Great to see more attention on this topic! I think there is an additional claim embedded in this proposal which you don’t call out:
6. Categories of intervention in the wisdom/intelligence space are sufficiently differentiated in long-term impact potential for a prioritization exercise to yield useful insights.
I notice that I’m intuitively skeptical about this point, even though I basically buy your other premises. It strikes me that there is likely to be much more variation in impact potential between specific projects or campaigns, e.g. at the level of a specific grant proposal, than there is between whole categories, which are hard to evaluate in part because they are quite complementary to each other and the success of one will be correlated with the success of others. You write, “We wouldn’t want to invest a lot of resources into one field, to realize 10 years later that we could have spent them better in another.” But what’s to say that this is the only choice we face? Why not invest across all of these areas and chase optimality by judging opportunities on a project-by-project basis rather than making big bets on one category vs. another?
Interesting, thanks so much for the thought. I think I agree that we’ll likely want to fund work in several (or all) of these fields. However, I expect some fields will be dramatically more exciting than others. It seems likely enough to me that 70% of the funding might be best in one of the mentioned intervention areas above, and that several would have less than 5% of the remaining amounts.
It could well be the case that more research would prove otherwise! Maybe 70% of the intervention areas listed would be roughly equal to each other. I think it’s a bit unlikely, but I’m not sure. This is arguably one good question for future researchers in the space to answer, and a reason why it could use more research.
If it were the case that the areas are roughly equal to each other, I imagine we’d then want more total prioritization research, because we couldn’t overlook any of them.
One obvious research project at this point would just be to survey a bunch of longtermists and get their take on how important/tractable each intervention area is.
Great to see more attention on this topic! I think there is an additional claim embedded in this proposal which you don’t call out:
I notice that I’m intuitively skeptical about this point, even though I basically buy your other premises. It strikes me that there is likely to be much more variation in impact potential between specific projects or campaigns, e.g. at the level of a specific grant proposal, than there is between whole categories, which are hard to evaluate in part because they are quite complementary to each other and the success of one will be correlated with the success of others. You write, “We wouldn’t want to invest a lot of resources into one field, to realize 10 years later that we could have spent them better in another.” But what’s to say that this is the only choice we face? Why not invest across all of these areas and chase optimality by judging opportunities on a project-by-project basis rather than making big bets on one category vs. another?
Interesting, thanks so much for the thought. I think I agree that we’ll likely want to fund work in several (or all) of these fields. However, I expect some fields will be dramatically more exciting than others. It seems likely enough to me that 70% of the funding might be best in one of the mentioned intervention areas above, and that several would have less than 5% of the remaining amounts.
It could well be the case that more research would prove otherwise! Maybe 70% of the intervention areas listed would be roughly equal to each other. I think it’s a bit unlikely, but I’m not sure. This is arguably one good question for future researchers in the space to answer, and a reason why it could use more research.
If it were the case that the areas are roughly equal to each other, I imagine we’d then want more total prioritization research, because we couldn’t overlook any of them.
One obvious research project at this point would just be to survey a bunch of longtermists and get their take on how important/tractable each intervention area is.