A lot of the topics in this post seem like just “the history of EA-related idea X”
For some (but not all) of these topics, my friend doesn’t really see a clear path to impact, and they think one would need to flesh out the case for why the history of X is particularly important to understand
I think those are basically fair points, but I’m fairly excited about research into these topics despite them. Here’s the response I wrote to that friend of mine, which might be useful to other people who are trying to think about the value of EA-aligned history research (whether or not on these topics).
Yeah, I’d agree that my post doesn’t explicitly outline paths to impact—or at least not very concrete ones—and that fleshing out and critiquing potential paths to impact would be a logical and useful early step. (The post was meant mainly as a starting point.)
But I’d be surprised if quality research into each of those topics wouldn’t turn out to be at least fairly useful. (But that sentence could be said about way more things that EAs have time to research, so fleshing out the paths to impact would still be useful for prioritisation, as well as for crafting more specific research directions, making dissemination plans, etc. See also.)
The reason I’d be surprised is partly because of roughly the following generic argument:
”Understanding the history of a topic often seems to help in:
Predicting what will happen in future in relation to that topic
Thinking about what one could/should do to intervene in that (including noticing common mistakes/pitfalls/downside risks)
Thinking about what to do in relation to other topics that might be affected by this topic (e.g., maybe understanding things to do with AI, bio, and nuclear risks should influence which countries we prioritise engagement with or movement-building in or how we do that)
And it seems reasonable to assume that that’ll be true for a given topic unless one has reason to believe otherwise.
So if a topic seems potentially quite relevant to efforts to improve the expected value of the long-term future, then understanding the history of it better will probably be useful.”
(But there are definitely more than 10 topics that fit that description, so it could definitely be useful to create a longlist of a broader set of topics that seem to fit that description, sketch potential paths to impact for research on them, and get a rough sense of which ones should be highest priority. I’d guess that the “ideal top 10” would differ at least somewhat from what’s in this post.)
A friend of mine said, essentially, that:
A lot of the topics in this post seem like just “the history of EA-related idea X”
For some (but not all) of these topics, my friend doesn’t really see a clear path to impact, and they think one would need to flesh out the case for why the history of X is particularly important to understand
I think those are basically fair points, but I’m fairly excited about research into these topics despite them. Here’s the response I wrote to that friend of mine, which might be useful to other people who are trying to think about the value of EA-aligned history research (whether or not on these topics).