Here’s a question. Seth Baum said last week that he thinks stakeholder engagement is critical for policy change. How can we better understand decision-makers who might need to implement decision that flow from effective-altruist guidance? Here’s Seth’s quote:
My big advice is to get involved in the decision processes as much as possible. GCRI calls this ‘stakeholder engagement’. That is a core part of our integrated assessment, and our work in general. It means getting to know the people involved in the decisions, building relations with them, understanding their motivations and their opportunities for doing things differently, and above all finding ways to build gcr reductions into their decisions in ways that are agreeable to them. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to listen to the decision makers and try to understand things from their perspective.
For example, if you want to reduce AI risk, then get out there and meet some AI researchers and AI funders and anyone else playing a role in AI development. Then talk to them about what they can do to reduce AI risk, and listen to them about what they are or aren’t willing or able to do.
I couldn’t agree more with Seth’s emphasis on the importance of stakeholder engagement. I would add, and I’m sure he would agree, that one of the most important parts of it is to learn from stakeholders. Everyone’s background offers insights that are really hard to imagine from other perspectives. One doesn’t just want to understand which of one’s ideas they can convinced to implement—they should be part of the process of developing the ideas. They should also be part of picking the questions.
Stakeholder engagement is something that GPP has set itself a particularly tough challenge on. Because we are trying to be a ‘broad’ cause comparison organisation, we do not slot naturally into an existing community of decision-makers. At the moment, this means that we have the capacity to build a small number of strong relationships in many different communities. This makes us good at the learning part of stakeholder engagement. It might end up making us too weak to push new policy on our own. That is why, for example, our current strategy for pushing specific policies is to sell focused policy to organisations that focus on that space and let them carry the idea forward. It remains to be seen how well this will work. It may be that the difficulty of stakeholder engagement with such a broad range of activities will force us to narrow our work, but this is also a factor which we think may make the area neglected.
Here’s a question. Seth Baum said last week that he thinks stakeholder engagement is critical for policy change. How can we better understand decision-makers who might need to implement decision that flow from effective-altruist guidance? Here’s Seth’s quote:
I couldn’t agree more with Seth’s emphasis on the importance of stakeholder engagement. I would add, and I’m sure he would agree, that one of the most important parts of it is to learn from stakeholders. Everyone’s background offers insights that are really hard to imagine from other perspectives. One doesn’t just want to understand which of one’s ideas they can convinced to implement—they should be part of the process of developing the ideas. They should also be part of picking the questions.
Stakeholder engagement is something that GPP has set itself a particularly tough challenge on. Because we are trying to be a ‘broad’ cause comparison organisation, we do not slot naturally into an existing community of decision-makers. At the moment, this means that we have the capacity to build a small number of strong relationships in many different communities. This makes us good at the learning part of stakeholder engagement. It might end up making us too weak to push new policy on our own. That is why, for example, our current strategy for pushing specific policies is to sell focused policy to organisations that focus on that space and let them carry the idea forward. It remains to be seen how well this will work. It may be that the difficulty of stakeholder engagement with such a broad range of activities will force us to narrow our work, but this is also a factor which we think may make the area neglected.