Hi Ian,
Great and thought-provoking post. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it!
I will think about it and might respond at length later, but for now, let me ask you this: How do you propose the EA movement go about introducing “case-specific effective altruism”? Do you imagine several official sub-groups, each dedicated to a specific cause?* Or do you simply want EA to acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism is a good thing, so that people can set up their own domain-specific EA groups if they like?
In sum, a few words on your thoughts for actual implementation going forward, would be nice! :)
*It seems, that if you are advocating that the EA movement actively pursues domain-specific effective altruism in a number of different domains, this would require a large amount of work from the group/community—work that will therefore not go into the (cause-neutral) traditional EA domain. For this reason alone, one could argue against this implementation (i.e. one could acknowledge that case-specific effective altruism would be a good thing, but still reject to actively do something about it, since the work load would be too high as compared to what you get out of it).
This was a good write-up. Thank you very much for doing it, Sean—and good luck with the future developments. I’m very much looking forward to following the research coming out of CSER!