Cause Prioritization Research I Would Like to See
Here are some research topics on cause prioritization that look important and neglected, in no particular order.
- Look at historical examples of speculative causes (especially ones that were meant to affect the long-ish-term future) that succeeded or failed and examine why.
- Try to determine how well picking winning companies translates to picking winning charities.
- In line with 2, consider if there exist simple strategies analogous to value investing that can find good charities.
- Find plausibly effective biosecurity charities.
- Develop a rigorous model for comparing the value of existential risk reduction to values spreading.
- Perform basic analyses of lots of EA-neglected or weird cause areas (e.g. depression, argument mapping, increasing savings, personal productivity–see here) and identify which ones look most promising.
- Reason about the expected value of the far future.
- Investigate neglected x-risk and meta charities (FHI, CSER, GPP, etc.).
- Reason about expected value estimates in general. How accurate are they? Do they tend to be overconfident? How overconfident? Do some things predictably make them more reliable?