On February 8th and 9th around twenty leading academics and policy-makers from the UK, USA, Germany, Finland, and Sweden gathered at our workshop in Oxford to discuss governance in existential risks. This brought together a mixture of specialists in relevant subject domains, diplomats, policy experts, and researchers with broad methodological expertise in existential risk. We had […]
![By U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Maddelin Angebrand [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://globalprioritiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1024px-thumbnail-150x150.jpg)
Sebastian Farquhar and Owen Cotton-Barratt Summary Global public health remains a top contender for the best way to improve welfare through aid. Within health interventions, it is natural to allocate marginal spending to avert the most expected DALYs (disability adjusted life-years) per dollar.1 However, not all DALYs are the same and there are important differences […]
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 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 […]
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 explored how we should form subjective probabilities about chances of success of problems of unknown difficulty. This post is concerned with how to use these probabilities to estimate the expected value […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt This is the first in a series of posts which take aim at the question: how should we prioritise work on problems where we have very little idea of our chances of success. In this post we’ll see some simple models-from-ignorance which allow us to produce some estimates of the chances of success […]