In general I think this is a promising area of research, not just for prioritization, but also for recognition that it is indeed an EA cause area. In fact, because in most respects a lot of this research is quite nascent, it’s not clear to me that cause prioritization in the classic sense makes a ton of sense over simply running small experiments in these different areas and seeing what we learn. I expect that the value of information is high enough for most of the things you suggested that running say 15 grant experiments each costing $5,000 - $15, 000 is a more cost effective intervention in terms of giving us data than a traditional cost effectiveness analysis (although, likely, the actually most effective thing to do is to combine these two together feedback loop style).
That’s an interesting perspective. It does already assume some prioritization though. Such experimentation can only really be done in a very few of the intervention areas.
I like the idea, but am not convinced of the benefit of this path forward, compared to other approaches. We already have had a lot of experiments in this area, many of which cost a lot more than $15,000; marginal exciting ones aren’t obvious to me.
But I’d be up for more research to decide if things like that are the best way forward :)
In general I think this is a promising area of research, not just for prioritization, but also for recognition that it is indeed an EA cause area. In fact, because in most respects a lot of this research is quite nascent, it’s not clear to me that cause prioritization in the classic sense makes a ton of sense over simply running small experiments in these different areas and seeing what we learn. I expect that the value of information is high enough for most of the things you suggested that running say 15 grant experiments each costing $5,000 - $15, 000 is a more cost effective intervention in terms of giving us data than a traditional cost effectiveness analysis (although, likely, the actually most effective thing to do is to combine these two together feedback loop style).
That’s an interesting perspective. It does already assume some prioritization though. Such experimentation can only really be done in a very few of the intervention areas.
I like the idea, but am not convinced of the benefit of this path forward, compared to other approaches. We already have had a lot of experiments in this area, many of which cost a lot more than $15,000; marginal exciting ones aren’t obvious to me.
But I’d be up for more research to decide if things like that are the best way forward :)
And I’d be up for more experiments to see if this is a better way forward.