One very good way to inspire research is to create a list of open questions. I'm aware of a few resources like this:
- Richard Batty's Concrete Projects List (and some of the comments).
- Open Phil's "questions that might affect our grantmaking" list.
- FRI's open research questions.
- Paul Christiano's sequence on iterated amplification, which talks about open questions but never quite lists them as such.
Are there other sets of EA-related open questions that I've left out of this list, and that aren't on Richard's list?
Specifically, I'm looking for questions that could be solved through research or experimentation, rather than "projects" that require competitive execution ("could someone create an Amazon for charitable donations?" doesn't count, but "what factors lead to someone repeatedly using a donation website?" could).
One of CEA's future goals for the Forum is to have an "Open Questions" page which is the most comprehensive source for such questions. Having interactivity around question posts (e.g. commenters adding papers that contribute to a question, with summaries of what progress was made) seems potentially really good.
I can't promise a particular timeline for this, and I'm not sure what form it will take, but I do think the Forum is a good place for questions to exist. If anyone sees this and has thoughts/questions, I'd be very happy to talk to them about what might make an "Open Questions" list especially good/helpful.