In brief, I’m sceptical there are good heuristics for assessing an entire problem. Ask yourself: what are they, and what is the justification for them? What do, rather, is have intuitive views about how effective particular solutions to given problems are. So we should think more carefully about those.
If it helps, for context, I started writing my thesis is 2015. At that time, EAs (following, I think, Will’s book at 80k’s then analysis) seemed to think you could make enormous progress on what the priorities are by appealing to very vague and abstract heuristics like “the bigger the problem, the higher the EV”. This all seemed and seems v suspicious to me. People don’t do this so much anymore.
Hmm, I feel we might be talking past each other slightly or something.
My impression is that Happier Lives Institute is already taking or planning to take both: (a) actions largely optimised for helping us identify the most cost-effective actions to improve near-term human wellbeing[1], and evaluate their cost-effectiveness, and (b) actions largely optimised for relatively directly improving near-term human wellbeing.
The fact that you’re doing or planning to do (b) implies that you have at least implicitly prioritised near-term human wellbeing over other issues, right? And since you’ve done it before we’ve thoroughly considered a wide range of interventions in a wide range of cause areas and decently evaluated their cost-effectiveness, it seems you are in some sense appealing to heuristics for the purpose of cause prioritisation?
So it seems like maybe what you’re saying is mainly that we should remember that our cause priorities should currently be considered quite preliminary and uncertain, rather than that we can’t have cause priorities yet?
(Also, FWIW, for tentative cause prioritisation it does seem to me that there are a range of heuristics which can be useful, even if they’re not totally decisive. I have in mind things including but not limited to ITN. But there’s already been a lot of debate on the value of many of those specific heuristics, and I imagine you discuss some in your thesis but I haven’t read it.)
[1] I’m not sure if this is precisely how you’d define HLI’s focus. By “near-term” I have in mind something like “within the next 100 years”.
In brief, I’m sceptical there are good heuristics for assessing an entire problem. Ask yourself: what are they, and what is the justification for them? What do, rather, is have intuitive views about how effective particular solutions to given problems are. So we should think more carefully about those.
If it helps, for context, I started writing my thesis is 2015. At that time, EAs (following, I think, Will’s book at 80k’s then analysis) seemed to think you could make enormous progress on what the priorities are by appealing to very vague and abstract heuristics like “the bigger the problem, the higher the EV”. This all seemed and seems v suspicious to me. People don’t do this so much anymore.
Hmm, I feel we might be talking past each other slightly or something.
My impression is that Happier Lives Institute is already taking or planning to take both: (a) actions largely optimised for helping us identify the most cost-effective actions to improve near-term human wellbeing[1], and evaluate their cost-effectiveness, and (b) actions largely optimised for relatively directly improving near-term human wellbeing.
The fact that you’re doing or planning to do (b) implies that you have at least implicitly prioritised near-term human wellbeing over other issues, right? And since you’ve done it before we’ve thoroughly considered a wide range of interventions in a wide range of cause areas and decently evaluated their cost-effectiveness, it seems you are in some sense appealing to heuristics for the purpose of cause prioritisation?
So it seems like maybe what you’re saying is mainly that we should remember that our cause priorities should currently be considered quite preliminary and uncertain, rather than that we can’t have cause priorities yet?
(Also, FWIW, for tentative cause prioritisation it does seem to me that there are a range of heuristics which can be useful, even if they’re not totally decisive. I have in mind things including but not limited to ITN. But there’s already been a lot of debate on the value of many of those specific heuristics, and I imagine you discuss some in your thesis but I haven’t read it.)
[1] I’m not sure if this is precisely how you’d define HLI’s focus. By “near-term” I have in mind something like “within the next 100 years”.