Doing something to democratize randomized controlled trials (RCTs) - thereby reducing the risk involved in testing new ideas and interventions.
RCTs are a popular methodology in medicine and the social sciences. They create a safety net for the scientists (and consumers) to test that the drug works as intended and doesn't turn people into mutants.
I think using this methodology in other fields would be a high-leverage intervention. For example startups, policy-making, education, etc. Being able to try out new ideas without facing a huge downside should be a feature of every field. Big institutions already conduct similar tests before they release something. But I'm wondering how useful it would be to allow small institutions, startups, and maybe even individuals to do this.
Plus, adding an RCT into the launch pipeline of any intervention/product allows us to see the unintended consequences before they're out there. I think this would have at least been helpful for the social media companies.
Based on some googling, I've understood that RCTs are very costly. But if the reasoning makes sense, this is exactly the kind of thing others can't try out that a megaproject should.
Here's a paraphrased quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, that is relevant in this context: If people could learn from their mistakes without dying from them, well actually, that in itself would tend to fix a whole lot of problems over time. [source]
P.S. I'm thinking on working on this idea full-time in 2022. It would be very helpful to hear whatever criticism/thoughts you have - It'll help me make sure my time is effectively spent.
i was just referring to the last bullet re climate change. eg in the last IPCC report, it would have been reasonable for govts to believe that there was a >10% chance of >6C of warming and that has been true since the 1970s, without having any impact. The political response to climate change seems to be influenced by most mainstream media coverage and public opinion in some circles which it would be fair to characterise as 'very concerned' about climate change. An opinion poll suggests that 54% of British people think that climate change threatens human extinction (depending on question framing). I agree that in a rational world we want to know how bad climate change could be, but the world isn't rational.
If you're just talking about EA cause prioritisation, the cost-benefit ratio looks pretty poor to me. Wrt reducing uncertainty about climate sensitivity, you're talking costs of $100m per year to have a slim chance of pushing climate change up above AI, bio, great power war for major EA funders. Or we might find out that climate change is less pressing than we thought in which case this wouldn't make any difference to the current priorities of EA funders.
I also don't see how research on solar geoengineering could be a top pick - stratospheric aerosol injection just doesn't seem like it will get used for decades because it requires unrealistic levels of international coordination. Also, I don't think extra modelling studies on solar geo would shed much light unless we spent hundreds of millions. Climate models are very inaccurate and would provide much insight into the impacts of solar geo in the real world. There might be a case for regional solar geo research, though.
(fwiw, i really don't rate that Xu and Ramanathan paper. they're not using existential in the sense we are concerned about. They define it as "posing an existential threat to the majority of the population". The evidence they use to support their conclusions is very weak. For example, they note following the Mora et al study that currently 30% of the population is exposed to deadly heat, which would increase to 74% at 4C warming. But obviously, it is not the case that all of these people will die, just as it is not the case that 30% of the world population today is dying due to heat waves. Moreover, 4C will take until the end of the century when most people will probably be a lot richer and so will have greater access to air conditioning. Climate change of that magnitude only makes the tropics uninhabitable in the sense that the Persian Gulf is uninhabitable today. There would be great humanitarian costs in low growth agrarian economies but that is a separate question to whether climate change poses an existential risk)