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Cause prioritization Cause prioritization refers to efforts to find the most pressing problems to work on and compare interventions across different cause areas so that we can do as much good as possible with the resources available to us.
Governments and philanthropists spend considerable resources attempting to do good in the world. How those resources are used, however, can make an even bigger difference than how many resources are available. Some work has been done on prioritizing within areas, but the question of how to prioritize between areas—which is arguably more important—has received limited attention.
Cause-neutral prioritization research seeks to identify new promising focus areas and to compare their relative value (for instance by considering factors like scope, neglectedness, and tractability of the problems).
Cause prioritization research (or global priorities research ) is often regarded as a highly promising area of work.
Further reading 80,000 Hours (2016) Global priorities research , 80,000 Hours , April (updated July 2018).
Grace, Katja (2014) Conversation with Paul Christiano on cause prioritization research , 80,000 Hours , August 20.
Related entries Cause X | cost-effectiveness | distribution of cost-effectiveness | global priorities research | impact assessment | intervention evaluation | ITN framework
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Looking at this old article from EA Concepts made me realize that we may want to have either an entry or a section discussing a cluster of terms that are often used interchangeably or to express related concepts, such as cause, problem, area, intervention, and program. In connection to this, we may also want to rename this entry to just prioritization to remain neutral on the relevant unit of analysis. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this; currently, my very tentative plan is to
Rename this entry.
Have the terminological discussion as a section within this entry.
(A complication is that there are other entries that use the word ‘cause’, such as cause candidates, criticism of effective altruism causes, less discussed causes, and others. So perhaps we could retain the word ‘cause’ for this entry, but still have the section on terminology.)