A research agenda for the Global Priorities Institute

Abstract

This research agenda, composed by researchers at the Global Priorities Institute (GPI), outlines the key areas of inquiry for the organization, with the primary aim of promoting rigorous, scientific approaches to determining which actions can do the most good in the world. The agenda is structured around the “longtermism paradigm,” which emphasizes the importance of actions’ long-term consequences, especially regarding the far future. The authors argue that maximizing the expected value of the very long-run future, rather than focusing solely on short-term effects, may necessitate a more radical approach to global prioritisation. The paper identifies a number of specific areas of inquiry, including the articulation and evaluation of longtermism, the expected value of continued human existence, mitigating catastrophic risk, other avenues for leveraging the vastness of the future, intergenerational governance, economic indices for longtermists, moral uncertainty for longtermists, and the long-term status of interventions scoring highly on short-term metrics. It then discusses a range of general issues in global prioritisation that transcend a long-term focus, including decision-theoretic issues, epistemological issues, discounting, diversification and hedging, distributions of cost-effectiveness, modelling altruism, altruistic coordination, and individual vs institutional actors. – AI-generated abstract.