This EA Forum sequence explains The Unjournal's Pivotal Questions Project, and tracks our progress. (Unjournal: in a nutshell.)   

The "Pivotal Questions" project process (piloting): 

1. Elicit ‘target questions’ from global-impact-focused organizations, aiming at high VOI for funding and policy choices
2. Select the most useful target questions, get feedback, and collaboratively refine them to make them more precise, tractable, and decision-relevant
3. Elicit stakeholder and expert beliefs over these questions, including through (Metaculus/Minitaculus) prediction markets
4. Source and prioritize research informing the target questions
5. Commission expert evaluations of this research, focused on how the research informs the target questions, and eliciting beliefs over these
6. Get feedback from research authors and the target organization(s), and updated beliefs about the target questions 
7. Prepare a ‘synthesis report’, quantifying our ~consensus updated beliefs about the questions, and resolving the Minitaculus markets
8. Complete and publish the ‘target question evaluation packages’
    

Based on conversations with a range of organizations (see list here), we sketched 19 potential pivotal questions (see here). We’ve prioritized four of these for our pilot, broadly labeled:

1. “How do plant-based products substitute for animal products (re their welfare footprint)?”; suggested by Animal Charity Evaluators (post coming soon)
2. DALY/WELLBY interconvertibility; suggested by Founders Pledge 
3. Measuring Well-being/WELLBY reliability; suggested by Founders Pledge
4. Cell-cultured meat cost and price; internally suggested (but linked to stated priorities of several organizations; see “Decision-Relevance” below)

I think LW-ers might be interested in this project, and I'd greatly value your feedback, because 

1. It connects to our systematic approach to evaluating research quality and impact, a project of building better epistemic institutions in EA, academia and beyond.
2. We're laying out a structured, Bayesian-style approach to identifying the most consequential unknowns, and eliciting, aggregating and measuring changes in beliefs (e.g., on Metaculus and using Metaculus tools), and connecting these to decisionmaking and value
3. We emphasize an open-science, scout-mindset approach, and commission and pay experts to provide reasoning-transparent critique, ratings, predictions, and calibrated judgements.