Like Adam, I’ll focus on things that someone reading this might be interested in supporting or applying for. I want to emphasize that this is my personal take, not representing the whole fund, and I would be sad if this response stopped anyone from applying—there’s a lot of healthy disagreement within the fund, and we fund lots of things where at least one person thinks it’s below our bar. I also think a well-justified application could definitely change my mind.
Improving science or technology, unless there’s a strong case that the improvement would differentially benefit existential risk mitigation (or some other aspect of our long-term trajectory). As Ben Todd explains here, I think this is unlikely to be as highly-leveraged for improving the long-term future as trajectory changing efforts. I don’t think there’s a strong case that generally speeding up economic growth is an effective existential risk intervention.
Climate change mitigation. From the evidence I’ve seen, I think climate change is unlikely to be either directly existentially threatening or a particularly highly-leveraged existential risk factor. (It’s also not very neglected.) But I could be excited about funding research work that changed my mind about this.
Most self-improvement / community-member-improvement type work, e.g. “I want to create materials to help longtermists think better about their personal problems.” I’m not universally unexcited about funding this, and there are people who I think do good work like this, but my overall prior is that proposals here won’t be very good.
Like Adam, I’ll focus on things that someone reading this might be interested in supporting or applying for. I want to emphasize that this is my personal take, not representing the whole fund, and I would be sad if this response stopped anyone from applying—there’s a lot of healthy disagreement within the fund, and we fund lots of things where at least one person thinks it’s below our bar. I also think a well-justified application could definitely change my mind.
Improving science or technology, unless there’s a strong case that the improvement would differentially benefit existential risk mitigation (or some other aspect of our long-term trajectory). As Ben Todd explains here, I think this is unlikely to be as highly-leveraged for improving the long-term future as trajectory changing efforts. I don’t think there’s a strong case that generally speeding up economic growth is an effective existential risk intervention.
Climate change mitigation. From the evidence I’ve seen, I think climate change is unlikely to be either directly existentially threatening or a particularly highly-leveraged existential risk factor. (It’s also not very neglected.) But I could be excited about funding research work that changed my mind about this.
Most self-improvement / community-member-improvement type work, e.g. “I want to create materials to help longtermists think better about their personal problems.” I’m not universally unexcited about funding this, and there are people who I think do good work like this, but my overall prior is that proposals here won’t be very good.
I am also unexcited about the things Adam wrote.