foods, to increase the likelihood that these technologies are successfully brought to market and to maximise the effects that these technologies have on displacing animal products.
Conducted by SI:
J. Mohorčich, “What can nuclear power teach us about the institutional adoption of clean meat?” (November 28, 2017)
J. Mohorčich, “What can the adoption of GM foods teach us about the adoption of other food technologies?” (June 20, 2018)
J. Mohorčich, “What can biofuel commercialization teach us about scale, failure, and success in biotechnology?” (August 21, 2019)
3. Assessing the tractability of changing the course of human history by looking at historical trajectory shifts (or attempts at them).
Covered briefly in this post I wrote on “How tractable is changing the course of history?” (March 12, 2019). I didn’t do it very systematically. I was trying to establish the extent to which the major historical trajectory shifts that I examined were influenced by 1) thoughtful actors, 2) hard-to-influence indirect or long-term factors, 3) contingency, i.e. luck plus hard-to-influence snap decisions by other actors.
One approach could be to create (crowdsource?) a large list of possible historical trajectory shifts to investigate. Then pick them based on: 1) a balance of types of shift, covering each of military, technological, and social trajectory shifts, aiming for representativeness 2) a balance of magnitudes of the shifts, 3) time since the shift, 4) availability of evidence.
Some useful feedback and suggestions I had when I presented this work to a workshop by the Global Priorities Institute:
Gustav Arrhenius of Institute of Future Studies suggested to me that there was more rigorous discussion of grand historical theories than I was implying in that post. He recommended reading works by Pontus Strimling of the Institute of Future Studies, plus work by Jerry Cohen on Marxism plus by Marvin Harris on cultural materialism.)
Christian Tarsney (GPI) suggested that a greater case for tractability is in shaping the aftermath of big historical events (e.g. world wars) rather than in causing the those major events to occur.
William MacAskill (GPI) suggested that rather than seeking out any/all types of trajectory shifts, it might be more useful to look specifically for times where individuals knew what they wanted to change and then investigating whether they were able to do that or not. e.g. what’s the “EA” ask for people at the time of the French Revolution? It’s hard to know what would have been useful. There might be cases to study where people had a clearer ideas about how to shape the world for the better, e.g. in contributing to the writing of the bible.
Some other topics I’ve thought about much more briefly:
4. The history of the growth, influence, collapse, etc. of various intellectual and academic movements.
Overlaps with your category 3. I think of this as quite different to the history of social movements. Separately from direct advocacy efforts, EA is full of ideas of research fields that could be built or developed. The ones I’m most familiar with are “global priorities research,” “welfare biology,” and “AI welfare science” but I’m sure there are either more now, or there will be soon, as EAs explore new areas. For example, there were new suggestions in David Althaus and Tobias Baumann, “Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors” (April 29, 2020). So working out how to most effectively encourage the growth and success of research fields seems likely to be helpful
Various historical research to help to clarify particular risk factors for s-risks will materialise in the future
These could each be categories on their own. Examples include:
5. To what extent have past societies prioritised the reduction of risks of high amounts of suffering and how successful have these efforts been?
6. Historical studies of “polarisation and divergence of values.”
7. “Case studies of cooperation failures” and other factors affecting the “likelihood and nature of conflict” (some overlap with your category 5. This was suggested by CLR. I had a conversation with Ashwin Acharya who also seemed interested in this avenue of research)
8. Study how other instances of formal research have influenced (or failed to influence) critical real-world decisions (suggested by CLR.)
9. Perhaps lower priority, but broader studies of the history of various institutions
The focus here would be on building an understanding of the factors that influence their durability. E.g. at a talk at a GPI workshop I attended, someone (Phillip Trammel? Anders Sandberg?) noted a bunch of types of institutions that have had some examples endure for centuries: churches, religions, royalty, militaries, banks, and corporations. Why have these institution types been able to last where others have not? Within those categories, why have some lasted where others have not.
Other comments and caveats:
Hopefully SI’s work offers a second example of an exception to the “recurring theme” you note in that 1) SI’s case studies are effectively a “deeper or more rigorous follow-up analysis” after ACE’s social movement case study project—if anything, I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them, and 2) I at least had an undergraduate degree in history :D
On the “background in history” thing, my guess is that social scientists will usually actually be better placed to do this sort of work, rather than historians. (Some relevant considerations here)
Any of these topics could probably be covered briefly, with low rigour, in ~one month’s worth of work (roughly the timeframe of my tractability post, for example), or could literally use up several lifetime’s worth of work. It’s a tough call to decide how much time is worth spending on each case study. Some sort of time capping approach could be useful.
Relatedly, at some point, you face the decision of how to aggregate findings and analyse across different movements. I think we’re close to this with the first two research avenues I mention that we’ve been pursuing at SI. So if anyone reading this has ideas about how to pursue this further, I’d be interested in having a chat!
Many of the topics discussed here are relevant to Sentience Institute’s research interests. If you share those interests, you could apply for our researcher opening at the moment.
To write this post I’ve essentially just looked back through various notes I have, rather than trying to start from scratch and think up any and all topics that could be useful. So there’s probably lots we’re both missing, and I echo the call for people to think about areas where historical research could be useful.
It’s long been on my to-do list to go through GPI and CLR’s research agendas more thoroughly to work out if there are other suggestions for historical research on there. I haven’t done that to make this post so I may have missed things.
I was told that the Centre for the Governance of AI’s research agenda has lots of suggestions of historical case studies that could be useful, though I haven’t looked through this yet.
These topics probably vary widely in terms of the cost-effectiveness of time spent researching them. Of course, this will depend on your views on cause prioritisation.
Once I’ve looked into the above lists and thought about this more, I might improve this comment and make my own top-level post at some point. I was planning to do that at some point anyway but you forced my hand (in a good way) by making your own post.
I’m definitely interested in your interest in research for topic 10 on your list, so please keep me in the loop!
Thanks for sharing those topic ideas, links to resources, and general thoughts on the intersection of history research and EA! I think this post is made substantially more useful by now having your comment attached. And your comment has also further increased how excited I’d be to see more EA-aligned history research (with the caveats that this doesn’t necessarily require having a history background, and that I’m not carefully thinking through how to prioritise this against other useful things EAs could be doing).
If you do end up making a top-level post related to your comment, please do comment about it here and on the central directory of open research questions.
Yeah, that sounds valuable. I generated my list of 10 topics basically just “off the top of my head”, without looking at various research agendas for questions/topics for which history is highly relevant. So doing that would likely be a relatively simple step to make a better, fuller version of a list like this.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I’ve now edited in a mention of SI after AI Impacts. I hadn’t actively decided against mentioning SI, just didn’t think to do so. And the reason for that is probably just that I haven’t read much of that work. (Which in turn is probably because (a) I lean longtermist but don’t prioritise s-risks over x-risks, so the work by SI that seems most directly intended to improve farm animal advocacy seems to me valuable but not a top priority for my own learning, and (b) I think not much of that work has been posted to the Forum?) But I read and enjoyed “How tractable is changing the course of history?”, and the rest of what you describe sounds cool and relevant.
Focusing in on “I worry that they’re too deep and rigorous and that this has drastically cut down the number of people who put the time into reading them”—do you think that that can’t be resolved by e.g. cross-posting “executive summaries” to the EA Forum, so that people at least read those? (Genuine question; I’m working on developing my thoughts on how best to do and disseminate research.)
Also, that last point reminds me of another half-baked thought I’ve had but forgot to mention in this post: Perhaps the value of people who’ve done such history research won’t entirely or primarily be in the write-ups which people can then read, but rather in EA then having “resident experts” on various historical topics and methodologies, who can be the “go-to person” for tailored recommendations and insights regarding specific decisions, other research projects, etc. Do you have thoughts on that (rather vague) hypothesis? For example, maybe even if few people read SI’s work on those topics, if they at least know that SI did that research, they can come to SI when they have specific, relevant questions and thereby get a bunch of useful input in a quick, personalised way.
(This general idea could also perhaps apply to research more broadly, not just to history research for EA, but that’s the context in which I’ve thought about it recently.)
Thanks! And, of course, I understand that our lists look different in part because of the different cause areas that we’ve each spent more time thinking about. Glad we could complement each others’ lists.
Huh, weird, I’m not sure why I didn’t do that for either of the case studies I’ve done so far—I’ve certainly done it for other projects. At some point, I was thinking that I might write some sort of summary post (a little like this one, for our tech adoption case studies) or do some sort of analysis of common themes etc, which I think would be much more easily readable and usable. I’d definitely post that to the Forum. I don’t think posting to the forum would make a lot of difference though, for us. This is mainly because my impression / intuition is that people who identify with EA and are focused on animal advocacy use the EA Forum less than people who identify with EA and are focused on extinction risk reduction, so it wouldn’t increase the reach to the main intended audience much over just posting the research to the Effective Animal Advocacy—Discussion Facebook group and our newsletter. But that concern probably doesn’t apply to many of the suggestions in your initial list.
I think there’s some value in that. A few concerns jump to mind:
Historical case studies tend to provide weak evidence for a bunch of different strategic questions. So while they might not single-handedly “resolve” some important debate or tradeoff, they should alter views on a number of different questions. So a lot of this value will just be missed if people don’t actually read the case studies themselves (or at least read a summary).
While I think I’m pretty good at doing these case studies to a relatively high standard in a relatively short amount of time (i.e. uncovering/summarising the empirical evidence), I don’t think I’m much better placed than anyone else to interpret what the evidence should suggest for individual decisions that an advocate or organisation might face.
In practice, I’ve hardly ever had people actually ask me for this sort of summary or recommendation. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two occasions where this has happened.
Slight tangent from the discussion here, but you might like to add “and their summary of “Foundational Questions for Effective Animal Advocacy” after where you’ve listed SI’s research agenda on that post. This is essentially a list of the key strategic issues in animal advocacy that we think could/should be explored through further research. Once I’ve published my literature review on artificial sentience, I’d be keen to add that too, since that contains a large list of potential further research topics.
Thanks for those answers and thoughts!
And good idea to add the Foundational Questions link to the directory—I’ve now done so.