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This is: Introducing the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI), published by maxime, konrad on the Effective Altruism Forum.
(Konrad Seifert & Maxime Stauffer) have the pleasure to announce the Simon[1] Institute for Longterm Governance (SI):
simoninstitute.ch
The website caters to our initial target audience of international policymakers. This post introduces our theory of change and provides additional information relevant to the EA community and potential funders. The following is structured into:
An overview of SI
Key decisions we made in founding SI and underlying assumptions
An overview of the value SI provides to the EA community
Call for support
How to get in touch
Ask us anything
We thank Nora Ammann, Haydn Belfield, Ollie Base, Michael Aird, Devon Fritz, Rumtin Sepasspour, Christine Peterson, Julia Wise and Helen Toner for their invaluable feedback on this announcement. All errors and shortcomings are ours.
1. Overview of SI
Our theory of change
SI aims to contribute to the long-term flourishing of civilization.
For 1., humanity needs to anticipate and mitigate global catastrophic risks (GCRs) and build resilient systems so that civilization can survive and flourish.
Policymaking in national governments and international organizations is the most influential form of explicit value-driven coordination and can, therefore, be used to achieve 2.
To build long-term governance there are at least four improvements we can make to 3.:
a. The dominant societal narratives require the inclusion of future generations and an understanding of human progress on long timeframes
b. Institutions must be reformed to take the interests of future generations into account (e.g. see Tyler John’s EAGxVirtual talk (2020) and Gonzalez-Ricoy & Gosseries (2016)).
c. Policy agendas must account for tail risks and their interaction effects (e.g. Avin et al. (2018)). For example, the post-2030 UN agenda should include GCRs beyond climate change.
d. Decision-making needs to (i) be more anchored in ethics, (ii) use more scientific evidence and sound reasoning, (iii) navigate complex systems and understand tail risks, (iv) make better decisions in the face of uncertainty and urgency, and (v) deal more productively with diverging preferences and groupthink.
SI focuses on 4.d. to build the capacity for achieving 4.a.-c. and contribute to 2. and 1.
Our first working paper will outline this theory of change in more detail. A first draft will be published on our website in April 2021.
Our approach
SI aims to embed concern for future generations within the incentive structures and decision-making processes of the international public policy ecosystem, leveraging our personal connections to the United Nations[2] and European Union systems. We are building organizational capacity via three focus areas:
Policy support: We develop training programs aiming to improve the collective capacity of policy networks[3] to make sense of tail risks, the abundance of information, competing objectives, complexity and uncertainty in a timely manner.
Field-building: We strengthen research coordination and policy decisions by building a Geneva-based community of longtermist international civil servants and researchers to share knowledge and exchange strategic insights.
Research: We seek to understand and improve long-term policymaking by synthesising research, formalizing system dynamics and empirically testing tools and hypotheses in policy contexts.
Current projects include a table-top exercise on pandemic preparedness for the ecosystem of the UN Biological Weapons Convention; building a Geneva-based network of long-term focused international civil servants & GCR governance researchers; and writing working papers operationalizing what it might take for public policymaking to benefit the long-term future. See here fo...
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