Some thoughts on future Debate Week topics:
I would prefer that the next topic move away from financial allocation between cause areas, so maybe something like:
1. There are 100 young, smart, flexible recent university graduates who are open to ~any kind of work. What is the optimal allocation of those graduates between object-level work, meta work, earning to give, or something else?
2. Should EA move directionally toward being a more r-selected (higher growth, less investment in each offspring) or K-selected movement, [1]or stay roughly where it is?
Two advantages of these sorts of topics, vis-a-vis a financial cause-prio debate:
A. I think these kinds of issues are generally more likely to be action-relevant for Forum users. Even I won a billion-dollar lottery prize and established a trust to give $50MM to effective animal welfare charities, the net effect on cause prio might be far less than $50MM because OP might reduce its spend by almost that amount. While there are niches in which this effect is absent or less pronounced, structuring a debate week with broad participation around them may be challenging.
B. These kinds of issues should be more accessible to those from a variety of cause perspectives. For various reasons, the last Debate Week was set up to have a predominant focus on a single cause area (AW). Cf. this discussion. That's not a bad thing, but I don't think all or most Weeks should be set up like that. Other questions may not have this effect -- for instance, I expect that the answers to questions 1 & 2 would differ substantially due to cause prio. So there's value in authoring discussion of these questions from a GH perspective, from an AW perspective, from a GCR perspective, and so on.[2]
More generally, it might be helpful to plan a Debate Season well in advance -- a "season" of (e.g.) one week each on a topic that is either specifically within a major cause area or for which it is expected to predominate, plus one or mo