Prohibition is a great example. It covers:

-alcohol

-marijuana

-LSD

-opioids

-etc

It might be a good idea to have some restrictions on some of these!

A key insight from PlayPumps is that the details matter -- kids did not enjoy the "Play" part of the pumping system. It seems a little odd (almost Orwellian) the inventor/promoter ignored this

Prohibition is a super interesting one I hadn't considered, thanks! 

GMOs/nuclear power are interesting but I'd suspect it's unlikely to engage readers' emotions much. I.e. I doubt they'll leave thinking 'wow, what a waste of time to oppose GMOs!' because there is something quite intuitively unappealing about them. Might be worth a mention though, even if not as the key case study.

The others feel a little bit politicised, even though I agree!

There was good reason back then to believe that overpopulation was a real problem whose time would come relatively soon. If it wasn't for technological breakthroughs with dwarf wheat and IR8 rice variants, spearheaded by Norman Borlaug and others, our population would have seriously passed our ability to grow food by this point -- the so-called Malthusian trap.

Using overpopulation as an example here would be akin to using something like global climate change as an example in the present, if it turns out that a technological breakthrough in the next 5-10 years completely obviates the need for us to be careful about greenhouse gas release in the future.

Because of this, I don't think overpopulation as a cause area would make for the best example that you're trying to make here.

Thanks so much - someone else suggested China's One Child Policy and I think this or a more general point on overpopulation might be where we end up! Really great suggestion. The sterilisation stories are harrowing and I think could really bring the point home.

I guess one question I would have is whether the campaigners at the time were using good reason and evidence. It's possible that the information we have now was not available to them, and it's also possible that it's a legitimate cause area (i.e. overpopulation is a real concern) even if the means (sterilisation etc.) are clearly wrong. I'm not an expert on this at all but will read up on more recent literature on overpopulation!

Great share. Really hurt to read, oh man.

Here some more details from the article that I found interesting, too:

Nonetheless, by the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there. "The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa," says David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too—though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me."

Borlaug's reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Thanks, ALS is a good suggestion (and I could imagine us using it) but I don't think it quite meets the 'PlayPump' test, in that I doubt readers would go away thinking that ALS is a bad cause area, in the same way that they would think PlayPumps are actually bad. It's possible that the bar I'm setting is too high, but ideally I want a cause area which people reflect on and think 'wow, what a waste  of time, that's not worth pursuing at all!' - but perhaps all the main causes which people focus on are at least somewhat good. 

Thanks. The nuclear one is a great example. 
 

We want examples of both prioritisation between causes and prioritisation between interventions, but cases of the latter are far easier to find - like PlayPumps the examples you give.  I actually think the former is a more important EA insight: it would probably be more valuable for the world for people/resources to focus on the most pressing cause areas, rather than to do what we currently do more (locally) effectively.

My initial reaction was "plastic straws/bags" as well, but the approach from 'meerpirat' now seems like the obvious way to go. I don't know anything on the topic, but there must be some clearly successful religious crusades that would be widely accepted as harmful now?

I'm trying to think of a more modern example that readers are more likely to find intuitively relatable, but run into the problem like you say in comment above "perhaps all the main causes which people focus on are at least somewhat good." I think the best bet if you are to stick with more relatable causes is to  highlight a cause that you can convince readers is clearly not as good . For example, poverty/health concerns of developed nations vs developing nations). You might hit a snag with many readers who have strong "charity begins at home" intuitions but it would be food for thought at least, and persuasive on readers you are likely targeting.

edit: I prefer 'alexrjl's plastic straws example, as has reasons for why it is likely actually bad.

These are great ideas and exactly along the right lines of what I was looking for. I agree the religious aspect is tricky to navigate, but perhaps being somewhat close to home is useful for readers (i.e. I expect many readers will believe in the apocalypse, but very few would endorse sects who predict specific dates. 

Someone on Facebook has also suggested China's One Child Policy, which is a nice contemporary example, not least because it was reversed this year!

So I guess the reason is that the example illustrates the importance of cause prioritisation more strongly. It's the same with PlayPumps: MacAskill could have picked a much better charitable intervention and yet still argued for effectiveness, but this wouldn't powerfully demonstrate just how important it is to get the intervention right. 

I completely agree with your overall point about maximising the good we can do, and other parts of the book will emphasise how important it is to not just settle for 'good enough'!

Thanks! I had considered things like this, but I'm not sure how well it illustrates the cause prioritisation point as in many ways these feel like the same cause (blindness) but different interventions, one of which is more effective than the other. I.e. it feels a bit more like a standard PlayPumps case, rather than highlighting the importance of picking the right cause? 

Feel free to push back if you disagree - I'm not too sure how tightly defined a 'cause area' is, but my general presumption is that it refers to addressing a distinct problem. 

Interesting. Without reading into it, I've always assumed that Western defences of colonialism (incl. White Man's Burden) were somewhat disingenuous, i.e. defending something they knew was wrong, or was at least controversial, and the motivations were not altruistic. The ideal case is one where people are being genuinely altruistic but completely miss the mark.