Why I’ve come to think global priorities research is more important than I thought

We’ve rated global priorities research (GPR) as one of our top priority areas for some time, but over the last couple of years I’ve come to see it as even more promising.
The field of GPR is about rigorously investigating what the most important global problems are, how we should compare them, and what kinds of interventions best address them. For example, how to compare the relative importance of tackling global health vs. existential risks.
It also considers questions such as how much weight to put on longtermism and the value of future generations, or whether we should give now or later.
I’d be keen to see more investment in the field, both in absolute terms and relative to the portfolio of effort within the effective altruism community.
Here are some reasons why. Each reason is weak by itself, but taken together they’ve caused me to shift my views.
Positive recent progress
I think the Global Priorities Institute has made good progress, which makes me optimistic about further work.
One form of work is putting existing ideas about global priorities on a firmer intellectual footing, of which I think Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill’s strong longtermism paper is a great example. This kind of work is useful because it encourages the ideas to be taken seriously within academia, and also helps to uncover new flaws in them.

















