The ideal responses to mainline and extreme risks appear to be different.
I’m curious to know what you think the difference is. Both problems require greenhouse gas emissions to be halted.
Adjusting this by giving more expensive things higher neglectedness scores in effect takes the ‘cost’ out of the ‘cost-effectiveness analysis’.
The neglectedness guidelines focus on the level of existing funding. I argue that this is an insufficient view—that if you have two problems who require $100 or $200 of total funding to solve completely, if they both have $50 of funding today, they are not equally neglected. The denominator matters—the $200 problem is much further from being solved.
Using a completely different framework would be fine, but making this adjustment alone causes one to depart from any notion of good done per effort put in.
Perhaps I’m proposing a slightly different framework—but it’s definitely not one divorced from the notion of caring about the good done per effort put in. I just don’t believe that climate change is really at saturation point for the level of effort.
Qualified ’need’s
Fair point about use of language. I’ll try and address this in a future edit.
I’m curious to know what you think the difference is. Both problems require greenhouse gas emissions to be halted.
I agree that both mainline and extreme scenarios are helped by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there are other things one can do about climate change, and the most effective actions might turn out to be things which are specific to either mainline or extreme risks. To take examples from that link:
Developing drought-resistant crops could mitigate some of the worst effects of mainline scenarios, but might help little in extreme scenarios.
Attempting to artificially reverse climate change may be a last resort for extreme scenarios, but may be too risky to be worthwhile for mainline scenarios.
For the avoidance of doubt, I think that my point about mainline and extreme risks appealing to different worldviews is sufficient reason to separate the analyses even if the interventions ended up looking similar.
if you have two problems who require $100 or $200 of total funding to solve completely, if they both have $50 of funding today, they are not equally neglected
Yep, you could use the word ‘neglected’ that way, but I stand by my comment that if you do that without also modifying your definition of ‘scale’ or ‘solvability’, the three factors no longer add up to a cost-effectiveness heuristic. i.e. if you formalise what you mean by neglectedness and insert it into the formula here without changing anything else, the formula will no longer cancel out to ‘good done / extra person or $’.
I’m curious to know what you think the difference is. Both problems require greenhouse gas emissions to be halted.
The neglectedness guidelines focus on the level of existing funding. I argue that this is an insufficient view—that if you have two problems who require $100 or $200 of total funding to solve completely, if they both have $50 of funding today, they are not equally neglected. The denominator matters—the $200 problem is much further from being solved.
Perhaps I’m proposing a slightly different framework—but it’s definitely not one divorced from the notion of caring about the good done per effort put in. I just don’t believe that climate change is really at saturation point for the level of effort.
Fair point about use of language. I’ll try and address this in a future edit.
I agree that both mainline and extreme scenarios are helped by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there are other things one can do about climate change, and the most effective actions might turn out to be things which are specific to either mainline or extreme risks. To take examples from that link:
Developing drought-resistant crops could mitigate some of the worst effects of mainline scenarios, but might help little in extreme scenarios.
Attempting to artificially reverse climate change may be a last resort for extreme scenarios, but may be too risky to be worthwhile for mainline scenarios.
For the avoidance of doubt, I think that my point about mainline and extreme risks appealing to different worldviews is sufficient reason to separate the analyses even if the interventions ended up looking similar.
Yep, you could use the word ‘neglected’ that way, but I stand by my comment that if you do that without also modifying your definition of ‘scale’ or ‘solvability’, the three factors no longer add up to a cost-effectiveness heuristic. i.e. if you formalise what you mean by neglectedness and insert it into the formula here without changing anything else, the formula will no longer cancel out to ‘good done / extra person or $’.