Something that might be worth considering as part of the next steps is attempting to evaluate the impact of any educational materials or efforts that are produced
In terms of metrics like whether people form accurate understandings, whether they retain them later, whether they report applying them in actual decisions, and perhaps how this tends to affect people’s later cause priorities, careers, donations, etc.
On “Objection #4: Some people need to know all this, but not everyone”, readers may find posts tagged Epistemic humility interesting.
This post seems to dovetail somewhat with Michelle Hutchinson’s recent suggestion that “Supporting teaching of effective altruism at universities” might be an important gap in the EA community.
My post (for Convergence Analysis) on Crucial questions for longtermists could be seen as doing something like the equivalent of collecting IBCs, organising them into categories and hierarchies, and collecting existing resources for each of them—but in that case, for prioritising within longtermism, rather than between causes. It could be interesting to consider how similar a similar methodology and output type to the one used for that post might (or might not) be useful for potential further work to identify and improve understanding of IBCs.
Incidentally, in that post, I wrote “One could imagine a version of this post that “zooms out” to discuss crucial questions on the “values” level, or questions about cause prioritisation as a whole. This might involve more emphasis on questions about, for example, population ethics, the moral status of nonhuman animals, and the effectiveness of currently available global health interventions. But here we instead (a) mostly set questions about morality aside, and (b) take longtermism as a starting assumption.” It’s cool to see that your post proposes something sort-of similar!
The post Clarifying some key hypotheses in AI alignment also does something sort-of similar, and I really like the approach that was taken there. So it could also be interesting to consider how that approach might be used for an IBC-related project.
A few random thoughts and links
Something that might be worth considering as part of the next steps is attempting to evaluate the impact of any educational materials or efforts that are produced
In terms of metrics like whether people form accurate understandings, whether they retain them later, whether they report applying them in actual decisions, and perhaps how this tends to affect people’s later cause priorities, careers, donations, etc.
On “Objection #4: Some people need to know all this, but not everyone”, readers may find posts tagged Epistemic humility interesting.
This post seems to dovetail somewhat with Michelle Hutchinson’s recent suggestion that “Supporting teaching of effective altruism at universities” might be an important gap in the EA community.
My post (for Convergence Analysis) on Crucial questions for longtermists could be seen as doing something like the equivalent of collecting IBCs, organising them into categories and hierarchies, and collecting existing resources for each of them—but in that case, for prioritising within longtermism, rather than between causes. It could be interesting to consider how similar a similar methodology and output type to the one used for that post might (or might not) be useful for potential further work to identify and improve understanding of IBCs.
Incidentally, in that post, I wrote “One could imagine a version of this post that “zooms out” to discuss crucial questions on the “values” level, or questions about cause prioritisation as a whole. This might involve more emphasis on questions about, for example, population ethics, the moral status of nonhuman animals, and the effectiveness of currently available global health interventions. But here we instead (a) mostly set questions about morality aside, and (b) take longtermism as a starting assumption.” It’s cool to see that your post proposes something sort-of similar!
The post Clarifying some key hypotheses in AI alignment also does something sort-of similar, and I really like the approach that was taken there. So it could also be interesting to consider how that approach might be used for an IBC-related project.