EA - Opportunities that surprised us during our Clearer Thinking Regrants program by spencerg

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Opportunities that surprised us during our Clearer Thinking Regrants program, published by spencerg on November 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post was written by a subset of Clearer Thinking team members, and not all of the team members involved with the regranting necessarily agree with everything said here.As part of the Clearer Thinking Regrants program, we evaluated over 630 project proposals and ended up with 37 finalists. In the many hours that we spent evaluating these finalists, we learned some things that surprised us and saw many potential opportunities to help the world that we hadn’t considered before. Of course, if you’re an expert in any of these areas, what surprised us non-experts may not surprise you.Our aim in this post is to share object-level information that we did not know before the regranting program and that we think readers may find interesting or useful. In several cases, we are sharing the fact that specific organizations or projects have significantly more room for funding than we would have guessed, even after accounting for the outcomes of our regrants program. We hope that readers find this information useful. By highlighting some organizations that have room for more funding, we hope that this will lead to impactful giving opportunities.Summary:We were surprised that there hasn't been more work to quantify the risks from large-magnitude volcanic eruptions (considering the impact that such eruptions could have).We were surprised that the Rethink Priorities Surveys Team has significant room for funding for their own project ideas (since most of their work is research/consulting for existing orgs).We hadn’t previously considered the extent to which the use of boiling as a water treatment method in low- and middle-income countries contributes to indoor air pollution (and, therefore, to potentially negative health outcomes).We were surprised to learn that the Happier Lives Institute (HLI) has substantial room for additional funding.We hadn’t considered that there may be significant new ideas about how to reduce the chance of nuclear war (given the age of the field).Some of our team hadn’t realized how difficult it can be to tell whether there’s a vitamin deficiency in a population, and none of us had realized that point-of-care biosensors might be feasible to roll out in the foreseeable future.We hadn’t realized that 1Day Sooner conducts activities outside of their human challenge trial work, and that these activities have significant room for funding.1. We were surprised that there hasn't been more work to quantify the risks from large-magnitude volcanic eruptions (considering the impact that such eruptions could have).Toby Ord’s best guess (discussed in The Precipice) is that there is a ~1 in 10,000 chance of an existential catastrophe via supervolcano eruption within the next 100 years. He also thinks that most of the risks associated with volcanic eruptions would relate to them causing the collapse of civilization and/or reducing the chance of recovering from that collapse, and that further research quantifying these risks would be helpful.Volcanologists Mike Cassidy and Lara Mani have argued that there has been insufficient attention paid to quantifying these risks, as well as to identifying where large-magnitude volcanic eruptions are most likely to occur and which measures should be taken to mitigate these risks. It was surprising to us that these questions have not already been investigated in greater detail, considering the impact that such eruptions could have (and that improved quantification may be quite low-cost if carried out by the right team).2. We were surprised that the Rethink Priorities Surveys Team has significant room for funding for their own project ideas (since most of their work is re...