The Nonlinear Library EA - Deciding What Project/Org to Start: A Guide to Prioritization Research by Alexandra Bos
Jan 31, 2024
11:48
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deciding What Project/Org to Start: A Guide to Prioritization Research, published by Alexandra Bos on January 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
If you're deciding what (research) project, organization or intervention to go for, analyzing your options through prioritization research can be invaluable. I used it to settle on founding
Catalyze, an AI Safety field-building non-profit. In this post, I will share my blueprint and learnings from this process. Please note that you don't need to be a researcher to benefit from conducting prioritization research.
Why prioritization research
No need to wait for inspiration to strike
If you're at a crossroads trying to come up with a great idea, I have good news: you don't have to invent something new. There's a world of ideas waiting to be discovered and executed. So don't wait for that idea to come to you; instead, you can go to the ideas.
You can probably find a better intervention than the first one(s) you stumbled upon
Suppose you have a handful of ideas for a project or an organization. That's a fantastic start! But consider the possibility that by conducting a broad and deliberate search, you could stumble upon something even more impactful. More likely than not, if you consider a wide range of ideas, your initial favorite won't come out on top. Don't go for the first thing that came to mind, but rather take some time to scope the field and possibly find an even better option.
The difference in impact between a 'good' and 'great' intervention is huge - especially within a high-impact cause area
One of the original points EA focused on was the huge difference in impact between different interventions within global health.
Illustrative Graph from this
80.000 Hours article
To me, it seems likely that the big difference in impact between interventions is similar in different cause areas.
Therefore, apart from wisely choosing what cause to work on, I think it is still very crucial to wisely pick what you work on within that cause area. One of the 'best' interventions in this area is likely many times more impactful than the median.
If you work within
a cause area that is especially high-impact, then finding one of the very best things to do could be especially consequential. Within such a cause area, the median intervention might already make a very big difference. Don't let this be encouragement to settle - instead let this be encouragement to find an outlier which is 10x as impactful as this already-great median intervention.
In other words, don't fall into the "it's-in-an-EA-cause-area-so-it's-high-impact-anyways" fallacy (I'll have to work on the naming). Although at this point it might all just feel 'very impactful', don't forget that the
Scope Insensitivity Bias might be clouding your judgement.
Get better feedback and advice by reasoning explicitly & strengthen your skills
The skills you can learn through prioritization research can for example be useful if you'd like to move into a grantmaker role or research role. I've personally also found it useful in my impact-focused entrepreneurship endeavours.
My blueprint for prioritization research
Below I'll describe the steps I took to decide roughly what intervention I wanted to build an organization around. In deciding what these steps looked like, I largely took inspiration from
Charity Entrepreneurship's (CE) materials (their
book and information I could find on
their website about their approach).
I by no means want to claim that the method I put together below is the best way to do prioritization research. Instead, I'd like to give readers some place to start from more quickly by sharing the specific steps and templates I put together. I think that finding materials like these would have helped me to get going more quickly and improve my methods. I encourage o...
If you're deciding what (research) project, organization or intervention to go for, analyzing your options through prioritization research can be invaluable. I used it to settle on founding
Catalyze, an AI Safety field-building non-profit. In this post, I will share my blueprint and learnings from this process. Please note that you don't need to be a researcher to benefit from conducting prioritization research.
Why prioritization research
No need to wait for inspiration to strike
If you're at a crossroads trying to come up with a great idea, I have good news: you don't have to invent something new. There's a world of ideas waiting to be discovered and executed. So don't wait for that idea to come to you; instead, you can go to the ideas.
You can probably find a better intervention than the first one(s) you stumbled upon
Suppose you have a handful of ideas for a project or an organization. That's a fantastic start! But consider the possibility that by conducting a broad and deliberate search, you could stumble upon something even more impactful. More likely than not, if you consider a wide range of ideas, your initial favorite won't come out on top. Don't go for the first thing that came to mind, but rather take some time to scope the field and possibly find an even better option.
The difference in impact between a 'good' and 'great' intervention is huge - especially within a high-impact cause area
One of the original points EA focused on was the huge difference in impact between different interventions within global health.
Illustrative Graph from this
80.000 Hours article
To me, it seems likely that the big difference in impact between interventions is similar in different cause areas.
Therefore, apart from wisely choosing what cause to work on, I think it is still very crucial to wisely pick what you work on within that cause area. One of the 'best' interventions in this area is likely many times more impactful than the median.
If you work within
a cause area that is especially high-impact, then finding one of the very best things to do could be especially consequential. Within such a cause area, the median intervention might already make a very big difference. Don't let this be encouragement to settle - instead let this be encouragement to find an outlier which is 10x as impactful as this already-great median intervention.
In other words, don't fall into the "it's-in-an-EA-cause-area-so-it's-high-impact-anyways" fallacy (I'll have to work on the naming). Although at this point it might all just feel 'very impactful', don't forget that the
Scope Insensitivity Bias might be clouding your judgement.
Get better feedback and advice by reasoning explicitly & strengthen your skills
The skills you can learn through prioritization research can for example be useful if you'd like to move into a grantmaker role or research role. I've personally also found it useful in my impact-focused entrepreneurship endeavours.
My blueprint for prioritization research
Below I'll describe the steps I took to decide roughly what intervention I wanted to build an organization around. In deciding what these steps looked like, I largely took inspiration from
Charity Entrepreneurship's (CE) materials (their
book and information I could find on
their website about their approach).
I by no means want to claim that the method I put together below is the best way to do prioritization research. Instead, I'd like to give readers some place to start from more quickly by sharing the specific steps and templates I put together. I think that finding materials like these would have helped me to get going more quickly and improve my methods. I encourage o...