Cause Exploration Contest

CEARCH’s Search for Potential Causes

CEARCH keeps a running longlist of causes (link) that may merit further research to see if they are highly impactful causes worth supporting. The list, which covers the broad areas of global health & development, longtermism, as well as EA meta, is currently around 400 causes long.

In compiling this longlist, we have used a variety of methods, as detailed in this search methodology (link); core ones include:

Using Nuno’s excellent list as a starting point.
Conducting consultations and surveys (e.g. of both EA and non-EA organizations and individuals).
Performing outcome tracing (i.e. looking at good/bad outcomes and identifying the underlying causes): The Global Burden of Diseases database and the World Database of Happiness are especially useful in this regard.

Cause Exploration Contest

Open Philanthropy had its excellent Cause Exploration Prize; and over July 2023, we ran a similar contest, but with a lower bar.

We invited people to suggest potential cause areas, providing a short justification if they felt it useful (e.g. briefly covering why the issue is important/tractable/neglected), or not, if otherwise (e.g. the idea simply appears novel or interesting to them). All ideas were welcome, for even causes which do not appear intuitively impactful can be fairly cost-effective upon deeper research.
People were also welcome to suggest potential search methodologies for finding causes (e.g. consulting weird philosophy, or looking up death certificates).

Prizes were awarded in the following way:

USD 300 for what the CEARCH team judges to be the most plausibly cost-effective and/or novel cause idea (and that is not already on our public longlist of causes).
USD 700 for what the CEARCH team judges to be the most useful and/or novel search methodology idea (and that is not already listed in our public search methodology document).

Winners

We are pleased to announce the following winning entries:

In the category of promising cause areas: Bean soaking, submitted by Nick Laing of OneDay Health. In summary, persuading citizens in sub-Saharan Africa to soak before cooking them (and thus saving on fuel use) may have health, economic and environmental benefits; however, there are some outstanding uncertainties over tractability and why soaking is not already common practice.
In the category of useful search methodologies: Brainstorming for solutions that may not have the most impact in the context of solving a single problem, but which may have significant overall impact given the benefits it brings across multiple cause areas; this was submitted by Jeroen De Ryck.

Honourable Mentions

We would also light to highlight the following entries that stood out. In the category of promising causes:

Modern slavery, submitted by Sam Hilton.
Alexithymia, submitted by Bolek Kerous.

And in the category of useful search methodologies:

A list of seven methods generally focused on taking different moral, political, epistemic and metaphysical perspectives (e.g. consulting the perspective of preference satisfaction; prioritizing causes systematically overlooked by human biases; copying ethical pioneers; consulting non-standard cosmology; consulting different political values; considering ideas that have gone out of fashion; and researching utopia building); this was submitted by David Mears, with input from Amber Dawn Ace.
Consulting J-PAL’s existing list of RCTed interventions, with the idea being that at lower levels of granularity, we can focus on very targeted interventions that may be very cost-effective but not generally applicable; this was submitted by Sophia Moss.