Iām asking to get a sense of what the current margin of funding looks like, as a way to help researchers and others prioritize our efforts.
So I donāt think they were answering for last dollar. I believe Open Phil said that it is willing to fund anything that meets its last dollar bar now, but their current bar could be higher now. I guess you could argue that there is uncertainty in what the last dollar bar will be, so we should stay at the current bar for the foreseeable future. However, if something is urgent, that is we could miss out on the X-risk reduction if we donāt do it in the next few years, I think that we should be using the last bar for current decisions. The case of climate change is complicated because the impacts are mostly a century or so in the future, but you could argue that there are opportunities to decarbonize now that will be gone in the future because that carbon will already be emitted. I think the case is clearer for resilience to catastrophes that could happen in the next few years, such as nuclear war, that they are urgent. Another way to think about it is if you would eventually fund these things because they are above the last dollar bar, you get a better benefit to cost ratio by doing it now because you have more overall X-risk reduction (assuming the interventions are long lived).
In that EA forum post in a comment, Linch says:
So I donāt think they were answering for last dollar. I believe Open Phil said that it is willing to fund anything that meets its last dollar bar now, but their current bar could be higher now. I guess you could argue that there is uncertainty in what the last dollar bar will be, so we should stay at the current bar for the foreseeable future. However, if something is urgent, that is we could miss out on the X-risk reduction if we donāt do it in the next few years, I think that we should be using the last bar for current decisions. The case of climate change is complicated because the impacts are mostly a century or so in the future, but you could argue that there are opportunities to decarbonize now that will be gone in the future because that carbon will already be emitted. I think the case is clearer for resilience to catastrophes that could happen in the next few years, such as nuclear war, that they are urgent. Another way to think about it is if you would eventually fund these things because they are above the last dollar bar, you get a better benefit to cost ratio by doing it now because you have more overall X-risk reduction (assuming the interventions are long lived).