The reason explicit cost-effectiveness framings should be deemphasized is that money is not the primary bottleneck—except in global health, there is enough money that it’s difficult to determine the cost-effectiveness bar because we don’t have all the ideas or megaproject infrastructure required to spend cost-effectively. Naturally, the critical path question emphasizes two of the current bottlenecks: time and project management. Time until AGI is now a critical resource, as is time until biotech capabilities, until we cure malaria anyway, and so on. Coordination is the other scarce resource, and project management is the correct framing for solving coordination issues in many (but not all) cases.
If your primary goal is reducing x-risk, you could ask “what’s on the critical path to saving the world?” which I think is slightly better.
Isn’t this saying that existing interventions have low cost-effectiveness, and hence we should invest in creating new projects that could outperform them?
I think that’s missing the point. If we increase cost-effectiveness of all projects by 20%, we’ll be doing much less good than if we increase time-effectiveness (speed up all projects) by 20%. While there is a limited amount of it, money is no longer the most important constraint, so it shouldn’t hold a special place as the resource we’re trying to maximize use of.
What’s on the critical path to doing good?
The reason explicit cost-effectiveness framings should be deemphasized is that money is not the primary bottleneck—except in global health, there is enough money that it’s difficult to determine the cost-effectiveness bar because we don’t have all the ideas or megaproject infrastructure required to spend cost-effectively. Naturally, the critical path question emphasizes two of the current bottlenecks: time and project management. Time until AGI is now a critical resource, as is time until biotech capabilities, until we cure malaria anyway, and so on. Coordination is the other scarce resource, and project management is the correct framing for solving coordination issues in many (but not all) cases.
If your primary goal is reducing x-risk, you could ask “what’s on the critical path to saving the world?” which I think is slightly better.
Isn’t this saying that existing interventions have low cost-effectiveness, and hence we should invest in creating new projects that could outperform them?
I think that’s missing the point. If we increase cost-effectiveness of all projects by 20%, we’ll be doing much less good than if we increase time-effectiveness (speed up all projects) by 20%. While there is a limited amount of it, money is no longer the most important constraint, so it shouldn’t hold a special place as the resource we’re trying to maximize use of.
Right, we should reframe the optimization problem to include both a budget constraint and a time constraint.