Recently I have talked to a few people about the importance of publicly discussing cause selection, and we agreed that we generally don't do it enough. So I've decided to host September's EA blogging carnival with the topic "My Cause Selection." Write a post (on the EA forum or on your own blog) explaining which cause you currently believe is best and why. If you're confused about which is best (I know I am), explain the strengths and weaknesses of the causes you think might be the best. If you want, discuss your thinking on other causes that you think are promising, or that are popular in EA but you don't think are promising. You should write in sufficient detail that readers have a good understanding of why you support the cause(s) you do.
If you post on the EA forum, please use the title "My Cause Selection: <Your name or username>", and tag your post with "my-cause-selection". If you post outside the EA forum, please write a comment here with a link to your post.
You can structure your post however you like, but if you want an idea of what you could do, this is how I'm structuring mine. I explain what I value and some general considerations, and then list out every major cause area I think is plausibly the best (which includes malaria nets, deworming, animal advocacy, research on animal advocacy, AI safety, and a few others). I explain what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of each cause area and then weigh them against each other.
It's not September yet, but this is a big topic, so we could use the extra couple of weeks. Feel free to publish before September starts. Happy blogging!
Peter Hurford and I have planned to write a defence of global poverty as a cause for over a year now. All we have so far are a dozen or so conversations and my notes from representing this perspective at the cause selection debate at the 2013 CEA weekend away. So I'm posting this comment to increase the pressure on us to get it done by the end of September! And also to see if anyone else would like to contribute to it: if so, I've created a publicly editable Google doc for drafting this and contributing notes and suggestions (open to all, but a work-in-progress draft, not something we'd want to widely publish).
Public admission of failure:
My attempt at self-imposed pressure didn't work - Peter and I have once again not had time to write our defence. Since I'm the one who imposed the pressure with the above comment, I'm the one who should have egg on my face, not him. Perhaps given another year we'll be able to get it done. ;)