In 2021 Ajeya described the practical institutional reasoning behind worldview diversification on the 80K podcast like so, in case useful:
Ajeya Cotra: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that there’s necessarily something to be said for it on a rigorously philosophical point of view, but I think there’s something to be said for not going all in on what you believe a rigorously philosophical accounting would say to value. So, I think one way you could put it is that Open Phil is — as an institution — trying to place a big bet on this idea of doing utilitarian-ish, thoughtful, deep intellectual philanthropy, which has never been done before, and we want to give that bet its best chance. And we don’t necessarily want to tie that bet — like Open Phil’s value as an institution to the world — to a really hyper-specific notion of what that means.
Ajeya Cotra: So, you can think about the longtermist team as trying to be the best utilitarian philosophers they can be, and trying to philosophy their way into the best goals, and win that way. Where at least moderately good execution on these goals that were identified as good (with a lot of philosophical work) is the bet they’re making, the way they’re trying to win and make their mark on the world. And then the near-termist team is trying to be the best utilitarian economists they can be, trying to be rigorous, and empirical, and quantitative, and smart. And trying to moneyball regular philanthropy, sort of. And they see their competitive advantage as being the economist-y thinking as opposed to the philosopher-y thinking.
Ajeya Cotra: And so when the philosopher takes you to a very weird unintuitive place — and, furthermore, wants you to give up all of the other goals that on other ways of thinking about the world that aren’t philosophical seem like they’re worth pursuing — they’re just like, stop… I sometimes think of it as a train going to crazy town, and the near-termist side is like, I’m going to get off the train before we get to the point where all we’re focusing on is existential risk because of the astronomical waste argument. And then the longtermist side stays on the train, and there may be further stops.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, interesting. I like the idea that rather than thinking about this as exclusively a philosophical disagreement, think about it as a disagreement on the strategy question of, what’s our edge? What’s our edge over everyone else who’s trying to do good? And one of them is, “Well, we’ll be better at philosophy, and we’ll reach more philosophically rigorous conclusions”. And the other people are like, “We’ll be better in some other way. We’ll be more empirical, or be more careful about thinking about…”
Ajeya Cotra: More quantitative, yeah.
Robert Wiblin: More quantitative, exactly.
Ajeya Cotra: I mean, I actually think the near-termist side of the organisation empirically uses quantitative estimates way, way more than the longtermist side of the organisation does. So, on the longtermist side, we’ve talked ourselves into highly prioritising causes where there are only like 10 people working on them. And so most of our effort is trying to convince potential grantees — potential people who could be helpful in this mission — that it’s reasonable to work on at all. And trying to fund people who are trying to do the basic thing that we want to do — for example, reducing global catastrophic biorisks as opposed to focusing on biorisks in general. And that is where almost all of our selection pressure has to go. But on the near-termist side of things, they’re looking at lists of hundreds of things they could focus on, like air pollution in India, or migration from low-income countries to middle-income countries. And they have a huge list of causes and they’re just doing the math on the number of lives that get better per dollar with each of these options.
Ajeya Cotra: So, the feel of doing near-termist work at Open Phil is definitely much more quantitative and rigorous, and in some sense it feels more like what you would have thought a cartoon EA foundation would feel like, because they have more opportunity to map things out.
I’d be interested to know how much this has changed since if at all, especially on the longtermist side.
In 2021 Ajeya described the practical institutional reasoning behind worldview diversification on the 80K podcast like so, in case useful:
I’d be interested to know how much this has changed since if at all, especially on the longtermist side.