Cause selection: a flowchart [link]

By Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2015-09-10T11:52 (+12)

At the Global Priorities Project, we’re interested in helping people to choose between different focus areas for helping the world. A complication is that people can have very different background assumptions, which makes it hard to give uniform recommendations. On the other hand, discussing the assumptions directly may not help if it’s unclear how they are decision-relevant.

To address this, we’ve been working on a flowchart which maps out how different ethical and empirical assumptions can lead us to support different areas. We hope this can serve as a tool to help people clarify their own thinking, understand where others may be coming from, or identify which questions most need further thought.

We've recently released this, and I thought it was particularly relevant to share on the forum given the theme of this month's blogging carnival. On our website you can find the flowchart in a couple of different formats, and more information about it. Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, who did much of the work on the chart.