Erich_Grunewald 🔸 comments on Review of The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does

[Erich_Grunewald 🔸]

There’s a larger issue (not really addressed in this volume) of when it makes sense for a funder to go “all in” on their best bets vs. when they’d do better to “diversify” their philanthropic portfolio. This is something EAs have discussed a bit before (often by making purely theoretical arguments that the “best bet” maximizes expected value), but I’d be excited to see more work on this problem using different methodologies, including taking into account the risk of “model error” or systemic bias in our initial EV estimates. (Maybe such work is already out there, and I just don’t know about it? The closest I can think of is Open Philanthropy’s work on worldview diversification, which I like a lot.)

There’s also We can do better than argmax, but yeah, seems like surprisingly little discussion so far on such an important topic.