Thank you for the article! One thought that came to mind: If the current view of the researchers is that “the world is improving,” then I would count that as a strong indicator for investing much more time into research first. It indicates that the causes discovered so far are of a kind where all the likely scenarios see the cause decreasing in scale and getting solved at some point. Assuming that the future is very long, the logarithm of that trajectory, the suffering over time, is very limited compared to hypothetical causes where the trajectory is uncertain or even such that are unlikely to decrease in scale.
So if the current view of researchers is that the causes they know of are in the process of getting solved (are decreasing in scale) then the search for Cause X should have priority over investing early. But I think the recent post on Cause X already contained many candidates of causes whose trajectories are highly uncertain or who are on an upward trajectory, so investing later is called for to give the researchers time to become convinced of the importance of these causes and to find or create giving opportunities to address them.
Thank you for the article! One thought that came to mind: If the current view of the researchers is that “the world is improving,” then I would count that as a strong indicator for investing much more time into research first. It indicates that the causes discovered so far are of a kind where all the likely scenarios see the cause decreasing in scale and getting solved at some point. Assuming that the future is very long, the logarithm of that trajectory, the suffering over time, is very limited compared to hypothetical causes where the trajectory is uncertain or even such that are unlikely to decrease in scale.
So if the current view of researchers is that the causes they know of are in the process of getting solved (are decreasing in scale) then the search for Cause X should have priority over investing early. But I think the recent post on Cause X already contained many candidates of causes whose trajectories are highly uncertain or who are on an upward trajectory, so investing later is called for to give the researchers time to become convinced of the importance of these causes and to find or create giving opportunities to address them.