Re: 1., there would be many more (thoughtful) people who share our concern about reducing suffering and s-risks (not necessarily with strongly suffering-focused values, but at least giving considerable weight to it). That results in an ongoing research project on s-risks that goes beyond a few EAs (e.g., it is also established in academia or other social movements).
Re: 2., a possible scenario is that suffering-focused ideas just never gain much traction, and consequently efforts to reduce s-risks will just fizzle out. However, I think there is significant evidence that at least an extreme version of this is not happening.
Re: 3., I think the levels of engagement and feedback we have received so far are encouraging. However, we do not currently have any procedures in place to measure impact, which is (as you say) incredibly hard for what we do. But of course, we are constantly thinking about what kind of work is most impactful!
Those answers make sense to me. But I notice that the answer to question 1 sounds like an outcome you want to bring about, but which I wouldn’t be way more surprised to observe in a world where CRS doesn’t exist/doesn’t have impact than one in which it does. This is because it could be brought about by the actions of others (e.g., CLR).
So I guess I’d be curious about things like:
Whether and how you think that that desired world-state will look different if CRS succeeds than if CRS accomplishes very little but other groups with somewhat similar goals succeed
How you might disentangle the contribution of CRS to this desired outcome from the contributions of others
I guess this connects to the question of quality/impact assessment as well.
I also think this dilemma is far from unique to CRS. In fact, it’s probably weaker for CRS than for non-suffering-focused longtermists (e.g. much of FHI), because there are currently more of the latter (or at least they control more resources), so there are more plausible alternative candidates for the causes of non-suffering-focused longtermist impacts.
Re: 1., there would be many more (thoughtful) people who share our concern about reducing suffering and s-risks (not necessarily with strongly suffering-focused values, but at least giving considerable weight to it). That results in an ongoing research project on s-risks that goes beyond a few EAs (e.g., it is also established in academia or other social movements).
Re: 2., a possible scenario is that suffering-focused ideas just never gain much traction, and consequently efforts to reduce s-risks will just fizzle out. However, I think there is significant evidence that at least an extreme version of this is not happening.
Re: 3., I think the levels of engagement and feedback we have received so far are encouraging. However, we do not currently have any procedures in place to measure impact, which is (as you say) incredibly hard for what we do. But of course, we are constantly thinking about what kind of work is most impactful!
Thanks.
Those answers make sense to me. But I notice that the answer to question 1 sounds like an outcome you want to bring about, but which I wouldn’t be way more surprised to observe in a world where CRS doesn’t exist/doesn’t have impact than one in which it does. This is because it could be brought about by the actions of others (e.g., CLR).
So I guess I’d be curious about things like:
Whether and how you think that that desired world-state will look different if CRS succeeds than if CRS accomplishes very little but other groups with somewhat similar goals succeed
How you might disentangle the contribution of CRS to this desired outcome from the contributions of others
I guess this connects to the question of quality/impact assessment as well.
I also think this dilemma is far from unique to CRS. In fact, it’s probably weaker for CRS than for non-suffering-focused longtermists (e.g. much of FHI), because there are currently more of the latter (or at least they control more resources), so there are more plausible alternative candidates for the causes of non-suffering-focused longtermist impacts.
Also, do you think it might make sense for CRS to run a (small) survey about the quality & impact of its outputs?