One of the proposed projects on which I currently feel particularly unsure of the longtermist theory of change for is:
Building heating for losing electricity/industry — Because the loss of electricity/industry is likely to be sudden, keeping people warm is an urgent need. Options we want to investigate include retrofitting ovens to burn wood for heating.
At first glance, it’s hard for me to imagine why this would be a high-priority variable to influence if we’re adopting a longtermist perspective (though it’s more plausible to me that it could be a decently cost-effective way to—in expectation—save lives in the coming generations).
Thanks for the feedback. We do think there is a compelling case for saving expected lives in the present generation cost effectively. On the long-term future, we do not have a quantitative model for how important extinction versus unrecoverable collapse versus negative trajectory changes are in these scenarios (and in terms of mitigation from interventions). So I would say it is closest to:
reducing numbers of deaths and global instability is just a good proxy for reducing existential risk
In this way, our situation seems analogous to the situation of someone who is caring for a sapling, has very limited experience with saplings, has no mechanistic understanding of how saplings work, and wants to ensure that nothing stops the sapling from becoming a great redwood. It would be hard for them to be confident that the sapling’s eventual long-term growth would be unaffected by unprecedented shocks—such as cutting off 40% of its branches or letting it go without water for 20% longer than it ever had before—even taken as given that such shocks wouldn’t directly/immediately result in its death. For similar reasons, it seems hard to be confident that humanity’s eventual long-term progress would be unaffected by a catastrophe that resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths.
One of the proposed projects on which I currently feel particularly unsure of the longtermist theory of change for is:
At first glance, it’s hard for me to imagine why this would be a high-priority variable to influence if we’re adopting a longtermist perspective (though it’s more plausible to me that it could be a decently cost-effective way to—in expectation—save lives in the coming generations).
Thanks for the feedback. We do think there is a compelling case for saving expected lives in the present generation cost effectively. On the long-term future, we do not have a quantitative model for how important extinction versus unrecoverable collapse versus negative trajectory changes are in these scenarios (and in terms of mitigation from interventions). So I would say it is closest to:
As Nick Beckstead said: