I have another somewhat related idea that I could talk about for 5-8 minutes as part of the same session where I talk about existential risk estimates, or that I could do a full session on instead of a session on existential risk estimates. (I obviously wouldn’t plan to take up two session slots by doing full presentations on both ideas.)
Perhaps it’d be best to use an “approval voting” approach, where you upvote the above comment if you’d be interested in a full-session on x-risk estimates, upvote this comment if you’d be interested in a full session on crucial questions for longtermists, and/or upvote my other comment if you’d be interested in a session briefly covering both.
Crucial questions for longtermists
Convergence Analysis (who I work for) are embarking on a project to collect, organise, clarify, and highlight existing ideas and works related to a large set of the “crucial questions” for longtermists. These are questions whose answers may be “crucial considerations”, which are “likely to cause a major shift of our view of interventions or areas”; their answers could substantially shift how we think about key problems and how we make major prioritisation decisions.
One set of such questions relate to how high various existential risks are, but there are many other questions as well. For example, there are questions related to the optimal timing for work and donations, including:
How will “leverage over the future” change over time?
How effectively can we “punt to the future”?
What would be the long-term effective growth rate of financial investments?
Which “direct” actions have “compounding” impacts (if any)? How strongly and durably do those impacts compound?
How steeply do marginal returns to work done within a given time period diminish? How much can we parallelise work?
Is there a “deadline”? When is it?
And many of these questions can in turn be broken down into sub-questions, sub-sub-questions, etc.
We aim for this project to aid in thought and communication about each of the crucial questions for longtermists, while also serving as something of an orientation to, “research agenda” for, and structured reading list for these questions. A draft of the article that will introduce this project (which includes our current full collection and structuring of questions) can be found here, and a draft of the article about crucial questions related to optimal timing of work and donations is available upon request.
If I did a full session on this project, I would:
Introduce the purpose and scope of this crucial questions series
Overview at least one set of questions (as an example)
And then probably open things up for more than 15 minutes of discussion about any of the topics/questions people are particularly interested in, or about the project as a whole. (Hopefully this would include getting some valuable feedback, as the project is at an early-ish stage thus far.)
I have another somewhat related idea that I could talk about for 5-8 minutes as part of the same session where I talk about existential risk estimates, or that I could do a full session on instead of a session on existential risk estimates. (I obviously wouldn’t plan to take up two session slots by doing full presentations on both ideas.)
Perhaps it’d be best to use an “approval voting” approach, where you upvote the above comment if you’d be interested in a full-session on x-risk estimates, upvote this comment if you’d be interested in a full session on crucial questions for longtermists, and/or upvote my other comment if you’d be interested in a session briefly covering both.
Crucial questions for longtermists
Convergence Analysis (who I work for) are embarking on a project to collect, organise, clarify, and highlight existing ideas and works related to a large set of the “crucial questions” for longtermists. These are questions whose answers may be “crucial considerations”, which are “likely to cause a major shift of our view of interventions or areas”; their answers could substantially shift how we think about key problems and how we make major prioritisation decisions.
One set of such questions relate to how high various existential risks are, but there are many other questions as well. For example, there are questions related to the optimal timing for work and donations, including:
How will “leverage over the future” change over time?
How effectively can we “punt to the future”?
What would be the long-term effective growth rate of financial investments?
Which “direct” actions have “compounding” impacts (if any)? How strongly and durably do those impacts compound?
How steeply do marginal returns to work done within a given time period diminish? How much can we parallelise work?
Is there a “deadline”? When is it?
And many of these questions can in turn be broken down into sub-questions, sub-sub-questions, etc.
We aim for this project to aid in thought and communication about each of the crucial questions for longtermists, while also serving as something of an orientation to, “research agenda” for, and structured reading list for these questions. A draft of the article that will introduce this project (which includes our current full collection and structuring of questions) can be found here, and a draft of the article about crucial questions related to optimal timing of work and donations is available upon request.
If I did a full session on this project, I would:
Introduce the purpose and scope of this crucial questions series
Overview at least one set of questions (as an example)
And then probably open things up for more than 15 minutes of discussion about any of the topics/questions people are particularly interested in, or about the project as a whole. (Hopefully this would include getting some valuable feedback, as the project is at an early-ish stage thus far.)