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This is: Crucial questions for longtermists, published by MichaelA on the AI Alignment Forum.
This post was written for Convergence Analysis. It introduces a collection of “crucial questions for longtermists”: important questions about the best strategies for improving the long-term future. This collection is intended to serve as an aide to thought and communication, a kind of research agenda, and a kind of structured reading list.
Introduction
The last decade saw substantial growth in the amount of attention, talent, and funding flowing towards existential risk reduction and longtermism. There are many different strategies, risks, organisations, etc. to which these resources could flow. How can we direct these resources in the best way? Why were these resources directed as they were? Are people able to understand and critique the beliefs underlying various views - including their own - regarding how best to put longtermism into practice?
Relatedly, the last decade also saw substantial growth in the amount of research and thought on issues important to longtermist strategies. But this is scattered across a wide array of articles, blogs, books, podcasts, videos, etc. Additionally, these pieces of research and thought often use different terms for similar things, or don’t clearly highlight how particular beliefs, arguments, and questions fit into various bigger pictures. This can make it harder to get up to speed with, form independent views on, and collaboratively sculpt the vast landscape of longtermist research and strategy.
To help address these issues, this post collects, organises, highlights connections between, and links to sources relevant to a large set of the “crucial questions” for longtermists.[1] These are questions whose answers might be “crucial considerations” - that is, considerations which are “likely to cause a major shift of our view of interventions or areas”.
We collect these questions into topics, and then progressively then progressively break “top-level questions” down into the lower-level “sub-questions” that feed into them. For example, the topic “Optimal timing of work and donations” includes the top-level question “How will ‘leverage over the future” change over time?’, which is broken down into (among other things) “How will the neglectedness of longtermist causes change over time?” We also link to Google docs containing many relevant links and notes.
What kind of questions are we including?
The post A case for strategy research visualised the “research spine of effective altruism” as follows:
This post can be seen as collecting questions relevant to the “strategy” level.
One could imagine a version of this post that “zooms out” to discuss crucial questions on the “values” level, or questions about cause prioritisation as a whole. This might involve more emphasis on questions about, for example, population ethics, the moral status of nonhuman animals, and the effectiveness of currently available global health interventions. But here we instead (a) mostly set questions about morality aside, and (b) take longtermism as a starting assumption.[2]
One could also imagine a version of this post that “zooms in” on one specific topic we provide only a high-level view of, and that discusses that in more detail than we do. This could be considered to be work on “tactics”, or on “strategy” within some narrower domain. An example of something like that is the post Clarifying some key hypotheses in AI alignment. That sort of work is highly valuable, and we’ll provide many links to such work. But the scope of this post itself will be restricted to the relatively high-level questions, to keep the post manageable and avoid readers (or us) losing sight of the forest for the trees.[3]
Finally, we’re mostly focused on:
Questions about which different longtermists hav...
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