EA - How to evaluate relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts? An update on research methodology & grantmaking of FP Climate by jackva

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to evaluate relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts? An update on research methodology & grantmaking of FP Climate, published by jackva on May 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Published on May 26, 2023 5:30 PM GMT1/ Introduction 2/ The value proposition and mission of FP Climate 3/ Methodological choices and their underlying rationale 4/ Projects 5/ Grantmaking 7/ Conclusion AcknowledgmentsWe recently doubled our full-time climate team (hi Megan!), and we are just going through another doubling (hiring a third researcher, as well as a climate communications manager, job ad for the latter coming soon, for now reach out to [email protected]).Apart from getting a bulk rate for wedding cake, we thought this would be a good moment to update on our progress and what we have in the pipeline for the next months, both in terms of research to be released as well as grantmaking with the FP Climate Fund and beyond.As discussed in the next section, If you are not interested in climate, but in EA grantmaking research in general, we think it still might be interesting reading. Being part of Founders Pledge and the effective altruist endeavor at large, we continually try to build tools that are useful for applications outside the narrow cause area work – for example, some of the methodology work on impact multipliers has also been helpful for work in other areas, such as global catastrophic risks (here, as well as FP's Christian Ruhl's upcoming report on the nuclear risk landscape) and air pollution. Another way to put this is that we think of our climate work as one example of an effective altruist research and grantmaking program in a “high-but-not-maximal-uncertainty” environment, facing and attacking similar epistemic and methodological problems as, say, work on great power war, or risk-neutral current generations work. We will come back to this throughout the piece.In what follows, this update is organized as follows: We first describe the fundamental value proposition and mission of FP Climate (Section 2). We then discuss, at a high level, the methodological principles that flow from this mission (Section 3), before making this much more concrete with the discussion of three of the furthest developed research projects putting this into action (Section 4). This is the bulk of this methodology-focused-update. We then briefly discuss grantmaking plans (Section 5) and backlog (Section 6) before concluding (Section 7).As part of Founders Pledge’s research team, the fundamental goal of FP Climate is to provide donors interested in maximizing the impact of their climate giving with a convenient vehicle to do so – the Founders Pledge Climate Fund. Crucially, and this is often misunderstood, our goal is not to serve arbitrary donor preferences but rather to guide donors to the most impactful opportunities available.. Taking caring about climate as given, we seek to answer the effective altruist question of what to prioritize.We are conceiving of FP Climate as a research-based grantmaking program to find and fund the best opportunities to reduce climate damage.We believe that at the heart of this effort has to be a credible comparative methodology to estimate relative expected impact, fit for purpose to the field of climate where a layer of uncertainties about society, economy, techno-economic factors, and the climate system, as well as a century-spanning global decarbonization effort. This is so because we are in a situation where causal effects and theories of change are often indirect and uncertainty is often irreducible on relevant time-frames (we discuss this more in our recent 80K Podcast (throughout links to 80K link to specific sections of the transcript), as well as Volts, and in our Changing Landscape report).While we have been building toward...