We’ve been doing a fair amount of work in this direction at Founders Pledge in “epistemicallymildly” longtermist areas, such as climate or nuclear risk—areas that are clearly much more uncertain than RCT-global-health but probably a fair amount less cluelessless-riddled than the most intractable longtermist interventions where there is little agreement on the sign of interventions.
We are describing some of the ideas here (and, initially, in our Changing Landscape report), my colleague Christian Ruhl has also just published a report using some of those ideas to allow evaluating nuclear risk interventions, and I expect we do a fair bunch more of this work.
It is my impression that there is a bunch of low-hanging fruit here, that methodology to prioritize in high-uncertainty contexts could be a lot more developed than it is.
A lot of this is early-stage and pre-quantification (and the quantified stuff is not ready for publication yet), but it is something we are thinking about a lot (though, as per Jeff, we are quite small and, as per Nuno, it might take seven years for something like this to become good!).
(Sorry for a post mostly containing links to FP work, but they seem relevant to the discussion here).
I’ll +1 everything Johannes has already said, and add that several people (including myself) have been chewing over the “how to rate longtermist projects” question for quite some time. I’m unsure when we will post something publicly, but I hope it won’t be too far in the future.
If anyone is curious for details feel free to reach out!
We’ve been doing a fair amount of work in this direction at Founders Pledge in “epistemically mildly” longtermist areas, such as climate or nuclear risk—areas that are clearly much more uncertain than RCT-global-health but probably a fair amount less cluelessless-riddled than the most intractable longtermist interventions where there is little agreement on the sign of interventions.
We are describing some of the ideas here (and, initially, in our Changing Landscape report), my colleague Christian Ruhl has also just published a report using some of those ideas to allow evaluating nuclear risk interventions, and I expect we do a fair bunch more of this work.
It is my impression that there is a bunch of low-hanging fruit here, that methodology to prioritize in high-uncertainty contexts could be a lot more developed than it is.
A lot of this is early-stage and pre-quantification (and the quantified stuff is not ready for publication yet), but it is something we are thinking about a lot (though, as per Jeff, we are quite small and, as per Nuno, it might take seven years for something like this to become good!).
(Sorry for a post mostly containing links to FP work, but they seem relevant to the discussion here).
I’ll +1 everything Johannes has already said, and add that several people (including myself) have been chewing over the “how to rate longtermist projects” question for quite some time. I’m unsure when we will post something publicly, but I hope it won’t be too far in the future.
If anyone is curious for details feel free to reach out!