Speaking for myself, I feel pretty bullish and comfortable saying that we should fund interventions that we have resilient estimates of reducing x-risk ~0.01% at a cost of ~$100M.
Do you similarly think we should fund interventions that we have resilient estimates of reducing x-risk ~0.00001% at a cost of ~$100,000? (i.e. the same cost-effectiveness)
Yep, though I think “resilient” is doing a lot of the work. In particular:
I don’t know how you can get robust estimates that low.
EA time is nontrivially expensive around those numbers, not just doing the intervention but also identifying the intervention in the first place and the grantmaker time to evaluate it, so there aren’t many times where ~0.00001% risk reductions will organically come up.
The most concrete thing I can think of is in asteroid risk, like if we take Ord’s estimates of 1⁄1,000,000 risk this century literally, and we identify a cheap intervention that we think can a) avert 10% of asteroid risks, b) costs only $100,000 , c) can be implemented by a non-EA with relatively little oversight, and d) has negligible downside risks, then I’d consider this a pretty good deal.
Do you similarly think we should fund interventions that we have resilient estimates of reducing x-risk ~0.00001% at a cost of ~$100,000? (i.e. the same cost-effectiveness)
Yep, though I think “resilient” is doing a lot of the work. In particular:
I don’t know how you can get robust estimates that low.
EA time is nontrivially expensive around those numbers, not just doing the intervention but also identifying the intervention in the first place and the grantmaker time to evaluate it, so there aren’t many times where ~0.00001% risk reductions will organically come up.
The most concrete thing I can think of is in asteroid risk, like if we take Ord’s estimates of 1⁄1,000,000 risk this century literally, and we identify a cheap intervention that we think can a) avert 10% of asteroid risks, b) costs only $100,000 , c) can be implemented by a non-EA with relatively little oversight, and d) has negligible downside risks, then I’d consider this a pretty good deal.