I believe in the overwhelming importance of shaping the long term future. In my view most causal chains that could actually matter are likely to be very long by normal standards. But they might at least have many paths to impact, or be robust (i.e. have few weak steps).
People who say they are working on broad, robust or short chains usually ignore the major uncertainties about whether the farther out regions of the chain they are a part of are positive, neutral or negative in value. I think this is dangerous and makes these plans less reliable than they superficially appear to be.
If any single step in a chain produces an output of zero, or negative expected value (e.g. your plan has many paths to increasing our forecasting ability, but it turns out that doing so is harmful), then the whole rest of that chain isn’t desirable.”
I alluded to this concern here:
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I believe in the overwhelming importance of shaping the long term future. In my view most causal chains that could actually matter are likely to be very long by normal standards. But they might at least have many paths to impact, or be robust (i.e. have few weak steps).
People who say they are working on broad, robust or short chains usually ignore the major uncertainties about whether the farther out regions of the chain they are a part of are positive, neutral or negative in value. I think this is dangerous and makes these plans less reliable than they superficially appear to be.
If any single step in a chain produces an output of zero, or negative expected value (e.g. your plan has many paths to increasing our forecasting ability, but it turns out that doing so is harmful), then the whole rest of that chain isn’t desirable.”
http://effective-altruism.com/ea/r6/what_is_a_broad_intervention_and_what_is_a_narrow/