In general, CE looks at cause areas where we can have a significant, legible and measurable impact.
Traditionally, this has meant focusing on cause areas that within EA are commonly considered near-termist, such as animal welfare, global health and wellbeing, family planning and mental health.
However, we think that there are cause areas that fall outside of this remit, and potentially that are traditionally within the long-termist space, where we could potentially find interventions that may have a significant impact and where there are concrete feedback loops. In fact, this is what prompted our research team to look into health security as a cause area.
During out intervention prioritisation research
Within health security, there are probably some differences in the way we have defined and operationalised this as a cause area and prioritised interventions compared to others in the community:
We have taken a broader focus than GCBRs (Global Catastrophic Biological Risks), and thought about things like antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic pandemics and other biothreats which are very unlikely to have GCBR potential but which may, in expectation, be quite high priority to work on.
We are probably less likely to be excited by ideas that might be more tailored solely towards tail-risk GCBR threats. This might include something like civilizational refuges, which we imagine is only useful for extinction risks. The reason that we are less excited about these ideas is not necessarily because we think that the risk of such events is low, but firstly because we think that there are unlikely to be strong ways to measure the impact that work on this area would have in the short to medium term, and secondly because this has less impact in the case of lower than extinction level risks.
To operationalise our research and the cost-effectiveness estimates that we have made, we looked at the impact of our interventions using a time frame of the next 50 years. We do not think this is a perfect operationalisation, but think it is fairly useful. We are very sceptical of our ability to know what the biggest risks to the world would be after 50 years.
Credit note: This answer Initially drafted by former CE staff Akhil Bansal.
Can you talk about how CE takes a midtermist approach and why the team think itβs compelling /β what your key uncertainities are?
Choosing cause areas
In general, CE looks at cause areas where we can have a significant, legible and measurable impact.
Traditionally, this has meant focusing on cause areas that within EA are commonly considered near-termist, such as animal welfare, global health and wellbeing, family planning and mental health.
However, we think that there are cause areas that fall outside of this remit, and potentially that are traditionally within the long-termist space, where we could potentially find interventions that may have a significant impact and where there are concrete feedback loops. In fact, this is what prompted our research team to look into health security as a cause area.
During out intervention prioritisation research
Within health security, there are probably some differences in the way we have defined and operationalised this as a cause area and prioritised interventions compared to others in the community:
We have taken a broader focus than GCBRs (Global Catastrophic Biological Risks), and thought about things like antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic pandemics and other biothreats which are very unlikely to have GCBR potential but which may, in expectation, be quite high priority to work on.
We are probably less likely to be excited by ideas that might be more tailored solely towards tail-risk GCBR threats. This might include something like civilizational refuges, which we imagine is only useful for extinction risks. The reason that we are less excited about these ideas is not necessarily because we think that the risk of such events is low, but firstly because we think that there are unlikely to be strong ways to measure the impact that work on this area would have in the short to medium term, and secondly because this has less impact in the case of lower than extinction level risks.
To operationalise our research and the cost-effectiveness estimates that we have made, we looked at the impact of our interventions using a time frame of the next 50 years. We do not think this is a perfect operationalisation, but think it is fairly useful. We are very sceptical of our ability to know what the biggest risks to the world would be after 50 years.
Credit note: This answer Initially drafted by former CE staff Akhil Bansal.