About us
Global Priorities Institute, 2019
Abstract
GPI’s vision and mission. There are many problems in the world. Because resources are scarce, it is impossible to solve them all. An actor seeking to improve the world as much as possible therefore needs to prioritise, both among the problems themselves and (relatedly) among means for tackling them. This task of prioritisation requires careful analysis. Some opportunities to do good are vastly more cost-effective than others. But identifying which are the better opportunities requires grappling with a host of complex questions - questions about how to evaluate different outcomes, how to predict the effects of actions, how to act in the face of uncertainty, how to identify more practically usable proxies for the criteria we ultimately care about, and many other topics. Within this broad class of topics lie a crucial few that are currently relatively neglected with academia. The Global Priorities Institute exists to develop and promote rigorous, scientific approaches to the question of how appropriately motivated actors can do good more effectively, with a particular focus on areas that are not already well addressed by existing academic research.