Oh, this is nice to read as I agree that we might be able to get some reasonable enough answers about Shrimp Welfare Project vs AMF (e.g. RP’s moral weights project).
Some rough thoughts: It’s when we get to comparing Shrimp Welfare Project to AI safety PACs in the US that I think the task goes from crazy hard but worth it to maybe too gargantuan a task (although some have tried). I also think here the uncertainty is so large that it’s harder to defer to experts in the way that one can defer to GiveWell if they care about helping the world’s poorest people alive today.
But I do agree that people need a way to decide, and Anthropic staff are incredibly time poor and some of these interventions are very time sensitive if you have short timelines, so that just begs the question: if I’m recommending worldview diversification, which cause areas get attention and how do we split among them?
I am legitimately very interested in thoughtful quantitative ways of going about this (my job involves a non-zero amount of advising Anthropic folks). Right now, it seems like Rethink Priorities is the only group doing this in public (e.g. here). To be honest, I find their work has gone over my heard, and while I don’t want to speak for them my understanding is they might be doing more in this space soon.
I think one of the challenges here is for the people who are respected/have a leadershipy role on cause prioritisation, I get the sense that they’ve been reluctant to weigh in here, perhaps to the detriment of Anthropic folks trying to make a decision one way or another.
Even more speculative: Maybe part of what’s going on here is that the charity comparison numbers that GiveWell produce, or when charities are being compared within a cause area in general, is one level of crazy and difficult. But the moment you get to cross-course comparisons, these numbers become several orders of magnitude more crazy and uncertain. And maybe there’s a reluctance to use the same methodology for something so much more uncertain, because it’s a less useful tool/there’s a risk it is perceived as something more solid than it is.
Overal I think more people who have insights on cause prio should be saying: if I had a billion dollars, here’s how I’d spend it, and why.