The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) exists to develop and promote rigorous academic research into issues that arise in response to the question “What should an agent do with a given amount of resources, insofar as her aim is to do the most good?”. The investigation of these issues constitutes the enterprise that we call global priorities research. It naturally draws upon central themes in (in particular) the fields of economics and philosophy; the Institute is interdisciplinary between these two academic fields. This report provides a brief summary of GPI’s key activities and progress over the past academic year.

Introduction

GPI is a young research institute, formally established in early 2018. By the end of 2018, we had hired our first postdocs, and settled on an initial research focus of “longtermism”: roughly, the idea that the most cost-effective opportunities to do good are matters of influencing the course of the very far future, on timescales of thousands or even millions of years, rather than focussing on how things go (say) within our own lifetimes.

During 2019-20, we have driven the organisation forward across three key dimensions: conducting our own research, building a network of scholars based elsewhere with similar interests, and establishing the internal culture and processes for a healthy and productive organisation. Key features of our progress on each of these aspects are outlined below. 

The major external influence of the year has of course been the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning we have worked remotely from March 2020 onwards. Compared to many other organisations, the nature of our work makes GPI relatively unaffected by the pandemic, but there have of course been effects. Internally, we are mindful of the subtle but potentially powerful effects of remote working on idea-sharing, team cohesion and staff well-being, particularly in the case of integrating new starters to the organisation. The more tangible effects have been on our external engagement activities, discussed more below.

Going forward, our key foci for the coming year include:

• Continuing to develop a solid body of research on longtermism, including (but certainly not limited to) exploration of issues related to institutions and political structures,
• Establishing GPI’s economics team,
• Clarifying GPI’s approach to internal prioritisation among possible research projects, and
• Establishing best practice on diversity across all GPI activities.

Over the course of the year, GPI was granted GBP 2.5m by the Open Philanthropy Project, and received donations totalling GBP 0.6m from a number of other private donors. I would like to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank all these parties for their crucial and generous support.

1. Research

At the start of the 2019/20 academic year, GPI researchers collectively had 11 working papers already posted on the GPI website. Our key goals for the year were to push these through to journal publication where suitable, and simultaneously to develop the next round of new research to the working paper stage. 

Collectively, by September 2020 we had four papers accepted for publication, two with “revise and resubmit” status, and four more under review. We also published an additional three new working papers on the GPI website. This represents significant progress towards establishing new longtermist themes in the academic literature. We also published an updated version of our research agenda.

Key outputs include the following:

• “The case for strong longtermism" (Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill). R&R. This paper sets out the argument for longtermism, building on earlier work by others (particularly Nick Bostrom and Nick Beckstead).
• “The Asymmetry, uncertainty, and the long term” (Teru Thomas). R&R. Standard discussions of extinction risk assume a total utilitarian approach to population ethics, according to which one should maximise (expected) total welfare. This paper investigates how an approach to population ethics that incorporates “the asymmetry” (roughly, the view that while we are not required to create additional good lives, we are required to refrain from creating additional bad lives) should treat cases involving risk. As a key application, it considers what responses such a view should recommend to extinction risk.
• “A paradox for tiny probabilities and enormous values” (Nick Beckstead and Teru Thomas). Published as GPI working paper. One of the disturbing features of the case for longtermism is that it arguably hinges on a decision theory that is “reckless” (or “fanatical”), recommending gambles involving arbitrarily tiny probabilities of gaining sufficiently enormous value over near-certainty of much smaller but still highly significant value. This paper investigates the prospects for finding a decision theory that is not “fanatical” in this sense.
• “Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory” (Christian Tarsney). Published as GPI working paper; under review. This paper develops a proposal for a particular decision theory that is somewhat more immune to fanaticism than expected utility theory: specifically, taking stochastic dominance to be sufficient and necessary condition for one gamble being better than another. Tarsney argues that the apparently unpalatable features of this approach are significantly mitigated once background uncertainty is taken into account.
• “Moral demands and the far future” (Andreas Mogensen). Accepted at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. This paper argues that the usual discussion of demandingness in the context of utilitarianism is significantly altered if due account is taken of axiological longtermism.

We are excited to welcome four new postdoctoral researchers (Jacob Barrett (philosophy), Loren Fryxell (economics), Benjamin Tereick (economics) and David Thorstad (philosophy)), all starting around October 2020. This represents a near-doubling of the size of GPI’s research team, and we are looking forward to making correspondingly faster progress on our research agenda (particularly in economics, where we previously had no postdoctoral researchers).

2. Academic outreach

GPI aims to serve as a global hub both for scholars with existing interests in global priorities research, and for those who are interested in making forays into this area. Key vehicles for this include a regular series of workshops, a summer program for early career researchers and hosting academic visitors.

As above, this was the area of our activities that was hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. To some extent this was a matter of choice: rather than try to simulate in remote form all the external-facing events that we would normally run in in-person format, we took the decision to shift our focus somewhat towards those activities that were relatively unaffected by the requirements of remote working (ie, largely, internal research activities).

While we were able to hold one workshop before the pandemic (in December 2019), we cancelled workshops that we had originally planned for March and June 2020, as well as our summer programme for early career researchers (the Early Career Conference Programme). We postponed two distinguished lectures and several planned academic visits. A small number of external visitors joined us remotely in summer 2020, regularly joining the remote events that by then constituted the bread-and-butter interactions among GPI’s own researchers.

All planned participants in the 2020 Early Career Conference Programme have been invited to participate in the 2021 programme without re-application. For the remainder of the pandemic, we will make heavier use of videoconferencing technology in order to continue with something more closely resembling our normal programme of external-facing research activities, so that our enterprise of building a researcher network is not too significantly set back.

3. Growing the organisation

As a young organisation, GPI is still very much in its formative stage. We are committed to establishing internal norms, culture and processes that are conducive to mission focus, productivity and staff well-being. Accordingly, this year we have

• Continued to experiment with innovative formats for internal research meetings,
• Researched and begun to embed best practice in line management, as it applies to a research organisation,
• Begun investigation of using more sophisticated metrics to track GPI’s progress and impact,
• Begun to establish a comprehensive package of onboarding materials and activities for new hires, and
• Established a regular and varied programme of internal social events.

Diversity deserves special comment. GPI operates at the intersection of environments each of which is significantly dominated by white males: the academic fields of economics and philosophy on the one hand, and the effective altruism community on the other. Relatedly, GPI itself shares this feature. We are committed to ensuring both that people of all characteristics feel comfortable at GPI (whether as staff members, visitors or participants in our events), and that the enterprise of global priorities research does not lose out on talent as a result of underrepresentation of these groups. Over the course of the year, we have conducted extensive initial research into best practice to address both of these issues. We will continue this process into the coming year, aiming to draw up an extensive list of diversity-promoting measures that GPI is in a position to take in the course of its activities (eg in hiring and outreach activities, in steering office atmosphere and in organising workshops).

Past annual reports:

• GPI Annual Report 2019