I. I did spent a considerable amount of time thinking about prioritisation (broadly understood)
My experience so far is
some of the foundations / low hanging sensible fruits were discovered
when moving beyond that, I often run into questions which are some sort of “crucial consideration” for prioritisation research, but the research/understanding is often just not there.
often work on these “gaps” seems more interesting and tractable than trying to do some sort of “lets try to ignore this gap and move on” move
few examples, where in some cases I got to writing something
Nonlinear perception of happiness—if you try to add utility across time-person-moments, it’s plausible you should log-transform it (or non-linearly transform it) . sums and exponentiation do not commute, so this is plausibly a crucial consideration for part of utilitarian calculations trying to be based on some sort of empirical observation like “pain in bad”
Multi-agent minds and predictive processing—while this is framed as about AI alignment, super-short version of why this is relevant for prioritisation is: theories of human values depend on what mathematical structures you use to represent these values. if your prioritization depnds on your values, this is possible important
Another example could be the style of thought explained in Eliezer’s “Inadequate Equillibria”. While you may not count it as “prioritisation research”, I’m happy to argue the content is crucially important for prioritisation work on institutional change or policy work. I spent some time thinking about “how to overcome inadequate equillibria”, which leads to topics from game theory, complex systems, etc.
II. My guess is there are more people who work in a similar mode, trying to basically ‘build as good world model as you can’, dive into problems you run into, and at the end prioritise informally based on such a model. Typically I would expect such model to be in parts implicit / be some sort of multi-model ensemble / …
While this may not create visible outcomes labeled as prioritisation, I think it’s important part of what’s happening now
Quick reaction:
I. I did spent a considerable amount of time thinking about prioritisation (broadly understood)
My experience so far is
some of the foundations / low hanging sensible fruits were discovered
when moving beyond that, I often run into questions which are some sort of “crucial consideration” for prioritisation research, but the research/understanding is often just not there.
often work on these “gaps” seems more interesting and tractable than trying to do some sort of “lets try to ignore this gap and move on” move
few examples, where in some cases I got to writing something
Nonlinear perception of happiness—if you try to add utility across time-person-moments, it’s plausible you should log-transform it (or non-linearly transform it) . sums and exponentiation do not commute, so this is plausibly a crucial consideration for part of utilitarian calculations trying to be based on some sort of empirical observation like “pain in bad”
Multi-agent minds and predictive processing—while this is framed as about AI alignment, super-short version of why this is relevant for prioritisation is: theories of human values depend on what mathematical structures you use to represent these values. if your prioritization depnds on your values, this is possible important
Another example could be the style of thought explained in Eliezer’s “Inadequate Equillibria”. While you may not count it as “prioritisation research”, I’m happy to argue the content is crucially important for prioritisation work on institutional change or policy work. I spent some time thinking about “how to overcome inadequate equillibria”, which leads to topics from game theory, complex systems, etc.
II. My guess is there are more people who work in a similar mode, trying to basically ‘build as good world model as you can’, dive into problems you run into, and at the end prioritise informally based on such a model. Typically I would expect such model to be in parts implicit / be some sort of multi-model ensemble / …
While this may not create visible outcomes labeled as prioritisation, I think it’s important part of what’s happening now