The bit about "music our ears are not hearing" brings back strong memories about building echolocation in me. Part of the surpise of it is/was that it is not about receiving more sound but rather interpreting what you constantly do get. Doing the hoops made for a cool subjective experience in me but I don't have a pathway to induce that in others. However despite/inaddition to being cool it could also be categorised as phenomological progress which could be a neglected category of value. Is there any way to explain to a blind man why it would be good to be able to see? Is it?
Invisible tragedies might include understanding human variance as erroring on one central design on how the brain is "supposed to" work. I guess thered is somewhat of an awareness that neurodivercity might be a positive force. But kind of bridging these two ideas, humans naturally learn stereoscopic colorvision and bats naturally leans echolocation. Humans left without instruction might or might not pick up on written language. If sensory modalities can be expanded by training then there would be a category comparable to alexic people, aspatial people that can't see beyond corners.
If a facistic dictatorship would only allow people of a certain haircolor or lineage to live that would seem unacceptably oppressive. Yet society effectively supports only 1 neurotype.
Re new subcategories of beauty created by technology, new art/entertainment forms like photography, film, radio, animation, TV, video games are examples. And printed books, not so long ago.
Re barely visible vast tragedies, untreated extreme (torture-level) prolonged pain, such as from cancer, is surely one. Many countries apparently don't provide even cheap painkillers like morphine. And I suspect extreme prolonged pain is vastly worse than other bad things people campaign about, that cause ordinary levels of discomfort & misery, and vastly worse than any pleasure is good. (Stick your hand in the fire, and see how long it takes for you to agree with me.)
Hence I suspect almost all the bad stuff in the world (affecting humans) resides in this extreme pain. Most of which could be treated quite easily & cheaply.
I'm sure I'm nowhere near the first person to talk about this "barely visible but vast tragedy", but factory farming is as far as I can tell the number one most heinous thing humanity has ever done. Every mass genocide perpetrated upon humans pales in comparison by orders of magnitude. Seems to me that one of the most effective ways of doing effective altruism right now would be to go vegan and spread veganism throughout society as much as possible, with the end goal of destroying the animal agriculture industry entirely.
But that's not really barely visible, I guess. Invisible to most people due to their indoctrination by a society that doesn't want them to experience their natural empathy for animals because it takes money out of the pockets of corporations, yes, but veganism is very old - lots of people are aware of it. In the same direction and less visibly (but still, I'm not the first one to notice this) is the even more horrendous suffering intrinsic in nature - a tragedy of cosmic proportions which only humans can solve, through paradise engineering. I can't seem to think of something not previously noticed, though...
As for type two, I think that artworks rendered in the sense of proprioception - choreographed transformations of one's sense of body shape and location - are quite imaginable and could be very beautiful, something like an exponentiation of dance - but with current tech basically impossible to create. We would need brain implants for that. Another obvious example is the direct experience of higher-dimensional spaces, which are capable of symmetries (and thus, if the symmetry theory of valence is correct, degrees of beauty) which cannot even be imagined with our 3D bodies and 3D-adapted brains.
EA Forum cross-post
Disclaimer: I don't know if this idea is an original way of thinking about Cause X. If it is not, I haven't seen it discussed much. In any case, it is not original outside of the Cause X discussion. Everything here is tentative, and the thing I'm pointing at might even be non-existent, but this line of thought might be promising.
Two concise and complementary ways to describe the search of Cause X might be:
1. Find X, where X is a barely visible but vast tragedy.
2. Find X, where X is a barely visible way to create a vast amount of value.
These are the main ideas relating to Cause X discussed in the introductory articles on effectivealtruism.org. The first idea relates to moral progress and asks if today there are tragedies that, by enlarge, current humans still don't recognize as such. One such past example is slavery. The second idea also considers the upside: There have been ways of creating huge amounts of value in the past, mainly thanks to scientific progress. What other ways to create huge value do we have today that we are not seeing?
Here, I want to introduce a third way to approach the question of Cause X:
3. Find X, where X is a barely visible but potentially vast new category of value.
Discovering a new vast category of value might be important in itself, but it's also important in relation to the two other questions: an answer might enable ways to prevent tragedies happening on the new axis of value discovered, or ways to create huge amounts of value on that axis.
This thought has occurred to me while reading the first chapter of The Precipice, by Toby Ord. He writes:
The obvious next question occurred to me: "what is this music that we lack the ears to hear?" and then the obvious next-next question occurred to me: "what are examples of new categories of value that arose in the past but weren't always there?" Much in the same way that now we see tragedies that weren't considered as such before, we now see value where perhaps we didn't see it before.
I want to try to answer the second question first. Is there a category of value that we didn't see before and that we now do? I have one tentative answer that appeals to the music metaphor, not very important or large in scale though (so maybe there are better examples I haven't thought about): the "music" of mathematics.
In a sense, mathematics is a kind of music that we listen to with other kinds of ears. Modern mathematics is a large corpus of ideas that beautifully relate to each other and the physical world in a way that is valuable to witness in itself. Before the invention of writing, I imagine that mathematics wasn't very advanced, and if someone glimpsed the intrinsic value in it that we see today, that must have been only a faint glimpse. Perhaps something related to counting and comparing quantities. I suspect that because writing enabled a much better way to pass knowledge, in turn, it enabled more advanced mathematics, and thus a new form of value arose. I think there might be a lesson here: new categories of values might be enabled by new technology.
But you might say: "this is not another value entirely; this is just beauty". I think this is probably true. I guess this kind of value in mathematics might be considered a subcategory of beauty that wasn't that prominently considered in pre-historic times.
Another observation is "well, this is not very important, is it?" That's right. Not at the same level of slavery. Consider this example as just me trying to grasp at something concrete, not necessarily a good example.
One other thing that we might extract from this example though, is that this kind of value is ultimately arising from new patterns of thinking: mathematics enabled new thinking patterns and a new form of beauty within them. And in fact, you might say that many things we value are just neurons firing in particular ways.
So, two main takeaways from the mathematics example:
1. Technology might enable new categories of value, just like writing did for maths.
2. New categories of value might reside in new thinking patterns.
Takeaway number 1. is a potential avenue for researching this question but it is also sort of sobering: if new tech will enable new forms of value anyway, we might not have many new opportunities to do good: we already know that advancing tech is good. Perhaps we might find new technologies that are worth advancing that we didn't consider worthy of advancing before. But still, this takeaway might mean that this line of thinking about Cause X might be less actionable than we would like.
Takeaway number 2. might be more interesting because it begs interesting questions: "What creates new valuable patterns in our brains? What are brain patterns that very few humans have but that those humans consider very valuable?" I'm sure these questions aren't being asked for the first time, but perhaps I'm arriving at them from a new road.
Now back to the first obvious next question I asked myself while reading Toby Ord's paragraph: "what is this music that we lack the ears to hear now?"
I don't know, and I have just sparse considerations.
Something unique to this kind of approach to Cause X is that new categories of value could be barely visible because they are currently very tiny, but they will be very large in the future. Instead, the tragedies we don't see yet are large but transparent to us. We may sort of see that there is an enormous monster in the world, but light goes through it, and it escapes sight if you aren't observant enough.
But there might be brain patterns that are already pervasive in humans, but that are not yet considered values. Transparent in the same way that some tragedies were transparent to our sight. Perhaps because too common? I don't exclude this option, and it probably deserves some attention.
To conclude: In the same way that beauty in maths was barely visible in pre-historic times, there might be barely visible values today, which will be obvious in the future. The fact that they might still be visible, although barely, makes me optimistic. If we squint hard enough, we might find something.