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This is: Humanities Research Ideas for Longtermists, published by Lizka on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
This post lists 10 longtermism-relevant project ideas for people with humanities interests or backgrounds. Most of these ideas are for research projects, but some are for summaries, new outreach content, etc. (See below for what I mean by “humanities.”)
The ideas, in brief:
Study future-oriented beliefs in certain religions or groups
Study the ways in which incidental qualities become essential to institutions
Explore fiction as a tool for moral circle expansion
Study how longtermists use different forms of media and how this might be improved
Study how non-EAs actually view AI safety issues, and how we got here
Produce anthropological/ethnographic studies of unusually relevant groups
Apply insights from education, history, and development studies to creating a post-societal-collapse recovery plan
Study notions of utopias
Analyze social media (and online forums) in the context of longtermism
Use tools from non-history humanities fields to aid history-oriented projects relevant for longtermism
Why it might be helpful to produce lists of projects for people with humanities backgrounds (or interests) to work on
Deliberately looking for and studying topics that are humanities-oriented could be a way to discover longtermist interventions that are hard to notice or tackle from other angles (e.g., a STEM angle), improve our views on known causes and interventions, and find topics that are better fits for some people than existing (non-humanities) project ideas would be.
If it is relatively easy to produce such lists, it suggests that we are systematically missing humanities ideas and tools from our reasoning, and that this gap is not explainable by a natural disconnect between longtermist values or concerns and non-STEM areas.[1] (If we had exhausted humanities approaches to longtermism, it would probably be hard to find previously unnoticed topics that seem reasonable.) It seems valuable to have diversity in backgrounds and perspectives, and the existence of this gap suggests that supporting humanities projects might be a way to improve on that front.
Collections like this can consolidate existing ideas and resources in one place, making it easier to find projects and collaborate as a community.
I am aware of talented people who have been put off EA (and longtermism) due to their general sense that the humanities are considered worthless. My sense is that EAs do see value in the humanities, and it might be worth making this clearer.
(Personal note) this project was helpful for me as a way to explore longtermist research.
Scope and disclaimers
The focus of the post is on the humanities disciplines most neglected in EA and longtermism, so I excluded history, philosophy, and psychology. (Those might also be neglected in the community, but there has been at least some mention of how they could be relevant for longtermism in places like the Forum.)[2] My use of the word “humanities'' is loose—for this project, I accepted some fields that might be considered social sciences instead. In practice, I think the ideas listed here are most related to anthropology, archival studies, area studies, art history, (comparative) literature, (comparative) religion studies/theology, education, and media studies.
The list is not meant to be exhaustive by any means; in particular, the selection of topics here is heavily influenced by my own academic background (literature, sort-of-history, art, math). Some of the ideas are ideas for bringing existing research into EA rather than ideas for producing totally new research. It is also important to note that I have very little background in most of the areas involved in this list, and I wouldn't be surprised if deeper research discovered that some ...
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