From the perspective of a grant-maker, thinking about reduction in absolute basis points makes sense of course, but for comparing numbers between people, relative risk reduction might be more useful?
E.g. if one person thinks AI risk is 50% and another thinks it’s 10%, it seems to me the most natural way for them to speak about funding opportunities is to say it reduces total AI risk by X% relatively speaking.
Talking about absolute risk reduction compresses these two numbers into one, which is more compact, but makes it harder to see where disagreements come from.
It’s a minor point, but with estimates of total existential risk sometimes more than an order of magnitude apart from each other, it actually gets quite important I think.
Also, given astronomical waste arguments etc., I’d expect most longtermists would not switch away from longtermism once absolute risk reduction gets an order of magnitude smaller per dollar.
Edited to add: Having said that, I wanna add that I’m really glad this question was asked! I agree that it’s in some sense the key metric to aim for and it makes sense to discuss it!
From the perspective of a grant-maker, thinking about reduction in absolute basis points makes sense of course, but for comparing numbers between people, relative risk reduction might be more useful?
E.g. if one person thinks AI risk is 50% and another thinks it’s 10%, it seems to me the most natural way for them to speak about funding opportunities is to say it reduces total AI risk by X% relatively speaking.
Talking about absolute risk reduction compresses these two numbers into one, which is more compact, but makes it harder to see where disagreements come from.
It’s a minor point, but with estimates of total existential risk sometimes more than an order of magnitude apart from each other, it actually gets quite important I think.
Also, given astronomical waste arguments etc., I’d expect most longtermists would not switch away from longtermism once absolute risk reduction gets an order of magnitude smaller per dollar.
Edited to add: Having said that, I wanna add that I’m really glad this question was asked! I agree that it’s in some sense the key metric to aim for and it makes sense to discuss it!