Regarding learning value being dominant (which seems plausible), you make one concrete recommendation:
In the meantime, there is nothing to do but invest and wait.
Do you think we could instead spend money on prioritization research? Some actors relevant to this space include
The Open Philanthropy Project
The Global Priorities Institute
The Future of Humanity Institute
Rethink Priorities
The Foundational Research Institute
The China Center for Global Priorities
Some think tanks
Independent researchers working on forecasting, cause prioritization, exploring specific domains that might turn out to be promising, etc.
Some of these groups are clearly very well-funded. However, some have raised funds recently, suggesting that they believe that marginal funds will accelerate prioritization work. Reasonable people can disagree about this, and it seems like a key point which would need to be resolved for the recommendation to carry.
Yes, I agree with this wholeheartedly—there are ways for money to be put to use now accelerating the research process, and those might well beat waiting. In fact (as I should have been far clearer about throughout this post!) this whole argument is really just directed at people who are planning to “spend money at some time t to increase welfare as efficiently as possible at time t”.
I’m hoping to write down a few thoughts soon about one might think about discounting if you’ll be spending the money on something else, like research or x-risk reduction. For now I’ll edit the post to make caveats like yours explicit. Thanks.
If you have any confident thoughts, I’d be interested to hear which funding opportunities in the space seem most promising to you. (i.e. my question above was not rhetorical.) In particular, it is not obvious to me where the funding gaps are, and you seem likely to be better placed to know.
Also, I think there are some considerations which are 1-3 orders of magnitude more important than RTPT. Your post prompted me to write up a simple quantitative comparison of factors. Would you be interested in discussing/commenting at some point?
My current best guess happens to be that there aren’t great funding opportunities in the “priorities research” space—for a point of reference, GPI is still sitting on cash while it decides which economist(s) to recruit—but that there will be better funding opportunities over the next few years, as the infrastructure gets better set up and as the pipeline of young EA economists starts flowing. For example I’d actually be kind of surprised if there weren’t a “Parfit Institute” (or whatever it might be called), writing policy papers in DC next door to Cato and Heritage and all the rest, in a decade or two. So at the moment I’m just holding out for opportunities like that. But if you have ideas for funding-constrained research right now, let me know!
And sure, I’d love to discuss/comment on that write-up!
Regarding learning value being dominant (which seems plausible), you make one concrete recommendation:
Do you think we could instead spend money on prioritization research? Some actors relevant to this space include
The Open Philanthropy Project
The Global Priorities Institute
The Future of Humanity Institute
Rethink Priorities
The Foundational Research Institute
The China Center for Global Priorities
Some think tanks
Independent researchers working on forecasting, cause prioritization, exploring specific domains that might turn out to be promising, etc.
Some of these groups are clearly very well-funded. However, some have raised funds recently, suggesting that they believe that marginal funds will accelerate prioritization work. Reasonable people can disagree about this, and it seems like a key point which would need to be resolved for the recommendation to carry.
Yes, I agree with this wholeheartedly—there are ways for money to be put to use now accelerating the research process, and those might well beat waiting. In fact (as I should have been far clearer about throughout this post!) this whole argument is really just directed at people who are planning to “spend money at some time t to increase welfare as efficiently as possible at time t”.
I’m hoping to write down a few thoughts soon about one might think about discounting if you’ll be spending the money on something else, like research or x-risk reduction. For now I’ll edit the post to make caveats like yours explicit. Thanks.
If you have any confident thoughts, I’d be interested to hear which funding opportunities in the space seem most promising to you. (i.e. my question above was not rhetorical.) In particular, it is not obvious to me where the funding gaps are, and you seem likely to be better placed to know.
Also, I think there are some considerations which are 1-3 orders of magnitude more important than RTPT. Your post prompted me to write up a simple quantitative comparison of factors. Would you be interested in discussing/commenting at some point?
My current best guess happens to be that there aren’t great funding opportunities in the “priorities research” space—for a point of reference, GPI is still sitting on cash while it decides which economist(s) to recruit—but that there will be better funding opportunities over the next few years, as the infrastructure gets better set up and as the pipeline of young EA economists starts flowing. For example I’d actually be kind of surprised if there weren’t a “Parfit Institute” (or whatever it might be called), writing policy papers in DC next door to Cato and Heritage and all the rest, in a decade or two. So at the moment I’m just holding out for opportunities like that. But if you have ideas for funding-constrained research right now, let me know!
And sure, I’d love to discuss/comment on that write-up!