All of Alexander_Gabriel's Comments + Replies
I might well donate to this. You've got a good framework, which is that long-run impacts are important but tough to know. I agree with investigating all five of these topics and with changing institutions to address unknown future risks. That seems at least as likely to work as direct mitigation of known ones. Your comment on the relative importance of different kinds of meta-research for the far future also seems spot on.
Some smaller points:
I'm with you on immigration but for different reasons. I don't see why increasing GDP is particularly great for max...
Quantifiable vs. Not (currently)
although it might be better to say
Decent Estimate vs. I (We?) Have Not Even a Qualitative Clue
The latter does seem to contain (the most?) important causes, so winnowing the former is limited as a strategy
Second, rankings of quantified causes may not be obvious since you must decide, say, between nearby and far-away folks. But sane rankings will overlap and so having two categories seems sound.
I would be interested if anyone has ideas on how to rate the effectiveness of political advocacy.
and there's Paul Christiano's distinc...
I like the main point here. I'd suggest that having a series of concentric "rings" around yourself for local, regional and global charity is in a sense more "logical" than an arbitrary discrete jump from spending money on yourself to global charity. But a counterargument would be that people just don't think like this and in practice things work out to a dichotomy of me vs. not me.