Ok, I understand your point better now, and find that it makes sense. To summarize, I believe that the art of good planning to a distant goal is to find a series of intermediate targets that we can focus on, one after the other. I was worried that your argument could be used against any such strategy. But in fact your point is that as it stands, health interventions have not been selected by a “planner” who was actually thinking about the long-term goals, so it is unlikely that the selected interventions are the best we can find. That sounds reasonable to me. I would really like to see more research into what optimizing for long-term growth could look like (and what kind of “intermediate targets” this would select). (There is some of this in Christiano’s post, but there is clearly room for more in-depth analysis in my opinion.)
Ok, I understand your point better now, and find that it makes sense. To summarize, I believe that the art of good planning to a distant goal is to find a series of intermediate targets that we can focus on, one after the other. I was worried that your argument could be used against any such strategy. But in fact your point is that as it stands, health interventions have not been selected by a “planner” who was actually thinking about the long-term goals, so it is unlikely that the selected interventions are the best we can find. That sounds reasonable to me. I would really like to see more research into what optimizing for long-term growth could look like (and what kind of “intermediate targets” this would select). (There is some of this in Christiano’s post, but there is clearly room for more in-depth analysis in my opinion.)
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