Owen Cotton-Barratt Prioritisation is mostly about working out how to trade different resources off against one another. Prioritisation problems come at different scales: for individuals, for companies or organisations, for the world at large. At the Global Priorities Project we’re mostly interested in the large-scale questions. But we sometimes have something to say about smaller […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt has just released a Future of Humanity Institute technical report on the strategic considerations in the timing of work on catastrophic risks such as artificial intelligence- “Allocating risk mitigation across time”. From his abstract: This article is about priority-setting for work aiming to reduce existential risk. Its chief claim is that all else […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt Owen presents his research into uncertainty in a health context and time-discounting at the 2014 Brocher Summer Academy on Ethical Issues in Global Population Health. Looks at different reasons we might discount future health benefits, and explores how discounting for uncertainty differs from discounting for time preference. You can watch the talk here. You […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt and Sebastian Farquhar Self-driving cars are coming. A review of existing legislation by the Department for Transport, released Wednesday, said the cars could be tested legally on any roads in Britain, so long as there was a human driver in the car who could assume control and would take responsibility for any accident. Google’s prototypes […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt and Ben Todd This post was produced in collaboration with 80,000 Hours. The introduction, below is also available on 80,000 Hour’s website. The detailed methodological considerations supporting it are below. These considerations can be easily extended to a wide range of similar applications, including the rate at which foundations spend down their reserves. […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt Over the past few months we’ve written a variety of pieces which fit together to give a picture of how we might estimate cost-effectiveness for research and similar activities. This page collects them, summarises what’s contained in each, and explains how they fit together. I gave an overview of my thinking at the Good Done […]
Max Dalton This post was written in conjunction with Giving What We Can, and first appeared on their blog. It is part of the Global Priorities Project series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. How valuable is medical research? Finding the solution to a problem in medical research is not only […]
Photo by Ramunas Geciauskas Owen Cotton-Barratt Areas of endeavour This is part of a series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. In a previous post, we investigated methodology for estimating the expected returns from working on a problem of unknown difficulty. We argued that ex ante the expected benefits should often scale […]
Photo (c) Royal Observatory Edinburgh; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation Owen Cotton-Barratt This is part of a series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. In a previous post, we investigated methodology for estimating the expected returns from working on a problem of unknown difficulty. We argued that ex ante the […]
Max Dalton Max Dalton did this work while working on a research internship with Owen Cotton-Barratt at the Global Priorities Project. It is part of our project about prioritisation under uncertainty. It interfaces with Giving What We Can in providing estimates of the cost-effectiveness of interventions in developing-world health. Summary This post examines the returns to funding […]