I think a better source for what I mean are my talk at SERI or the Changing Landscape report (on mobile, can’t easily link, but they’re both linked on the Fund page you reference).
I do think we mean the same thing, I mean that EA grantmakers do, in fact, seek to avoid these correlations by making uncorrelated or negatively correlated bets (bets where the underlying uncertainties are not correlated or negatively correlated), e.g. in our case on different ways to tackle climate that will be relatively more important when the other way fails (within innovation, diversifying between accelerating decarbonization and accelerating carbon removal, within broader theories of change such as innovation and avoiding carbon lock in, adaptation could be another one if there were promising options there (resistant grains you mention are an obvious candidate, though there are reasons to think it’s not particularly neglected).
Beyond this narrow niche, if you listen to Sam Bankman Fried and why he did the Future Fund and not just enlarging the pot of Open Philanthropy and why they heavily work with regrantors, complementarity and avoiding too heavily correlated bets was also an important motivation.
Thanks for the edit!
I think a better source for what I mean are my talk at SERI or the Changing Landscape report (on mobile, can’t easily link, but they’re both linked on the Fund page you reference).
I do think we mean the same thing, I mean that EA grantmakers do, in fact, seek to avoid these correlations by making uncorrelated or negatively correlated bets (bets where the underlying uncertainties are not correlated or negatively correlated), e.g. in our case on different ways to tackle climate that will be relatively more important when the other way fails (within innovation, diversifying between accelerating decarbonization and accelerating carbon removal, within broader theories of change such as innovation and avoiding carbon lock in, adaptation could be another one if there were promising options there (resistant grains you mention are an obvious candidate, though there are reasons to think it’s not particularly neglected).
Beyond this narrow niche, if you listen to Sam Bankman Fried and why he did the Future Fund and not just enlarging the pot of Open Philanthropy and why they heavily work with regrantors, complementarity and avoiding too heavily correlated bets was also an important motivation.