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).
Effectivethesis.com contains many possible topics
There’s also Jacy Reese’s 2018 list of half-baked volunteer research ideas
There are some research ideas at the end of EA Summit’s list
Global Priorities Institute's research agenda a has very many possible research projects listed.
80,000 hours as a list of potentially promising paths that they haven't written reviews on yet. I vaguely remember them mentioning somewhere that it could be valuable for people to write reviews about careers they are seriously considering. I guess 80,000 hours framework could be used for that.