This comment matches my view (perhaps unsurprisingly!).
One thing Iād add: I think Peter is basically talking about our āLongtermism Departmentā. We also have a āSurveys and EA Movement Research Departmentā. And I feel confident they could do a bunch of additional high-value longtermist work if given more funding. And donors could provide funding restricted to just longtermist survey projects or even just specific longtermist survey projects (either commissioning a specific project or funding a specific idea we already have).
(I feel like I should add a conflict of interest statement that I work at RP, but I guess that should be obvious enough from context! And conversely I should mention that I donāt work in the survey department, havenāt met them in-person, and decided of my own volition to write this comment because I really do think this seems like probably a good donation target.)
Here are some claims that feed into my conclusion:
Funding constraints: My impression is that that department is more funding constrained than the longtermism department
(To be clear, Iām not saying the longtermism department isnāt at all funding constrained, nor that that single factor guarantees that itās better to fund RP;s survey and EA movement research department than RPās longtermism department.)
Skills and comparative advantage:
They seem very good at designing, running, and analysing surveys
And I think that that work gains more from specialisation/āexperience/ātraining than one might expect
And there arenāt many people specialising for being damn good at designing, running, and/āor analysing longtermism-relevant surveys
I think the only things Iām aware of are RP, GovAI, and maybe a few individuals (e.g., Lucius Caviola, Stefan Schubert, Vael Gates)
And Iād guess GovAI wouldnāt scale that line of work as rapidly as RP could with funding (though I havenāt asked them), and individual people are notably harder to scale...
Thereās good work to be done:
We have a bunch of ideas for longtermism-relevant surveys and I think some would be very valuable
(I say āsomeā because some are like rough ideas and I havenāt thought in depth about all of them yet)
I/āwe could probably expand on this for potential donors if they were interested
I think I could come up with a bunch more exciting longtermism-relevant surveys if I spent more time doing so
I expect a bunch of other orgs/āstakeholders could as well, at least if we gave them examples, ideas, helped them brainstorm, etc.
This comment matches my view (perhaps unsurprisingly!).
One thing Iād add: I think Peter is basically talking about our āLongtermism Departmentā. We also have a āSurveys and EA Movement Research Departmentā. And I feel confident they could do a bunch of additional high-value longtermist work if given more funding. And donors could provide funding restricted to just longtermist survey projects or even just specific longtermist survey projects (either commissioning a specific project or funding a specific idea we already have).
(I feel like I should add a conflict of interest statement that I work at RP, but I guess that should be obvious enough from context! And conversely I should mention that I donāt work in the survey department, havenāt met them in-person, and decided of my own volition to write this comment because I really do think this seems like probably a good donation target.)
Here are some claims that feed into my conclusion:
Funding constraints: My impression is that that department is more funding constrained than the longtermism department
(To be clear, Iām not saying the longtermism department isnāt at all funding constrained, nor that that single factor guarantees that itās better to fund RP;s survey and EA movement research department than RPās longtermism department.)
Skills and comparative advantage:
They seem very good at designing, running, and analysing surveys
And I think that that work gains more from specialisation/āexperience/ātraining than one might expect
And there arenāt many people specialising for being damn good at designing, running, and/āor analysing longtermism-relevant surveys
I think the only things Iām aware of are RP, GovAI, and maybe a few individuals (e.g., Lucius Caviola, Stefan Schubert, Vael Gates)
And Iād guess GovAI wouldnāt scale that line of work as rapidly as RP could with funding (though I havenāt asked them), and individual people are notably harder to scale...
Thereās good work to be done:
We have a bunch of ideas for longtermism-relevant surveys and I think some would be very valuable
(I say āsomeā because some are like rough ideas and I havenāt thought in depth about all of them yet)
I/āwe could probably expand on this for potential donors if they were interested
I think I could come up with a bunch more exciting longtermism-relevant surveys if I spent more time doing so
I expect a bunch of other orgs/āstakeholders could as well, at least if we gave them examples, ideas, helped them brainstorm, etc.