I had a look around and couldn’t find too many full peer-reviewed models. (Yet: it’s a young endeavour.) This is probably partially a principled reaction to the hard limits of solely quantitative approaches. Most researchers in the area are explicitly calling their work “shallow investigation”: i.e. exploratory and pre-theoretical. To date, the empirical FHI papers tend to be piecemeal estimates and early methodologicalinnovation, rather than full models. OpenPhil tends towards prior solicitation from experts and do causes one at a time so far. GiveWell’s evaluations are all QALY based and piecemeal, though there’s non-core formal stuff on there too.
There’s hope: what modelling has been done is always done with economic methods. Michael Dickens has built a model which strikes me as an excellent start, but it’s not likely to win over sceptical institutional markers, because it is ex nihilo and doesn’t cite anyone. (C++ code here, including weights.) Peter Hurford lists many individual empirical models in footnote 4 here. Here’s Gordon Irlam’s less formal one, with a wider perspective. Here’s a more formal one just for public policy.
To win them over, you could frame it as “social choice theory” rather than cause prioritisation. So for the goal of getting academic approval, Sen, Binmore and Broome are your touchstones here, rather than Cotton-Barrett, Beckstead, and Christiano.
Your particular project proposal seems like an empirical successor to MacAskill’s PhD thesis; I’d suggest looking for leads directly in the bibliography there.
I hope you see the above as evidence for the importance of your proposed research, rather than a disincentive to doing it.
Hello ChemaCB,
I had a look around and couldn’t find too many full peer-reviewed models. (Yet: it’s a young endeavour.) This is probably partially a principled reaction to the hard limits of solely quantitative approaches. Most researchers in the area are explicitly calling their work “shallow investigation”: i.e. exploratory and pre-theoretical. To date, the empirical FHI papers tend to be piecemeal estimates and early methodological innovation, rather than full models. OpenPhil tends towards prior solicitation from experts and do causes one at a time so far. GiveWell’s evaluations are all QALY based and piecemeal, though there’s non-core formal stuff on there too.
There’s hope: what modelling has been done is always done with economic methods. Michael Dickens has built a model which strikes me as an excellent start, but it’s not likely to win over sceptical institutional markers, because it is ex nihilo and doesn’t cite anyone. (C++ code here, including weights.) Peter Hurford lists many individual empirical models in footnote 4 here. Here’s Gordon Irlam’s less formal one, with a wider perspective. Here’s a more formal one just for public policy.
To win them over, you could frame it as “social choice theory” rather than cause prioritisation. So for the goal of getting academic approval, Sen, Binmore and Broome are your touchstones here, rather than Cotton-Barrett, Beckstead, and Christiano.
Your particular project proposal seems like an empirical successor to MacAskill’s PhD thesis; I’d suggest looking for leads directly in the bibliography there.
I hope you see the above as evidence for the importance of your proposed research, rather than a disincentive to doing it.
Also, welcome!