I'd be excited if there's an EA who's an expert in industrial and organizational psychology, especially the psychometrics side. To the extent that the research and methodology is valid, this has pretty clear applicability to community-building efforts, especially if we're focused on attracting, selecting for, and deploying exceptional talent. 

It may also have a bunch of value in running organizations well .

TikTok (like, seriously. Lots of young people are there caring about the world ending, and it doesn't seem like it should be that complicated, right?)

A communications specialist who could think of 100 different maximally-effective ways to explain AI safety to a general audience, many of them in less than two minutes and some in a couple sentences.

Computational linguistics and evolutionary biology focus on hominids in the last few million years. (AI forecasting relevance and maybe language model comparisons?)

Psychology related to dark triad/tetrad traits. (Relevant to reducing the influence of malevolent actors.)

The risk of hacking into nuclear weapons systems. This was how Gwern's AI takeover story ended, and has received mainstream interest unrelated to AI risk. Here's a short brainstorm I did. 

How various prominent ideologies view the world, e.g. based on in-depth conversations

Hiring

• Flow and distribution of information (inside EA, and in general)
• how to structure and present information to make it as easily digestible as possible (e.g. in blog posts or talks/presentations)

A bit less pressing maybe, but I'd also be interested in seeing some (empirical) research on polyamory and how it affects people. It appears to be rather prevalent in rationality & EA, and I know many people who like it, and also people who find it very difficult and complicated. 

Love the question! Within AI policy:

• How/whether R&D funding can be leveraged to fund AI safety research.
• How/whether governments should regulate AI safety. We have people writing high-level academic papers on this, but potentially nobody, at least in the US, who’s aiming to become an expert in the details of implementation.
• Anti-trust as it relates to AI. There’s a chance AI governance initiatives could run afoul of anti-trust by default, so it seems good to have people with deep experience at places like the FTC who could advise on how to navigate this.

Someone extremely on top of the cutting-edge multi-omics game. EA has a lot of bio talent but nobody with years-long metagenomics experience and access to the (often unpublished) knowledge on current best practices, pitfalls, and promising upcoming research.

Various practical skillsets:

• A "Scribe", someone who is good at eliciting and presenting the ideas of other people who aren't good at presenting their own ideas. There are a lot of people in the intellectual movement who're brilliant, but don't write enough, or don't have an intuitive sense of what needs to be written (what's not obvious to others, what others are ready for), or don't have an impulse to do it unless someone is in front of them and asking them questions. A scribe is someone who knows what needs to be written and can facilitate the writing.
  A very good job for a Scribe is podcast interviewing. There are currently no brilliant scribes doing podcasting as far as I'm aware (potentially due to limited true competition as a result of... incumbency bias, and as a result of the temptation to not be a scribe, and to instead follow your own interests, and because no one has formalized or named the skillset until we did).
• Matchmaking, facilitating networking. The easiest way to start to get to know another person is for someone who knows both of you already to tell the two of you what you need to talk about. I feel like every EA group should be doing a lot of this, but it's hard, it's not something I'm naturally skilled at, but if someone who had a deep natural interest in people told me what I needed to learn, I think I would learn it then.
  • Doubt: There's a possibility that an online profile system is always better for introductions than anything we can do in person.
• Psychology of aesthetics of interior design, and potentially 3d modelling. We will need someone to build venues for EA in VR at some point over the next decade.
  • Doubt: It's possible that the most reasonable approach will just be to find works that have been made outside of the community, pay for some minor adjustments and put "effective altruism" in the description to make it findable, in which case this is less important, but it might still be useful to have someone who knows how spaces create moods and shape conversations to tell us which spaces are best. But we can figure that out pretty well ourselves.

Inside-view understanding of policymaking in major / emerging bioeconomies outside the US/Europe. I'm thinking BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) but also countries that will have huge economies/populations this century, like Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the DRC, countries with BSL-4 labs, and places with regulatory environments that allow broader biotechnology experimentation (e.g. Israel, Singapore).

Education

If there is already an expert, or a substantial body of research addressing this from an EA perspective, let me know!

Data poisoning, especially the kind relevant to US-China cybersecurity.

People working in producing and moving physical goods, to be able to have more impact on the physical world. I would guess that is kind of work, and starting companies to provide this kind of work is the most likely activity to bring low income countries to middle income

I am not saying that this doesn't exist within EA (have not spoken to every EA anyway!) just that there is less emphasis on this than I think there should be:

- Modelling indirect impact: often people seem to be speaking about direct risks, e.g. from AI or bio, with other areas such as climate change being less discussed and global health and poverty being seen as 'neartermist'. But for example more inequality can lead to greater instability, which increases chances of conflict which increases chances of other xrisks. Or climate change increases the chance of pandemics when e.g. more people are climate refugees (just two examples, not intending to put numbers on them but to illustrate a point). 
- Applied psychology/communication (if that's the right phrasing): when I first started joining EA I was mentioning how useful it would be to gain a deeper understanding of why people do what they do. If they currently aren't don't something that would be very beneficial from them to do (e.g. working on a high impact career), why? And if you want to convince them to do something like that and communicate with them effectively, how would you go about it? It's difficult to answer either of those things without understanding why people do what they do, and more broadly why groups do what they do, or governments do what they do. 

(1) Effects of cybersecurity on geopolitics, or individual privacy. These are two different areas and they seem to me like one bad actor can cause a lot of suffering or lead to suboptimal futures, but I don't know of any EAs who looked deeply into it.

(2) Reproductive health and the costs of childbearing, possibly from a policy angle. I think as a community we decided to bite the bullet and become total utilitarians, and I see some discussions on how it should play out in terms of contraception and choosing to have more children but all of these come across to me as not very well-informed. There are only 2 posts I found about it are by isabel and they touch very specific topics. So I think an analysis of why people are having fewer children, what policies will help people choose to have more children, and a thorough analysis to settle all the discussions around contraception and abortion, including an attempt to quantify the suffering and counterfactual involved in childbearing and childcare, would be appreciated.

Diet and nutrition.

Eating better and more efficiently seems important. May be good for both physical and mental health, may improve brain capabilities...

I recently stumbled upon WFPB (Whole Food Plant-based) diet promoted by Dr. T. Colin Campbell and has started experimenting it for a month.

When I was evaluating the claims of WFPB I wanted to get some idea from a trusted source, but found out nutrition wasn't a popular topic in EA.

The energy system (Vaclav Smil style) and the implications for transitioning out of fossil fuels. 

It seems to me that the EA community is very naive about the importance of energy and the degree to which a timely transition out of fossil fuels is difficult. As a community, it mostly takes energy for granted.

I think we should do a bit more research into avant la lettre EA movements.  Macaskill mentioned the Mohists several times in his new book, but never really gets into the detail of this movement. In a few recent (link)posts there have been mentions of the Charity Organisation Society and Scientific Philanthropy movements, and we have similarities with the original British utilitarian philosophers as well. 

I would love to read an in depth analysis about why/how/if these movements failed, how the originated and how they compare to EA. 

The knowledge explosion, our relationship with it, our ability (or not) to control it.