I don’t know if there’s a high-leverage point where a few EAs or even the entire EA community can come in and bring a lot of change.
From my perspective, most decision automation is highly neglected for some reason. I don’t know why, but things seem to be moving really slowly right now, especially for the big picture sorts of decisions effective altruists care about. I don’t know of any startups trying to help people make career decisions using probability distributions / expected values, for example. (Or most of the other questions I listed in this document).
but these are also the kinds of decisions that don’t directly involve so called “astronomical stakes”
To me, the distinction isn’t so black and white. If people decided on better politicians, and those politicians decided on better policies, we’d probably have better risk mitigation procedures.
A whole lot of “effective altruist research” is made up of tiny, seemingly trivial decisions (“What should the title of this post be? What edits should I make to this piece?”). If we could get these out of the way, they could focus more on the bigger questions.
A lot of the “big picture” questions can be decomposed into smaller questions. Like, we use forecasting infrastructure to answer them, but them have lots of optimization to do on this forecasting infrastructure.
From my perspective, most decision automation is highly neglected for some reason. I don’t know why, but things seem to be moving really slowly right now, especially for the big picture sorts of decisions effective altruists care about. I don’t know of any startups trying to help people make career decisions using probability distributions / expected values, for example. (Or most of the other questions I listed in this document).
To me, the distinction isn’t so black and white. If people decided on better politicians, and those politicians decided on better policies, we’d probably have better risk mitigation procedures.
A whole lot of “effective altruist research” is made up of tiny, seemingly trivial decisions (“What should the title of this post be? What edits should I make to this piece?”). If we could get these out of the way, they could focus more on the bigger questions.
A lot of the “big picture” questions can be decomposed into smaller questions. Like, we use forecasting infrastructure to answer them, but them have lots of optimization to do on this forecasting infrastructure.