I think the expected value of the IIDM group’s future activities, and thus the expected impact of a grant to them, is sensitive to how much relevant fundamental, macrostrategic, etc., kind of work they will have access to in the future.
Given the nature of the activities proposed by the IIDM group, I don’t think it would have helped me for the grant decision if I had known more about macrostrategy. It would have been different if they had proposed a more specific or “object-level” strategy, e.g., lobbying for a certain policy.
I mean it would have helped me somewhat, but I think it pales in importance compared to things like “having more first-hand experience in/with the kind of institutions the group hopes to improve”, “more relevant knowledge about institutions, including theoretical frameworks for how to think about them”, and “having seen more work by the group’s leaders, or otherwise being better able to assess their abilities and potential”.
[ETA: Maybe it’s also useful to add that, on my inside view, free-floating macrostrategy research isn’t that useful, certainly not for concrete decisions the IIDM group might face. This also applies to most of the things you suggest, which strike me as ‘too high-level’ and ‘too shallow’ to be that helpful, though I think some ‘grunt work’ like ‘mapping out actors’ would help a bit, albeit it’s not what I typically think of when saying macrostrategy.
Neither is ‘object-level’ work that ignores macrostrategic uncertainty useful.
I think often the only thing that helps is to have people to the object-level work who are both excellent at doing the object-level work and have the kind of opaque “good judgment” that allows them to be appropriately responsive to macrostrategic considerations and reach reflective equilibrium between incentives suggested by proxies and high-level considerations around “how valuable is that proxy anyway?”. Unfortunately, such people seem extremely rare. I also think (and here my view probably differs from that of others who would endorse most of the other things I’m saying here) that we’re not nearly as good as we could be at identifying people who may already be in the EA community and have the potential to become great at this, and at identifying and ‘teaching’ some of the practice-able skills relevant for this. (I think there are also some more ‘innate’ components.)
This is all slightly exaggerated to gesture at the view I have, and I’m not sure how much weight I’d want to give that inside view when making, e.g., funding decisions.]
I think to some extent there’s just a miscommunication here, rather than a difference in views. I intended to put a lot of things in the “Fundamental, macrostrategic, basic, or crucial-considerations-like work”—I mainly wanted to draw a distinction between (a) all research “upstream” of grantmaking, and (b) things like Available funding, Good applicants with good proposals for implementing good project ideas, Grantmaker capacity to evaluate applications, and Grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas.
E.g., I’d include “more relevant knowledge about institutions, including theoretical frameworks for how to think about them” in the bucket I was trying to gesture to.
So not just e.g. Bostrom-style macrostrategy work.
On reflection, I probably should’ve also put “intervention research” in there, and added as a sub-question “And do you think one of these types of research would be more useful for your grantmaking than the others?”
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But then your “ETA” part is less focused on macrostrategy specifically, and there I think my current view does differ from yours (making yours interesting + thought-provoking).
I think the expected value of the IIDM group’s future activities, and thus the expected impact of a grant to them, is sensitive to how much relevant fundamental, macrostrategic, etc., kind of work they will have access to in the future.
Given the nature of the activities proposed by the IIDM group, I don’t think it would have helped me for the grant decision if I had known more about macrostrategy. It would have been different if they had proposed a more specific or “object-level” strategy, e.g., lobbying for a certain policy.
I mean it would have helped me somewhat, but I think it pales in importance compared to things like “having more first-hand experience in/with the kind of institutions the group hopes to improve”, “more relevant knowledge about institutions, including theoretical frameworks for how to think about them”, and “having seen more work by the group’s leaders, or otherwise being better able to assess their abilities and potential”.
[ETA: Maybe it’s also useful to add that, on my inside view, free-floating macrostrategy research isn’t that useful, certainly not for concrete decisions the IIDM group might face. This also applies to most of the things you suggest, which strike me as ‘too high-level’ and ‘too shallow’ to be that helpful, though I think some ‘grunt work’ like ‘mapping out actors’ would help a bit, albeit it’s not what I typically think of when saying macrostrategy.
Neither is ‘object-level’ work that ignores macrostrategic uncertainty useful.
I think often the only thing that helps is to have people to the object-level work who are both excellent at doing the object-level work and have the kind of opaque “good judgment” that allows them to be appropriately responsive to macrostrategic considerations and reach reflective equilibrium between incentives suggested by proxies and high-level considerations around “how valuable is that proxy anyway?”. Unfortunately, such people seem extremely rare. I also think (and here my view probably differs from that of others who would endorse most of the other things I’m saying here) that we’re not nearly as good as we could be at identifying people who may already be in the EA community and have the potential to become great at this, and at identifying and ‘teaching’ some of the practice-able skills relevant for this. (I think there are also some more ‘innate’ components.)
This is all slightly exaggerated to gesture at the view I have, and I’m not sure how much weight I’d want to give that inside view when making, e.g., funding decisions.]
Thanks, these are interesting perspectives.
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I think to some extent there’s just a miscommunication here, rather than a difference in views. I intended to put a lot of things in the “Fundamental, macrostrategic, basic, or crucial-considerations-like work”—I mainly wanted to draw a distinction between (a) all research “upstream” of grantmaking, and (b) things like Available funding, Good applicants with good proposals for implementing good project ideas, Grantmaker capacity to evaluate applications, and Grantmaker capacity to solicit or generate new project ideas.
E.g., I’d include “more relevant knowledge about institutions, including theoretical frameworks for how to think about them” in the bucket I was trying to gesture to.
So not just e.g. Bostrom-style macrostrategy work.
On reflection, I probably should’ve also put “intervention research” in there, and added as a sub-question “And do you think one of these types of research would be more useful for your grantmaking than the others?”
---
But then your “ETA” part is less focused on macrostrategy specifically, and there I think my current view does differ from yours (making yours interesting + thought-provoking).