I think the key thing here is that the criterion by which EA intellectuals decide whether something is interesting is significantly related to it being useful. Firstly, because a lot of EA’s are intellectually interested in things that are at least somewhat relevant to EA, lots of these fields seem useful at least at a high level; moral philosophy, rationality, and AI alignment are all clearly important things for EA. Moreover, many people actually don’t find these topics interesting at all, and they are thus actually highly neglected. This is compounded by the fact that they are very hard, and thus probably only quite smart people with good epistemics can make lots of progress on them. These two features in turn contribute to the work being more suspiciously theoretical than it would be if the broad domains in question (formal ethics, applied rationality, alignment) were less neglected, as fields become increasingly applied as they become better theorized. In other words, it seems prima facie plausible that highly talented people should work in domains that are initially selected partially for relevance to EA and that are highly neglected due to being quite difficult and also not as interesting to people who aren’t interested in topics related to EA, and thus more theoretical than they would be if more people worked on them.
I think the key thing here is that the criterion by which EA intellectuals decide whether something is interesting is significantly related to it being useful. Firstly, because a lot of EA’s are intellectually interested in things that are at least somewhat relevant to EA, lots of these fields seem useful at least at a high level; moral philosophy, rationality, and AI alignment are all clearly important things for EA. Moreover, many people actually don’t find these topics interesting at all, and they are thus actually highly neglected. This is compounded by the fact that they are very hard, and thus probably only quite smart people with good epistemics can make lots of progress on them. These two features in turn contribute to the work being more suspiciously theoretical than it would be if the broad domains in question (formal ethics, applied rationality, alignment) were less neglected, as fields become increasingly applied as they become better theorized. In other words, it seems prima facie plausible that highly talented people should work in domains that are initially selected partially for relevance to EA and that are highly neglected due to being quite difficult and also not as interesting to people who aren’t interested in topics related to EA, and thus more theoretical than they would be if more people worked on them.