Would you currently prefer a marginal resource to be used by an impatient longtermist (i.e. to reduce existential risk) or by a patient longtermist (i.e. to invest for the future)? Assume both would spend their resource as effectively as possible
Where do you think the impatient longtermist would spend their resource and where do you think the patient longtermist would spend their resource?
Finally, how do you best think we should proceed to answer these questions with more certainty?
P.S. there may well have been a much simpler way to formulate these questions, feel free to reformulate if you want to!
I’m not sure I really believe that “patient vs impatient longtermists” cleaves the world at its joins. I’ll use the terms to mean something like resources aimed at reducing existential risk over the next fifty years or so, versus aiming to be helpful on a timescale of over a century?
In either case I think it depends a lot on the resource in question. Many resources (e.g. people’s labour) are not fully fungible with one another, so it can depend quite a bit on comparative advantage.
If we’re talking about financial resources, these are fairly fungible. There I tend to think (still applies to both “patient” and “impatient” flavours of longtermism):
It doesn’t make so much sense to analyse at the level of the individual donor
Instead we should think about the portfolio we want longtermist capital as a whole to be spread across, and what are good ways to contribute to that portfolio at the margin
Sometimes particular donors will have comparative advantage in giving to certain places (e.g. they have high visibility on a giving opportunity so it’s less overhead for them to assess it, and it makes sense for them to fill it)
Sometimes it’s more about coordinating to have roughly the right amount total spent, and not fritter away too much on donor-of-last-resort type games
Some particular opportunities around now look excellent, but the scale of them is such that it’s hard to absorb a large fraction of longtermist capital over (say) the next five years, so it makes sense for some money to be held in traditional investments
Then more specialised statements:
From a “patient” perspective, we want to invest in anything which grows the pool of informed longtermist resources faster than traditional investment, e.g. some versions of:
value-spreading
this is a lazy catch-all term which includes a ton of very different looking activities; I think getting better resolution on strategies that are worth employing here is pretty important
producing better intellectual material about what longtermists should do (includes research + dissemination, and works by increasing the degree people are informed plus by making the set of ideas seem more legit+solid, so easier to attract further people)
(specialised) education
research into what type of activities have good long-term returns for longtermists
From an “inpatient” perspective, we want to invest in opportunities which are plausibly on critical paths to averting existential catastrophes, e.g. some versions of:
lots of the things mentioned for the “patient” perspective
(there’s a continuum here, and if you were so impatient you just wanted to work on averting existential risk that would manifest in the next five years, the patient strategies don’t look so great)
research into understanding and characterising the nature and likelihood of imminent risks
+ work which sets this out clearly, and can be usefully understood by many people (I think that broad understanding of risks is a big step towards reducing them)
work to develop careers of people who might be well-placed to do relevant work
analogously, work to develop institutions that could play a useful role
Overall, I don’t think it makes sense to imagine that one of the “patient” or “impatient” perspectives is correct. I think that the correct longtermist portfolio certainly includes substantial amounts of both of these classes of investments. For financial resources, I think that over the next several years it’s likely that the meaningful margins are all about which given opportunities rise above the bar of saving (rather than which class deserves more money).
For non-financial resources (e.g. the career of a specified individual) it’s more plausible to ask about tradeoffs between patient and impatient perspectives. I think it may usually be better if decisions here come down to comparative advantage rather than high-level views of the tradeoffs between “patient” and “impatient”.
If I pinned myself down and forced myself to name one bullet point above that I think I’d like to see slightly more of (at the expense of the other bullet points), then at-least-in-moment-writing-this, I’d say “research into what type of activities have good long-term returns for longtermists”. But I think this is correctly quite a small slice of our portfolio: I just want it to be a slightly-less-small slice. (I’d have similar views about some particular subfields of various of the other activity-types.)
Thanks for this detailed reply! I appreciate these aren’t questions with simple answers.
research into what type of activities have good long-term returns for longtermists
Do you mind elaborating slightly on what you mean here? To me this just reads as finding out the best activities to do if you’re a longtermist, but given that you say it’s a “small slice of our portfolio” I suspect this is this more specific.
I mean for various activities X, estimating how many resources end up devoted to longtermist ends as a result of X (and what the lags are).
e.g. some Xs = writing articles about longtermism; giving talks in schools; talking about EA but not explicitly longtermism; outreach to foundations; consultancy to help people give better according to their values (and clarify those values); …
Would you currently prefer a marginal resource to be used by an impatient longtermist (i.e. to reduce existential risk) or by a patient longtermist (i.e. to invest for the future)? Assume both would spend their resource as effectively as possible
Where do you think the impatient longtermist would spend their resource and where do you think the patient longtermist would spend their resource?
Finally, how do you best think we should proceed to answer these questions with more certainty?
P.S. there may well have been a much simpler way to formulate these questions, feel free to reformulate if you want to!
I’m not sure I really believe that “patient vs impatient longtermists” cleaves the world at its joins. I’ll use the terms to mean something like resources aimed at reducing existential risk over the next fifty years or so, versus aiming to be helpful on a timescale of over a century?
In either case I think it depends a lot on the resource in question. Many resources (e.g. people’s labour) are not fully fungible with one another, so it can depend quite a bit on comparative advantage.
If we’re talking about financial resources, these are fairly fungible. There I tend to think (still applies to both “patient” and “impatient” flavours of longtermism):
It doesn’t make so much sense to analyse at the level of the individual donor
Instead we should think about the portfolio we want longtermist capital as a whole to be spread across, and what are good ways to contribute to that portfolio at the margin
Sometimes particular donors will have comparative advantage in giving to certain places (e.g. they have high visibility on a giving opportunity so it’s less overhead for them to assess it, and it makes sense for them to fill it)
Sometimes it’s more about coordinating to have roughly the right amount total spent, and not fritter away too much on donor-of-last-resort type games
Some particular opportunities around now look excellent, but the scale of them is such that it’s hard to absorb a large fraction of longtermist capital over (say) the next five years, so it makes sense for some money to be held in traditional investments
Then more specialised statements:
From a “patient” perspective, we want to invest in anything which grows the pool of informed longtermist resources faster than traditional investment, e.g. some versions of:
value-spreading
this is a lazy catch-all term which includes a ton of very different looking activities; I think getting better resolution on strategies that are worth employing here is pretty important
producing better intellectual material about what longtermists should do (includes research + dissemination, and works by increasing the degree people are informed plus by making the set of ideas seem more legit+solid, so easier to attract further people)
(specialised) education
research into what type of activities have good long-term returns for longtermists
From an “inpatient” perspective, we want to invest in opportunities which are plausibly on critical paths to averting existential catastrophes, e.g. some versions of:
lots of the things mentioned for the “patient” perspective
(there’s a continuum here, and if you were so impatient you just wanted to work on averting existential risk that would manifest in the next five years, the patient strategies don’t look so great)
research into understanding and characterising the nature and likelihood of imminent risks
+ work which sets this out clearly, and can be usefully understood by many people (I think that broad understanding of risks is a big step towards reducing them)
work to develop careers of people who might be well-placed to do relevant work
analogously, work to develop institutions that could play a useful role
Overall, I don’t think it makes sense to imagine that one of the “patient” or “impatient” perspectives is correct. I think that the correct longtermist portfolio certainly includes substantial amounts of both of these classes of investments. For financial resources, I think that over the next several years it’s likely that the meaningful margins are all about which given opportunities rise above the bar of saving (rather than which class deserves more money).
For non-financial resources (e.g. the career of a specified individual) it’s more plausible to ask about tradeoffs between patient and impatient perspectives. I think it may usually be better if decisions here come down to comparative advantage rather than high-level views of the tradeoffs between “patient” and “impatient”.
If I pinned myself down and forced myself to name one bullet point above that I think I’d like to see slightly more of (at the expense of the other bullet points), then at-least-in-moment-writing-this, I’d say “research into what type of activities have good long-term returns for longtermists”. But I think this is correctly quite a small slice of our portfolio: I just want it to be a slightly-less-small slice. (I’d have similar views about some particular subfields of various of the other activity-types.)
Thanks for this detailed reply! I appreciate these aren’t questions with simple answers.
Do you mind elaborating slightly on what you mean here? To me this just reads as finding out the best activities to do if you’re a longtermist, but given that you say it’s a “small slice of our portfolio” I suspect this is this more specific.
Sorry that was poorly worded.
I mean for various activities X, estimating how many resources end up devoted to longtermist ends as a result of X (and what the lags are).
e.g. some Xs = writing articles about longtermism; giving talks in schools; talking about EA but not explicitly longtermism; outreach to foundations; consultancy to help people give better according to their values (and clarify those values); …
Ah OK thanks, that makes sense. Certainly seems worthwhile to have more research into this