One estimate from 2019 is that EA has 2315 "highly-engaged" EAs and 6500 "active EAs in the community."

So a way of making your claims more precise is to estimate how many of these people should drop some or all of what they're doing now to focus on these cause areas. It would also  be helpful to specify what sorts of projects you think they'd be stopping in order to do that. If you think it would cause an influx of new members, they could be included in the anlaysis as well. Finally, I know that some of these issues do already receive attention from within EA (Michael Plant's wellbeing research, for example), so making an accounting for that would be beneficial.

To be clear, I think it would be best if all arguments about causes being neglected did this. I also think arguments in favor of the status quo should do so as well.

I also think it's important to address why the issue in question is pressing enough that it needs a "boost" from EA relative to what it receives from non-EAs. For example, there's a fair amount of attention paid to nuclear risk already in the non-EA governance and research communities. Or in the case of "taking dharma seriously," which I might interpret as the idea that religious obervation is in fact the central purpose of human life, why are the religious institutions of the world doing an inadequate job in this area, such that EA needs to get involved?

I realize this is just a list on Twitter, a sort of brainstorm or precursor to a deeper argument.  That's a fine place to start. Without an explicit argument on the pros and cons of any given point, though, this list is almost completely illegible on its own. And it would not surprise me at all if any given list of 22 interdependent bullet-point-length project ideas and cause areas contained zero items that really should cause EA to shift its priorities.

Maybe there are other articles out there making deeper arguments in favor of making these EA cause areas. If so, then it seems to me that we should make efforts to center conversation on those, rather than "regressing" to Twitter claims.

Alternatively, if this is where we're at, then I'd encourage the author, or anyone whose intuition is that these are neglected, to make a convincing argument for them. These are sort of the "epistemic rules" of EA.

In fact, I think that's sort of the movement's brand. EA isn't strictly about "doing the most good." How could we ever know that for sure?

Instead, it's about centering issues for which the strongest, most legible case can be made. This may indeed cause some inefficiencies, as you say. Some weird issues that are even more important than the legible ones we support may be ignored by EA, simply because they depend on so much illegible information make their importance clear.

Hopefully, those issues will find support outside of EA. I think the example of "dharma," or the "implications of psychedelics," are possibly subject to this dilemma. But I personally think EA is better when it confines itself to legible cause areas. There's already a lot of intuition-and-passion-based activism and charity out there.

If anyone thinks EA ought to encompass illegible cause areas, I would be quite interested to read a (legible!) argument explaining why!

It's worth pointing out that #5 will not be news to EAs who have come across Bostrom's paper The Vulnerable World Hypothesis which is featured on the Future of Humanity's website. It also generated quite a bit of discussion here.

As for #10 it sounds like people at CSER are investigating similar issues as per the comment by MMMaas elsewhere in this thread. 

I'm not convinced any of the ideas mentioned are very important blindspots.

It doesn't feel contradictory to me, but I think I see where you're coming from. I hold the following two beliefs which may seem contradictory :

1. Many of the aforementioned blindspots seem like nonsense, and I would be surprised if extensive research in any would produce much of value.
2. At large, people should form and act on their own beliefs rather than differing to what is accepted by some authority.

There's an endless number of things which could turn out to be important. All else equal, EA's should prioritise researching the things which seem the most likely to turn out to be important. 

This is why I am happy that the EA community is not spending time engaging with many of these research directions, as I think they're unlikely to bear fruit. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to change my mind if I were presented a really good case for their importance!

If someone disagrees with my assessment then I would very much welcome research and write-ups, after which I would not be paying the cost of

"should I (or someone else) prioritise researching psychedelics over this other really important thing"

but rather

"should I prioritise reading this paper/writeup, over the many other potentially less important papers?"

If everyone would refuse to engage with even a short writeup on the topic, I would agree that there was a problem and to be fair I think there are some issues with misprioritisation due to poor use of proxies such as "does the field sound too weird" or "is the author high status". But I think in the far majority of cases, what happens is simply that the writeup wasn't sufficiently convincing to justify moving away resources from other important research fields to engage further. This will of course seem like a mistake to the people who are convinced of the topic's importance, but like the correct action to those who aren't.

I’ve thought about this a bit and don’t think #2 is incorrect, although I could quibble with it as an “important” factor.

I think broadly improving mental health could reduce catastrophic risk if:

A. Catastrophic technologies (i.e., Big Red Buttons) will become cheaper to access. B. Someone unhinged is likelier to press a Big Red Button.

The connection here doesn't seem mysterious at all to me. Sane people are less likely to end the world.

However, this may be more about reducing variance in mental health than increasing its average level.

Looks like the OP added numbers. Thanks OP!

Yes, I have a similar position that early-AGI risk runs through nuclear mostly.  I wrote my thoughts on this here: When Bits Split Atoms

Thanks I'll take a look!

Smart things are not dangerous because they have access to human-built legacy nukes.  Smart things are dangerous because they are smarter than you. 

I expect that the most efficient way to kill everyone is via the biotech->nanotech->tiny diamondoid bacteria hopping the jetstream and replicating using CHON and sunlight->everybody falling over dead 3 days after it gets smart.  I don't expect it would use nukes if they were there.

Smart AIs are not dangerous because somebody built guns for them, smart AIs are not dangerous because cars are connected to the Internet, smart AIs are not dangerous because they can steal existing legacy weapons infrastructure, smart AIs are dangerous because they are smarter than you and can think of better stuff to do.

Sure, but I'm not sure this particular argument means working on nuclear safety is as important as working on AI. We could get rid of all nuclear weapons and a powerful AI could just remake them, or make far worse weapons that we can't even conceive of now. Unless we destroy absolutely everything I'm sure a powerful unaligned AI will be able to wreak havoc, and the best way to prevent that seems to me to ensure  AI is aligned in the first place!

I agree that the current nuclear weapon situation makes AI catastrophe more likely on the margin, and said as much here (The paragraph "You might reply: The thing that went wrong in this scenario is not the out-of-control AGI, it’s the fact that humanity is too vulnerable! And my response is: Why can’t it be both? ...")

That said, I do think the nuclear situation is a rather small effect (on AI risk specifically), in that there are many different paths for an intelligent motivated agent to cause chaos and destruction. Even if triggering nuclear war is the lowest-hanging fruit for a hypothetical future AGI aspiring to destroy humanity (it might or might not be, I dunno), I think other fruits are hanging only slightly higher, like causing extended blackouts, arranging for the release of bio-engineered plagues, triggering non-nuclear great power war (if someday nuclear weapons are eliminated), mass spearphishing / hacking, mass targeted disinformation, etc., even leaving aside more exotic things like nanobots. Solving all these problems would be that much harder (still worth trying!), and anyway we need to solve AI alignment one way or the other, IMO. :)

Gotcha, thanks!