My intuition is that you might be overestimating how much information is available to donors? There is also uncertainty over the value of purchasing additional information. It seems you need to buy at least a little bit of information in the best way you know how in order to start to calibrate how valuable that info is and thus your future information purchases will be.
Getting information is definitely important in a lot of cases. I believe it’s more important for narrow decisions (e.g. which interventions to support within a cause) than broad decisions (such as whether to prioritize short-term or far-future interventions). I don’t believe there’s much you could learn from making grants about how to prioritize short-term versus far-future interventions, since this depends mostly on theoretical questions and extremely long-term effects that you can’t really measure.
since this depends mostly on theoretical questions and extremely long-term effects that you can’t really measure.
This itself is the sort of hypothesis that we wish to test by doing additional research. What sort of actions, if any, have ever had predictable long term consequences? What is the actual time horizon of e.g. qualitative predictions (unknown) vs quantitative predictions (around 400 days according to superforecasting work so far).
My intuition is that you might be overestimating how much information is available to donors? There is also uncertainty over the value of purchasing additional information. It seems you need to buy at least a little bit of information in the best way you know how in order to start to calibrate how valuable that info is and thus your future information purchases will be.
Getting information is definitely important in a lot of cases. I believe it’s more important for narrow decisions (e.g. which interventions to support within a cause) than broad decisions (such as whether to prioritize short-term or far-future interventions). I don’t believe there’s much you could learn from making grants about how to prioritize short-term versus far-future interventions, since this depends mostly on theoretical questions and extremely long-term effects that you can’t really measure.
This itself is the sort of hypothesis that we wish to test by doing additional research. What sort of actions, if any, have ever had predictable long term consequences? What is the actual time horizon of e.g. qualitative predictions (unknown) vs quantitative predictions (around 400 days according to superforecasting work so far).