Iāve been wondering about cost-effectiveness in this space for a long time, so thanks for writing this and especially for releasing the quantitative model! At the top, it looks like you are saying that $100 million per year for 10 years could reduce x risk by about one percentage point, meaning about 100 basis points (0.01%) per billion dollars-is that correct? In the model column AF in tab X-risk, you say that the effort would be over a century, so does that mean spending $10 billion total? Elsewhere you say you consider spending $100 million per year just on one institution, so are you really talking about spending $100 billion this century on the top 10 institutions? Then this would be about 1 basis point per $billion. This is in the range of cost effectiveness values collected here.
So if Iām understanding you correctly, $10 billion spent over the century would reduce the existential risk from the US Government Executive Office of the President by 50%, and 40% of that would have happened anyway, so you are reducing overall existential risk by 0.135%, which would be 1.35 basis points per $billion?
Hi David, thanks for your interest in our work! I need to preface this by emphasizing that the primary purpose of the quantitative model was to help us assess the relative importance of and promise of engaging with different institutions implicated in various existential risk scenarios. There was less attention given to the challenge of nailing the right absolute numbers, and so those should be taken with a super-extra-giant grain of salt.
With that said, the right way to understand the numbers in the model is that the estimates were about the impact over 100 years from a single one-time $100M commitment (perhaps distributed over multiple years) focusing on a single institution. The comment in the summary about $100 million/āyear was assuming that the funder(s) would focus on multiple institutions. Thus, the 100 basis points per billion figure is the ācorrectā one provided our per-institution estimates are in the right order of magnitude.
Weāre about to get started on our second iteration of this work and will have more capacity to devote to the cost-effectiveness estimates this time around, so hopefully that will result in less speculative outputs.
Iāve been wondering about cost-effectiveness in this space for a long time, so thanks for writing this and especially for releasing the quantitative model! At the top, it looks like you are saying that $100 million per year for 10 years could reduce x risk by about one percentage point, meaning about 100 basis points (0.01%) per billion dollars-is that correct? In the model column AF in tab X-risk, you say that the effort would be over a century, so does that mean spending $10 billion total? Elsewhere you say you consider spending $100 million per year just on one institution, so are you really talking about spending $100 billion this century on the top 10 institutions? Then this would be about 1 basis point per $billion. This is in the range of cost effectiveness values collected here.
So if Iām understanding you correctly, $10 billion spent over the century would reduce the existential risk from the US Government Executive Office of the President by 50%, and 40% of that would have happened anyway, so you are reducing overall existential risk by 0.135%, which would be 1.35 basis points per $billion?
Hi David, thanks for your interest in our work! I need to preface this by emphasizing that the primary purpose of the quantitative model was to help us assess the relative importance of and promise of engaging with different institutions implicated in various existential risk scenarios. There was less attention given to the challenge of nailing the right absolute numbers, and so those should be taken with a super-extra-giant grain of salt.
With that said, the right way to understand the numbers in the model is that the estimates were about the impact over 100 years from a single one-time $100M commitment (perhaps distributed over multiple years) focusing on a single institution. The comment in the summary about $100 million/āyear was assuming that the funder(s) would focus on multiple institutions. Thus, the 100 basis points per billion figure is the ācorrectā one provided our per-institution estimates are in the right order of magnitude.
Weāre about to get started on our second iteration of this work and will have more capacity to devote to the cost-effectiveness estimates this time around, so hopefully that will result in less speculative outputs.
Thanks for the clarification. I would say this is quite optimistic, but I look forward to your future cost-effectiveness work.