It might be helpful to distinguish two related but distinct issues here: a) there are edge-cases of prio-work where it is (even) intuitively unclear whether they should be categorized as CP or WCP and b) my more theoretical point that this kind of categorization is fundamentally relative to cause individuations.
The second issue (b) seems to be the in-principle more damaging one to your results, as it suggests that your findings may hold only relative to one of many possible individuations. But I think it’s plausible (although not obvious to me) that in fact it doesn’t make a big difference because (i) a lot of actual prio-work takes something like your cause individuation for orientation (i.e. there is not that much prio-work between your general causes and relatively specific interventions) and also because (ii) your analysis seems not to apply the specific cause individuation mentioned in the beginning very strictly in the end—it seems that you rather think of causes as something like global health, animals, and catastrophic risks, but not necessarily these in particular? So I wonder if your results could be redescribed as holding relative to a cause individuation of roughly the generality / coarse-grainedness of the one you suggest, where the one you mention is only a proxy or example which could be replaced by similarly coarse-grained individuations. Then, for example, your result that only 8% of prio-work is CP would mean that 8% of prio-work operates on roughly the level of generality of causes like global health, animals, and catastrophic risks, although not all of that work compares these causes in particular.
So I think that your results are probably rather robust in the end. Still, it would be interesting to do the same exercise again based on a medium fine-grained cause individuation that distinguishes between, say, 15 causes (maybe similar to Will’s) and see if anything changes significantly.
Thanks, David!
It might be helpful to distinguish two related but distinct issues here: a) there are edge-cases of prio-work where it is (even) intuitively unclear whether they should be categorized as CP or WCP and b) my more theoretical point that this kind of categorization is fundamentally relative to cause individuations.
The second issue (b) seems to be the in-principle more damaging one to your results, as it suggests that your findings may hold only relative to one of many possible individuations. But I think it’s plausible (although not obvious to me) that in fact it doesn’t make a big difference because (i) a lot of actual prio-work takes something like your cause individuation for orientation (i.e. there is not that much prio-work between your general causes and relatively specific interventions) and also because (ii) your analysis seems not to apply the specific cause individuation mentioned in the beginning very strictly in the end—it seems that you rather think of causes as something like global health, animals, and catastrophic risks, but not necessarily these in particular? So I wonder if your results could be redescribed as holding relative to a cause individuation of roughly the generality / coarse-grainedness of the one you suggest, where the one you mention is only a proxy or example which could be replaced by similarly coarse-grained individuations. Then, for example, your result that only 8% of prio-work is CP would mean that 8% of prio-work operates on roughly the level of generality of causes like global health, animals, and catastrophic risks, although not all of that work compares these causes in particular.
So I think that your results are probably rather robust in the end. Still, it would be interesting to do the same exercise again based on a medium fine-grained cause individuation that distinguishes between, say, 15 causes (maybe similar to Will’s) and see if anything changes significantly.