Hey folks,
As an effective altruist-minded founder, I've been working to find ways to bring EA values and measures into a space that is relatively behind in terms of scientific rigor: Peacebuilding. I recently wrote an op-ed outline the scope, neglectedness, and potential for innovation in the field, which you can find on the World Economic Forum website. That's a great primer for the discussion, which I'll avoid regurgitating here.
However, I am not convinced it is enough. I believe a deeper analysis of the problem and solution spaces is deeply needed, and I'd love to bring together some of your great analytical minds to examine the space from an explicitly EA perspective. This includes sizing up the problem in contrast to other issues, and evaluating the potential for impact based on approaches and various parameters. We could develop some white papers to share here and beyond.
If this interests you, please feel free to comment below or get in touch with me directly.
Here's a snapshot of the size of the issue, along with its neglectedness, in economic terms:
I just noticed the article you linked. In the future it's probably best to put all the arguments here on this forum, where you can add more details and EA-specific information.
Your idea seems to be figuring out a way of assessing individuals' propensity for violence, and then seeing what changes that. But that's not how war happens. It happens at the level of societies and nations as a result of more complicated dynamics.
Individuals don't have a clear, easy-to-study propensity for violence. It's a complicated thing that depends on the environment. In behavioral economics, we can study consumer choice and come up with descriptive decision theories because everything is about money, which is interchangeable and easy to measure and used for everything. The equivalent of this would be a study of individuals' propensity to go to college or something like that. We can study such things, but not in the same way and not with the same kind of results.
And only a small proportion of a population will ever become militants. This makes it very hard to study in a statistically rigorous way. If 1% of people will become a militant, then a survey of 1,000 people reaches only ten future militants on average. This creates numerous statistical problems.
In a very general sense, sure you could say X causes people to engage in violence, let's reduce X, and then violence is reduced in expectation. But that just sounds like normal research that probably already exists.
Finally, it seems to me that interventions which target the people who actually are violent are likely to be more effective. If 1% of people become militants then generic interventions will have to be 50-100x cheaper.