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Thanks so much! I've been doing some stuff related to GTD, but haven't read the whole book -- will do so.

Great point.

I think my take is that evaluation and ranking often really makes sense for very specific goals. Otherwise you get the problem of evaluating an airplane using the metrics of a washing machine.

This post was rather short. I think if a funnel became more capacity, it would have to be clarified that it has a very particular goal in mind. In this case, the goal would be "identifying targets that could be entire nonprofits". 

We've discussed organizing cause areas that could make sense for smaller projects, but one problem with that is that the number of possible candidates in that case goes up considerably. It becomes a much messier problem to organize the space of possible options for any kind of useful work. If you have good ideas for this, please do post!

This was a fantastic post Jenny. Very insightful. Thank you!

There must be something I don't understand; I don't see a puzzle here at all. You spent a lot of time writing this up, presumably you spent a lot of time thinking about it, so I'm going to spend at least a small amount of time trying to find where our worldviews glide past each other.

Here's my take. It's  a fairly simple take, as I'm a fairly simple person. 

If someone exists, one ought to be nice to them. Certainly, one ought not to let them die--to do so would be unkind, to say the least. People who exist should have good lives--if someone doesn't have a good life or will lose their good life, this is a problem one ought to fix. So far, nothing but bog-standard moral fare. 

If someone doesn't exist, they don't exist--it's impossible to be kind or cruel to someone who doesn't exist. I don't think many would disagree on that point either. 

Now here, perhaps, is where we lose each other: if someone is going to exist, and one is aware of this fact, one should probably take preemptive steps to ensure that future person will have a good life--a life happy, fulfilling, and long. This isn't because hypothetical people have moral value, it's because we are aware in advance that the problem won't always be a hypothetical one. We can realistically foresee that unless we course correct on this destroying the biosphere project we've undertaken, people will come into existence and lead terrible, cruelly short lives.

I (and many others, I gather) aren't doing this so that more people will be born--we're doing this so that people who will be born either way live happily.

(Parenthetical aside: some people place value on the human species continuing to exist--I don't, personally; if everyone alive died that would be awful, but I don't think it'd be more awful than if there had been fourteen billion minds before seven billion died. That said, if we care at all about aesthetics I can see the aesthetic argument in favor of human survival, in that all aesthetics would die with us.)

This is a very different problem from educating women and predictably causing fewer people to exist in the first place. My value isn't people existing, my value is good long lives for those who do (or will).

Thanks a lot for writing this up! I related to a lot of this, especially to #4. I'm curious if you have any concrete advice for orienting more towards being proactive? Or is this just something that slowly happened over time?

Yeah, lasers might help at getting rid of certain kinds of junk. As you mentioned, lasers might be useful at getting rid of beta-amyloid plaque (unfortunately, plaque is probably not the right target since amyloid oligomers are likely to be a lot more important in the development of Alzheimer's). LumiThera is developing a laser system to get rid of drusen which is one of kinds of junk that causes AMD. Longecity funded an unsuccessful attempt at using lasers to eliminate lipofuscin; apparently, the organisms used in the experiment lacked lipofuscin.

My moral intuitions say that there isn’t really an objective way that I should act, however I do think there are states of the world that are objectively better than others and that this betterness ordering is determined by whatever the best version of utilitarianism is. 

So it is indeed better if I don’t give my family special treatment, but I’m not actually obligated to. There’s no rule in my opinion which says “you must make the world as good as possible”.

This is how I have always interpreted utilitarianism. Not having studied philosophy formally I’m not sure if this is a common view or if it is seen as stupid, but I feel it allows me to give my family some special treatment whilst also thinking utilitarianism is in some way “right”.

For future reference, Linch's comment was in response to a comment of mine which I deleted before Linch replied, in which I used the example of saying "Federer is the best tennis player". Sorry about that! I replaced it with a comment that tried to point at the heart of the objection; but since I disagree with the things in your reply, I'll respond here too.

I think I just disagree with your intuitions here. When someone says Obama is the best person to be president, they are presumably taking into account factors like existing political support and desire to lead, which make it plausible that Obama actually is the best person.

And when people say "X is the best fiction author ever", I think they do mean to make a claim about the literal probability that this person is, out of all the authors who ever wrote fiction, the best one. In that context, the threshold at which I'd call something a "belief" is much lower than in most contexts, but nevertheless I think that when (for example) a Shakespeare fan says it, they are talking about the proposition that nobody was greater than Shakespeare. And this is not an implausible claim, given how much more we study Shakespeare than anyone else.

(By contrast, if they said: nobody had as much latent talent as Shakespeare, then this would be clearly false).

Anyway, it seems to me that judging the best charitable intervention is much harder than judging the best author, because for the latter you only need to look at books that have already been written, whereas in the former you need to evaluate the space of all interventions, including ones that nobody has proposed yet.

Thanks for this, an interesting proposal.

Do you have a view on how this approach might compare with having a strong credence in utilitarianism and smaller but non-zero credences in other moral theories, and then acting in a way that factors in moral uncertainty, perhaps by maximising expected choiceworthiness (MEC)?

I might be off the mark, but it seems there are some similarities in that MEC can avoid extreme situations and be pluralist, although it might be a bit more prescriptive than you would like.

I think the main problem with your definition is that it doesn't allow you to be wrong. If you say "X is the best bet", then how can I disagree if you're accurately reporting information about your subjective credences? Of course, I could respond by saying "Y is the best bet", but that's just me reporting my credences back to you. And maybe we'll change our credences, but at no point in time was either of us wrong, because we weren't actually talking about the world itself.

Which seems odd, and out of line with how we use this type of language in other contexts. If I say "Mathematics is the best field to study, ex ante" then it seems like I'm making a claim not just about my own beliefs, but also about what can be reasonably inferred from other knowledge that's available; a claim which might be wrong. In order to use this interpretation, we do need some sort of implicit notion of what knowledge is available, and what can be reasonably inferred from it, but that saves us from making claims that are only about our own beliefs. (In other words, not the local map, nor the territory, but some sort of intermediate "things that we should be able to infer from human knowledge" map.)