What’s the evidence that EA grantmakers are not thinking about this?
At Founders Pledge, we’re thinking about this issue a lot in our climate work (indeed, we try to make negatively correlated bets in light of nonlinear climate damage) and I’d be very surprised if we were the only ones as generally thinking about uncertainty and its implications is one of the strengths of the EA movement.
The Founders Pledge climate fund’s stated objective is to “sustainably reach net-zero emissions globally”.
A great example of an insidious correlation of this fund: what about funding work which helps people adapt to climate change, instead of mitigating it?
For example, can we invent cheap air conditioning units which anyone in the world can afford to buy, to keep humans and crops cool as they migrate away from current coastal areas?
EDIT: let me try to be more clear, since this answer was downvoted twice—upon seeing the fund, I asked myself, “what belief seems to be shared by all of these investments”? That then lead me to the above thought. This is a much better intuition pump than “what should this fund be uncertain about”? I think that’s the difference between uncertainty and insidious correlation, and I think you’re interpreting insidious correlation as another name for uncertainty.
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.
What’s the evidence that EA grantmakers are not thinking about this?
At Founders Pledge, we’re thinking about this issue a lot in our climate work (indeed, we try to make negatively correlated bets in light of nonlinear climate damage) and I’d be very surprised if we were the only ones as generally thinking about uncertainty and its implications is one of the strengths of the EA movement.
The Founders Pledge climate fund’s stated objective is to “sustainably reach net-zero emissions globally”.
A great example of an insidious correlation of this fund: what about funding work which helps people adapt to climate change, instead of mitigating it?
For example, can we invent cheap air conditioning units which anyone in the world can afford to buy, to keep humans and crops cool as they migrate away from current coastal areas?
EDIT: let me try to be more clear, since this answer was downvoted twice—upon seeing the fund, I asked myself, “what belief seems to be shared by all of these investments”? That then lead me to the above thought. This is a much better intuition pump than “what should this fund be uncertain about”? I think that’s the difference between uncertainty and insidious correlation, and I think you’re interpreting insidious correlation as another name for uncertainty.
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.