Global Priorities Institute: Research Agenda

[Aaron Gertler]

Link post

The Global Priorities Institute’s research agenda is the best source I know of to find open research questions on cause prioritization.

The agenda is very long, and I’m not sure how often it gets updated, so I won’t crosspost the whole thing here. But I do want people to be able to find the agenda by looking at tags, or searching for a keyword, which is why I published this.

I’ll post the table of contents as a preview for the full agenda:

• Introduction

  • The Global Priorities Institute’s vision and mission

  • GPI’s research agenda

• 1. The longtermism paradigm

  • 1.1. Articulation and evaluation of longtermism

  • 1.2. The value of the future of humanity

  • 1.3. Reducing and mitigating catastrophic risk

  • 1.4. Other ways of leveraging the size of the future

  • 1.5. Intergenerational governance

  • 1.6. Economic growth, population growth and inequality

  • 1.7. Moral uncertainty for longtermists

  • 1.8. Forecasting the long-term future

• 2. General issues in global prioritisation

  • 2.1. Decision-theoretic issues

  • 2.2. Epistemological issues

  • 2.3. Optimal timing and discounting

  • 2.4. Diversification and hedging

  • 2.5. Distributions of cost-effectiveness

  • 2.6. Modelling altruism

  • 2.7. Altruistic coordination

  • 2.8. Institutions

• Appendix A. Research areas for future engagement

  • A.1. Animal welfare

  • A.2. The scope of welfare maximisation

• Appendix B. Closely related areas of existing academic research

  • B.1. Methodology of cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis

  • B.2. Multidimensional economic indices

  • B.3. Infinite ethics and intergenerational equity

  • B.4. Epistemology of disagreement

  • B.5. Demandingness

  • B.6. Population ethics

  • B.7. Risk aversion and ambiguity aversion

  • B.8. Moral uncertainty

  • B.9. Value of information

  • B.10. Harnessing and combining evidence

  • B.11. The psychology of altruistic decision-making

• Appendix C. Additional informal discussion