Thanks for the question! I think describing the current state will hint at a lot on what might make us change the distribution, so I’m primarily going to focus on that.
I think the current distribution of what we work on is dependent on a number of factors, including but not limited to:
What we think about research opportunities in each space
What we think about the opportunity to exert meaningful influence in the space
Funding opportunities
Our ability to hire people
In a sense, I think we’re cause neutral in that we’d be happy to work on any cause provided the good opportunities arise to do so. We do have opinions on high level cause prioritization (though I know there’s some disagreement inside RP about this topic) but I think given the changing nature of marginal value of additional work in any given the above considerations, and others, we meld our work (and staff) to where we think we can have the highest impact.
In general, though this is fairly generic and high level, were we to come to think our in a given area wasn’t useful or the opportunity cost were too high to continue to work on it, we would decide to pursue other things. Similarly, if the reverse was true for some particular possible projects we weren’t working on, we would take them on
Thanks for your reply. I think (1) and (2) are doing a ton of work — they largely determine whether expected marginal research is astronomically important or not. So I’ll ask a more pointed follow-up:
Why does RP think it has reason to spend significant resources on both shorttermist and longtermist issues (or is this misleading; e.g., do all of your unrestricted funds go to just one)? What are your “opinions on high level cause prioritization” and the “disagreement inside RP about this topic”? What would make RP focus more exclusively on either short-term or long-term issues?
[This is not at all an organizational view; just some thoughts from me]
tl;dr: I think mostly RP is able to grow in multiple areas at once without there being strong tradeoffs between them (for reasons including that RP is good at scaling & that the pools of funding and talent for each cause area are somewhat different). And I’m glad it’s done so, since I’d guess that may have contributed to RP starting and scaling up the longtermism department (even though naively I’d now prefer RP be more longtermist).
I think RP is unusually good at scaling, at being a modular collection of somewhat disconnected departments focusing on quite different things and each growing and doing great stuff, and at meeting the specific needs of actors making big decisions (especially EA funders; note that RP also does well at other kinds of work, but this type of work is where RP seems most unusual in EA).
Given that, it could well make sense for RP to be somewhat agnostic between the major EA causes, since it can meet major needs in each, and adding each department doesn’t very strongly trade off against expanding other departments.
(I’d guess there’s at least some tradeoff, but it’s possible there’s none or that it’s on-net complementary; e.g. there are some cases where people liking our work in one area helped us get funding or hires for another area, and having lots of staff with many areas of expertise in the same org can be useful for getting feedback etc. One thing to bear in mind here is that, as noted elsewhere in this AMA, there’s a lot of funding and “junior talent” theoretically available in EA and RP seems unusually good at combining these things to produce solid outputs.)
I would personally like RP to focus much more exclusively on longtermism. And sometimes I feel a vague pull to advocate for that. But RP’s more cause-neutral, partly demand-driven approach has worked out very well from my perspective so far, in that it may have contributed to RP moving into longtermism and then scaling up that team substantially.[1] (I mean that from my perspective this is very good for the world, not just that it let me get a cool job.) So I think I should endorse that overall decision procedure.
That’s not to say that I think we shouldn’t think at all about what areas are really most important in general, what’s most important on the current margin within EA, where our comparative advantage is, etc. I know we think at least somewhat about those things (though I’m mostly involved in decisions about the longtermism department rather than broader org strategy so I don’t bother trying to learn the details). But I think maybe the tradeoffs between growing each area are smaller than one might guess from the outside, such that that sort of high-level internal cause area priority-setting is somewhat less important than one might’ve guessed.
This doesn’t really directly answer your question, since I think Peter and Marcus are better placed to do so and since I’ve already written a lot on this semi-tangent...
[1] My understanding (I only joined in late 2020) is that for a brief period at its very beginning, RP had no longtermist work (I think it was just global health & dev and animals?). Later, it had longtermism as just a small fraction of its work (1 researcher). RP only made multiple hires in this area in late 2020, after already having had substantial successes in other areas. At that point, it would’ve been unsurprising if people at the org thought they should just go all-in on their existing areas rather than branching out into longtermism. But they instead kept adding additional areas, including longtermism. And now the longtermism team is likely to expand quite substantially, which again could’ve been not done if the org was focusing more exclusively on its initial main focus areas.
Thanks for the question! I think describing the current state will hint at a lot on what might make us change the distribution, so I’m primarily going to focus on that.
I think the current distribution of what we work on is dependent on a number of factors, including but not limited to:
What we think about research opportunities in each space
What we think about the opportunity to exert meaningful influence in the space
Funding opportunities
Our ability to hire people
In a sense, I think we’re cause neutral in that we’d be happy to work on any cause provided the good opportunities arise to do so. We do have opinions on high level cause prioritization (though I know there’s some disagreement inside RP about this topic) but I think given the changing nature of marginal value of additional work in any given the above considerations, and others, we meld our work (and staff) to where we think we can have the highest impact.
In general, though this is fairly generic and high level, were we to come to think our in a given area wasn’t useful or the opportunity cost were too high to continue to work on it, we would decide to pursue other things. Similarly, if the reverse was true for some particular possible projects we weren’t working on, we would take them on
Thanks for your reply. I think (1) and (2) are doing a ton of work — they largely determine whether expected marginal research is astronomically important or not. So I’ll ask a more pointed follow-up:
Why does RP think it has reason to spend significant resources on both shorttermist and longtermist issues (or is this misleading; e.g., do all of your unrestricted funds go to just one)? What are your “opinions on high level cause prioritization” and the “disagreement inside RP about this topic”? What would make RP focus more exclusively on either short-term or long-term issues?
[This is not at all an organizational view; just some thoughts from me]
tl;dr: I think mostly RP is able to grow in multiple areas at once without there being strong tradeoffs between them (for reasons including that RP is good at scaling & that the pools of funding and talent for each cause area are somewhat different). And I’m glad it’s done so, since I’d guess that may have contributed to RP starting and scaling up the longtermism department (even though naively I’d now prefer RP be more longtermist).
I think RP is unusually good at scaling, at being a modular collection of somewhat disconnected departments focusing on quite different things and each growing and doing great stuff, and at meeting the specific needs of actors making big decisions (especially EA funders; note that RP also does well at other kinds of work, but this type of work is where RP seems most unusual in EA).
Given that, it could well make sense for RP to be somewhat agnostic between the major EA causes, since it can meet major needs in each, and adding each department doesn’t very strongly trade off against expanding other departments.
(I’d guess there’s at least some tradeoff, but it’s possible there’s none or that it’s on-net complementary; e.g. there are some cases where people liking our work in one area helped us get funding or hires for another area, and having lots of staff with many areas of expertise in the same org can be useful for getting feedback etc. One thing to bear in mind here is that, as noted elsewhere in this AMA, there’s a lot of funding and “junior talent” theoretically available in EA and RP seems unusually good at combining these things to produce solid outputs.)
I would personally like RP to focus much more exclusively on longtermism. And sometimes I feel a vague pull to advocate for that. But RP’s more cause-neutral, partly demand-driven approach has worked out very well from my perspective so far, in that it may have contributed to RP moving into longtermism and then scaling up that team substantially.[1] (I mean that from my perspective this is very good for the world, not just that it let me get a cool job.) So I think I should endorse that overall decision procedure.
This feels kind-of related to moral trade and maybe kind-of to the veil of ignorance.
That’s not to say that I think we shouldn’t think at all about what areas are really most important in general, what’s most important on the current margin within EA, where our comparative advantage is, etc. I know we think at least somewhat about those things (though I’m mostly involved in decisions about the longtermism department rather than broader org strategy so I don’t bother trying to learn the details). But I think maybe the tradeoffs between growing each area are smaller than one might guess from the outside, such that that sort of high-level internal cause area priority-setting is somewhat less important than one might’ve guessed.
This doesn’t really directly answer your question, since I think Peter and Marcus are better placed to do so and since I’ve already written a lot on this semi-tangent...
[1] My understanding (I only joined in late 2020) is that for a brief period at its very beginning, RP had no longtermist work (I think it was just global health & dev and animals?). Later, it had longtermism as just a small fraction of its work (1 researcher). RP only made multiple hires in this area in late 2020, after already having had substantial successes in other areas. At that point, it would’ve been unsurprising if people at the org thought they should just go all-in on their existing areas rather than branching out into longtermism. But they instead kept adding additional areas, including longtermism. And now the longtermism team is likely to expand quite substantially, which again could’ve been not done if the org was focusing more exclusively on its initial main focus areas.