Right. I think being ambiguity and/or risk averse is a good reason to potentially prefer near-term cause areas, though they have their own issues with robustness as well.
I don’t think you need to be ambiguity / risk averse to be worried about robustness of long-term causes. You could think that (1) the long term is extremely complex and (2) any paths to impact on such a complex system that humans right now can conceive of will be too brittle to model errors.
Yes, this was the reason I chose the word robustly! I wholeheartedly agree that all three premises are certainly debatable. The reason I’m wondering is primarily because I think quite a few EAs might in fact have these views, wether correct or not. I’m therefore a little surprised that I have not seen anyone act on them.
That is, I have not seen anyone say that they have substantially increased their near-termist donations (although I have not gone looking either).
My suspicion is that a lot of the people holding these views might be more “grassroots” or in the periphery. Not the type of EA on a podcast or writing on the forum, but perhaps a city group member, student, earning to give etc.
I think ‘robustly’ does enough work to make item 3 also pretty uncertain for at least a lot of people.
Right. I think being ambiguity and/or risk averse is a good reason to potentially prefer near-term cause areas, though they have their own issues with robustness as well.
I don’t think you need to be ambiguity / risk averse to be worried about robustness of long-term causes. You could think that (1) the long term is extremely complex and (2) any paths to impact on such a complex system that humans right now can conceive of will be too brittle to model errors.
Yes, this was the reason I chose the word robustly! I wholeheartedly agree that all three premises are certainly debatable. The reason I’m wondering is primarily because I think quite a few EAs might in fact have these views, wether correct or not. I’m therefore a little surprised that I have not seen anyone act on them.
That is, I have not seen anyone say that they have substantially increased their near-termist donations (although I have not gone looking either).
My suspicion is that a lot of the people holding these views might be more “grassroots” or in the periphery. Not the type of EA on a podcast or writing on the forum, but perhaps a city group member, student, earning to give etc.