The main thing that I personally think we don't need as much of is donations to object-level charities (e.g. GiveWell's top picks). It's unclear to me how much this can be funged into more self-reflection for the general person, but for instance I am sacrificing potential donations right now in order to write this post and respond to criticism...

I am substantially less enthusiastic about donations to object-level charities (for their own sake) than I am for opportunities for us to learn and expand our influence. So I'm pretty on board here.

I think "writing blogposts criticizing mistakes that people in the EA community commonly make" is a moderate strawman of what I'd actually like to see, in that it gets us closer to being a successful movement but clearly won't be sufficient on its own.

That was my first pass at how I'd try to start to try to increase the "self-awareness" of the movement. I would be interested in hearing more specifics about what you'd like to see happen.

Why do you think basic fact-finding would be particularly helpful? Seems to me that if we can't come to nontrivial conclusions already, the kind of facts we're likely to find won't help very much.

A few reasons. One is that the model for research having an impact is: you do research --> you find valuable information --> people recognize your valuable information --> people act differently. I have become increasingly pessimistic about people's ability to recognize good research on issues like population ethics. But I believe people can recognize good research on stuff like shallow cause overviews.

Another consideration is our learning and development. I think the above consideration applies to us, not just to other people. If it's easier for us to tell if we're making progress, we'll learn how to learn about these issues more quickly.

I believe that a lot of the more theoretical stuff needs to happen at some point. There can be a reasonable division of labor, but I think many of us would be better off loading up on the theoretical side after we had a stronger command of the basics. By "the basics" I mean stuff like "who is working on synthetic biology?" in contrast with stuff like "what's the right theory of population ethics?".

You might have a look at this conversation I had with Holden Karnofsky, Paul Christiano, Rob Wiblin, and Carl Shulman. I agree with a lot of what Holden says.