What should Founders Pledge research?

[My views only]

Thanks for putting up with my follow-up questions.

Out of the areas you mention, I'd be very interested in:

• Improving science. Things like academia.edu and sci-hub have been interesting. Replacing LaTeX is interesting. Working on publishing incentives is also interesting. In general, there seems to be plenty of room for improvement!

I'd be interested in:

• Improving political institutions and political wisdom: EA might need to escalate its involvement in many areas adjacent to this, such as policy intersected with great power relations or pivotal technologies. It would be very interesting to better-understand what can be done with funding alone.
• Reducing political bias and partisanship: this seems hard, but somewhat important. Most lobbyists are not trying to do this. Russia is actively trying to do the opposite. It would be interesting if more can be done in this space. Fact-checking websites and investigative journalism (Bellingcat) are interesting in this space too. Another interesting area is counteracting political corruption.
• Sundry ex risks/GCRs

I'd be a little interested in:

• Increasing economic growth

I think the other might be disadvantageous based on my understanding that it's better for EA to train people up in longtermist-relevant areas, and be percieved as being focused on the same.

Out of those you haven't mentioned, but that seem similar, I'd also be interested in:

• Promotion of effective altruism
• Scholarships for people working on high-impact research
• More on AI safety - OpenPhil seems to be funding high-prestige mostly-aligned figures (e.g. Stuart Russell, OpenAI) and high-prestige unaligned figures (e.g. their fellows) but has mostly not funded low-mid prestige highly-aligned figures (with notable exceptions of MIRI, Michael C and Dima K). Other small but comparably informed funders mostly favor low-mid prestige highly-aligned targets to a greater extent e.g. Paul's funding for AI safety research, and Paul and Carl argued to OpenPhil that they should fund MIRI more. I think there are residual opportunities to fund other low-mid prestige highly-aligned figures. [edited for clarity]

Here are a few different areas that look promising. Some of these are taken from other organizations’ lists of promising areas, but I expect more research on each of them to be high expected value.

• Donors solely focused on high-income country problems.
• Mental health research (that could help both high and low income countries).
• Alcohol control
• Sugar control
• Salt control
• Trans-fats control
• Air pollution regulation
• Metascience
• Medical research
• Lifestyle changes including "nudges" (e.g. more exercise, shorter commutes, behaviour, education)
• Mindfulness education
• Sleep quality improvement
• Donors focused on animal welfare.
• Wild animal suffering (non-meta, non-habitat destruction) interventions
• Animal governmental policy, particularly in locations outside of the USA and EU.
• Treat disease that affects wild animals
• Banning live bait fish
• Transport and slaughter of turkeys
• Pre-hatch sexing
• Brexit related preservation of animal policy
• Donors focused on improving the welfare of the current generation of humans.
• Pain relief in poor countries
• Contraceptives
• Tobacco control
• Lead paint regulation
• Road traffic safety
• Micronutrient fortification and biofortification
• Sleep quality improvement
• Immigration reform
• Mosquito gene drives, advocacy, and research
• Voluntary male circumcision
• Research to increase crop yields

Thanks for asking this question. I support and follow the approach of asking relevant people in the space for input to a research agenda. I am happy to see that other organizations are also doing it.

Meta-thoughts on how to approach this selection task would also be handy.

Your question inspired me to write a short post on a methodology of systematically integrating stakeholders' and decision-makers' input into the research agenda. You might find this meta-methodology helpful.

Out of the areas you mention, I'd be very interested in the following:
Animal product alternatives 6/10

Pain relief in developing countries 6/10
Improving science 9/10

Ideas not included on your list:
GiveWell recently published its list of areas they are planning to explore. I think some of them might be of interest to donors focused on improving the welfare of the current generation of humans and high-income countries’ problems.

• Tobacco, alcohol, and sugar control
• Air pollution regulation
• Micronutrient fortification and biofortification
• Improving government program selection
• Improving government implementation
• Immigration reform
• Mosquito gene drives advocacy and research
• Mental health (interventions comparison)
• Sleep quality improvement

As you know, GW’s research is very diligent. Consequently, it takes a long time to finalize. I would be interested in having preliminary research conducted by other organizations.

Regarding donors focused on animal welfare:

• Producers’ outreach, for example,. providing subsidization for farmers interested in higher-welfare farming
• CRISPR-based gene drives to address wild animals’ suffering
• WAS intervention comparison
• Affecting law and law enforcement focused on welfare improvements for chicken and fish in Asia
• Insects’ welfare, intervention comparison, for example, reduction of the production of silk, painkillers for insects used in research, etc.

I am currently working on CE’s agenda for the next year in the area of global poverty/health, animal advocacy, and mental health. I will be able to list more areas and research questions worth investigating that CE cannot cover this year at the end of September. I am narrowing down a list of research ideas from 400 ideas (in three cases). Let me know if you are interested in hearing more about it.

I'd need a better understanding of how Founders Pledge works to be able to say anything intelligent. I'm guessing the idea is something like:

• when founders are due to donate, you prompt them
• you ask them what kind of advice they would like
• you give them some research relevant to that, and do/don't make specific recommendations ???
• they make donations directly

Is that how it actually happens?

I'd love to see an independent dive into consciousness & moral patienthood.

Luke Muehlhauser did a thorough report (a) on this a couple years ago. As far as I know, that work is informing a lot of EA prioritization. It's quite opinionated, and I haven't seen too much discussion of its conclusions (there's some in the AMA; the topic definitely warrants more).

Consciousness and its relationship to morality is complicated enough & important enough that an independent pass seems high value.

Potential entry point: Integrated Information Theory is currently pretty prominent in neuroscience; I'd love to see an EA steelman of it. (Luke on IIT, after giving a brief explainer: "let me jump straight to my reservations about IIT.")

Also would be great to see an EA steelman of panpsychism, which is considered plausible by a bunch of philosophers and some scientists.

Just wanted to mention that I also think that improving political institutions and wisdom (and general capacity building) is quite interesting. I think policy in general is a semi-neglected EA area that could be highly valuable. Everything from advocating for known high impact policies to be put in place where they aren't (ex. tobacco taxation) to examining new policies that could be implemented (ex. novel ways of stopping illicit financial outflows from developing countries). I think GiveWell has also been looking into this field so I'm sure they have some thoughts here. I've been researching tobacco tax policy mainly in LMICs (and tobacco policies more broadly as a byproduct of that research) and am happy to chat about that if it's helpful, but I'm a relative novice in the field.

Mental health (especially in developing countries --> eg a more thorough look at Strong Minds etc.).

Fighting human rights violations around the globe.