I still expect we would if have some disagreement on how likely it is for this concentrated opportunities hypothesis to be true.
An interesting cheap (but low veracity) test of this hypothesis that could be to list out a handful of institutions (or collections of institutions) that you think would certainly NOT be considered as the “most powerful” but might matter (E.g.: university career services, EA community institutions, the Biological Weapons Convention implementation unit, AI/tech regulatory bodies, top business schools, tech start-ups, etc, etc) and then include a few of those in your modelling exercise and see how $100m to improve institutions in those cases compares to $100m to influence the most powerful institutions.
On the “path dependencies” point you make – I largely agree. I just think there is a risk (which I am sure you are already thinking through) that if you overly focus future research on just the most powerful institutions you might miss out on finding these indirect opportunities.
I still expect we would if have some disagreement on how likely it is for this concentrated opportunities hypothesis to be true.
An interesting cheap (but low veracity) test of this hypothesis that could be to list out a handful of institutions (or collections of institutions) that you think would certainly NOT be considered as the “most powerful” but might matter (E.g.: university career services, EA community institutions, the Biological Weapons Convention implementation unit, AI/tech regulatory bodies, top business schools, tech start-ups, etc, etc) and then include a few of those in your modelling exercise and see how $100m to improve institutions in those cases compares to $100m to influence the most powerful institutions.
On the “path dependencies” point you make – I largely agree. I just think there is a risk (which I am sure you are already thinking through) that if you overly focus future research on just the most powerful institutions you might miss out on finding these indirect opportunities.