I think if we are just jumping into the same highly-salient crises as everybody else (Ukraine today, Afghanistan yesterday, Black Lives Matter, Covid, etc), we burn a lot of money quickly at only middling effectiveness (even if we try to identify specific “most effective” interventions in each crisis, like providing oxygen tanks to Indian hospitals during their covid surge) and don’t even get a huge amount of publicity because everybody else is also playing that same game (see: Elon Musk giving starlinks to Ukraine, etc).
This idea maybe works better if we are trying to respond to other crises elsewhere in the world that everyone else isn’t already going bananas over—like doing famine/disaster relief in countries that aren’t getting headlines, or doing pandemic early-response stuff before the world realizes it’s a problem, or having some kind of “Pivotal Action Fund” on hair-trigger alert to attempt a response to the potential emergence of transformative AGI capabilities. I’m not sure what specific approaches such a fund would use to reliably improve response times above the current situation (which is presumably “OpenPhil has the ability to spend a lot of money fast if they all start really freaking out about an emerging crisis”), but I’d certainly be interested to hear someone explore this idea.
I think if we are just jumping into the same highly-salient crises as everybody else (Ukraine today, Afghanistan yesterday, Black Lives Matter, Covid, etc), we burn a lot of money quickly at only middling effectiveness (even if we try to identify specific “most effective” interventions in each crisis, like providing oxygen tanks to Indian hospitals during their covid surge) and don’t even get a huge amount of publicity because everybody else is also playing that same game (see: Elon Musk giving starlinks to Ukraine, etc).
This idea maybe works better if we are trying to respond to other crises elsewhere in the world that everyone else isn’t already going bananas over—like doing famine/disaster relief in countries that aren’t getting headlines, or doing pandemic early-response stuff before the world realizes it’s a problem, or having some kind of “Pivotal Action Fund” on hair-trigger alert to attempt a response to the potential emergence of transformative AGI capabilities. I’m not sure what specific approaches such a fund would use to reliably improve response times above the current situation (which is presumably “OpenPhil has the ability to spend a lot of money fast if they all start really freaking out about an emerging crisis”), but I’d certainly be interested to hear someone explore this idea.