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Very nice.
Is there a quick way to use the agenda to see GPI's research prioritization? (e.g. perhaps the table of contents is ordered from high-to-low priority?)
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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
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This is really really impressive. An amazing collection of really important questions.
POSITIVES. I like the fact that you intend to research:
* Institutional actors (2.8). Significant changes to the world are likely to come through institutional actors and the EA community has largely ignored them to date. The existing research has focused so much on the benefits of marginal donations (or marginal research) that our views on cause prioritisation cannot be easily applied to states. As someone into EA in the business of influencing states this is a really problematic oversight of the community to date, that we should be looking to fix as soon as possible.
* Decision-theoretic issues (2.1)
* The use of discount rates. This is practically useful for decision makers.
OMISSIONS. I did however note a few things that I would have expected to be included, to not be mentioned in this research agenda in particular there was no discussion on
* Useful models for thinking about and talking about cause prioritisation. In particular the scale neglectedness and tractability framework is often used and often criticised. What other models can or should be used by the EA community.
* Social change. Within section 1 there is some discussion of broad verses narrow future focused interventions, and so I would have expected a similar discussion in section 2 on social change interventions verses targeted interventions in general. This was not mentioned.
* (which risks to the future are most concerning. Although I assume this is because those topics are being covered by others such as FHI.)
CONCERN
Like I said above I think the questions within 2.8 are really importation for EA to focus on. I hope that the fact it is low on the list does not mean it is not priorotised.
I also note that there is a sub-question in 2.8 on "what is the best feasible voting system". I think this issue comes up too much and is often a distraction. It feels like a minor sub part of the question on "what is the optimal institution design" which people gravitate too because it is the most visible part of many political systems, but is really unlikely to be thing on the margin that most needs improving.
I hope that helps, Sam
What are these other questions about optimal institution design, which you consider more important than voting systems?
There are maybe 100+ other steps to policy as important as voting system design. In rough chronological order I started listing some of them below (I got bored part way through and stopped at what looks like 40 points).
I have aimed to have all of these issues at a roughly similar order of magnitude of importance. The scale of these issues will depend on country to country and the tractability of trying to change these issues will vary with time and depend on individual to individual.
Overall I would say that voting reform is not obviously more or less important than the other 100+ things that could be on this list (although I guess it is often likely to somewhere in the top 50% of issues). There is a lot more uncertainty about what the best voting mechanisms look like than many of the other issues on the list. It is also an issue that may be hard to change compared to some of the others.
Either way voting reform is a tiny part of an incredibly long process, a process with some huge areas for improvements in other parts.
SETTING BOUNDARIES
CHOOSING POLITICIANS
CIVIL SERVICE STAFFING
ACCOUNTABILITY
AGENDA SETTING AND INITIAL RESEARCH
POLICY DEVELOPMENT
LEGISLATIVE PROCESS
POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
POLICY REVIEW
PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
RISK MANAGEMENT
GENERAL