For calibration, so far no one has contacted me to take on one of the research projects in the list of concrete researchy projects [EA · GW]. And even in 1-1s, with people that are interested in joining EA Israel and are interested in taking on research project, it had very limited success going over this list and thinking together about possible research questions. 

This was a very practical post. I return to it from time to time to guide my thinking on what to research next. I suggest it to people to consider. I think about ways to build on the work and develop a database. I think that it may have helped to catalyse a lot of good outcomes.

Hey, thanks for putting this together. I think it would be quite valuable to have these lists be put up on Effective Thesis's research agenda page. My reasoning for this is that Effective Thesis's research agenda page probably has more viewers than this EA Forum post or the Google Doc version of this post.

Additionally, if you agree with the above, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how we could make Effective Thesis's research agenda page open source?

Thanks so much for this! I am keen to discuss this when Covid-19 has passed. I have some ideas and see opportunities for collaboration. EdoArad - I would love to talk with you too at that time. For context, I am one of the people involved in READI which is led by EA volunteers and seeking to tackle high impact/EA aligned research questions. This is our current project, you can see other work here.

Noticeable lack of Global Health and Development lists/topics, particularly as this is where most of the individual giving where most of the individual EA giving is going. Hope I can help with this at some point.

Here's a section that was in this post until today but that I've now decided is no longer worth having in the post itself:

What this could become (with your help!)

[Edited to add in April 2021: I've now drafted a post that goes into more detail on a better version of the sorts of ideas given below.]

As noted earlier, I hope this can help some of the many wonderfully curious EAs out there to find important questions they can start plugging away at, to help guide us all in our various efforts to improve the world.

But I’m sure that:

• I’ve missed various collections of questions, especially for cause areas other than longtermism (my personal focus)
• New collections will be made in future
• There are many individual questions that haven’t yet been collected anywhere, or new individual questions that could be suggested (I’ve added some as “Comments” in the google doc already)
• Some people would find this more useful if someone actually pulled out all of the questions from those collections and organised them, by topic and subtopic and so on (with the original source of each question referenced).
  • This could be in one central document, in a “family” of interlinked documents (e.g., one for each broad cause area), in a spreadsheet, or in a wiki-style page.

And I think we could do more to inspire and support people to actually investigate these questions than just assemble a big list. For example, we could somehow “attach” to each question, perhaps as comments or indented bullet points, things like:

• thoughts on how to approach the question
• potential breakdowns into subquestions
• links to relevant resources
• links to draft documents where someone has begun answering certain questions
• “tags” indicating what sort of skills or backgrounds are required for answering each question or set of questions
• offers of “prizes” (payment) for sufficiently high quality explorations of the questions
  • Ideally, it’d be easy to offer the prizes, stipulate the terms, and see the total amount offered by everyone for a particular question

And this could all be done collaboratively. (Plus, I don’t expect to have time to do it myself.)

So here’s a Google Doc version of this post. [Edit: I'm no longer updating that when I update the post version.] Anyone can comment and make suggestions. Please do so, to make this as useful as it can be! (You can either say “someone should probably do X”, or just do go do X yourself.)

Also feel free to:

• Duplicate the doc
• Create other docs and suggest links to them from this central directory
• Let me know if you want to get full editing permissions and be the person “in charge” of this doc

I’d be really excited to see this develop into something that can really help people advance our movement’s collective knowledge, and to see people actually executing on that - actually making those advancements.

Thoughts from Aaron Gertler

I emailed Aaron Gertler [EA · GW] of the Centre for Effective Altruism to ask his thoughts on how valuable something like this would be, and what its ideal eventual form might be. His reply, which he confirmed it was ok for me to quote here, included the following:

I'm not sure how often people actually look at these "open question" lists to decide on research priorities, so I don't know what kind of return you'd get on your time. However, some kind of Google Doc for this should exist, and if your post is what causes that to happen, I think it will be valuable (over time, some number of people will eventually go looking for this sort of thing -- I've been asked for it before, and it will be nice to have a good place to send people).

A really comprehensive list of open questions (which is regularly updated both with new questions and with new resources relevant to old questions) would be an interesting resource, and is the kind of thing one could apply for an EA Funds grant to support; however, I think you'd first have to make a case that such a thing would be used by at least a few people who otherwise wouldn't have picked very good research topics (the Effective Thesis use case is a classic example of this). It seems to me like any such list should be research-oriented (pointing out where work can be done to resolve confusion) more than debate-oriented (pointing out what different people believe), though of course your ability to emphasize that will vary from question to question.

Hopefully that can provide food for thought for people who might want to develop this idea further.

I still think this was a useful post. It's one of many posts of mine that seem like they were somewhat obvious low-hanging fruit that other people could've plucked too; more thoughts on that in other self-reviews here [EA · GW] and here [EA · GW]. 

That said, I also think that, at least as far as I'm aware, this post has been less impactful and less used than I'd have guessed. I'm not actually aware of any instances where I know for sure that someone used this post to pick a research project and then followed it through to completion. I am aware of two other well-received and high-quality-seeming research question collection posts that were substantially influenced by this one (by 80k and by Lizka [EA · GW]), but I'm also not aware of clear signs of impact from those either. This seems kinda surprising and sad.

I wrote some thoughts on why that might've happened, and what it might suggest we need to do to improve the EA-aligned research pipeline, in this sequence [EA · GW] and in a draft "Proposal: A central, editable database to help people choose and do research projects". But I no longer plan to publish the latter draft or to strongly encourage people to work on that idea. (I can expand on why if people are interested.) I'm now focused more on other ways to improve the EA-aligned research pipeline, like causing there to be more available high-quality mentorship via research training programs, scaling EA research orgs, and sharing tips and resources on how to do research and how to do management and stuff. 

I would add the GFI alternative protein solutions database

Addition: Open Problems in Cooperative AI.

Additions under "Less technical / AI strategy / AI governance"?

-  https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdMnmmqqiP5zCtSfv/cognitive-science-psychology-as-a-neglected-approach-to-ai [EA · GW] 
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9kNqYzEAYtvLg2BbR/baobao-zhang-how-social-science-research-can-inform-ai [EA · GW] (though this one only has three research questions and isn't focused on generating questions)

Update: 80,000 Hours have released an article entitled Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline, which draws on the lists of questions listed by this post, but also includes some new questions (sometimes from personal correspondences with the authors). Readers may want to check that article out too. (I've now added a link from this post.)