What we will do

QURI researches systematic practices to specify and estimate the most important parameters for the most important or scalable decisions. Research areas include forecasting, epistemics, evaluations, ontology, and estimation. We emphasize technological solutions that can heavily scale in the next 5 to 30 years.

Why?

We believe that humanity’s success in the next few hundred years will lie intensely on its ability to coordinate and make good decisions. If important governmental and philanthropic bodies become significantly more effective, this will make society far more resilient to many kinds of challenges ahead.

Don’t recent failures of governments demonstrate that all organizational decision making is hopeless?

No. There have been setbacks very recently (Brexit, Trump, COVID challenges), but many successes as well (Many other world leaders, OpenPhil, Gates Foundation). In the long-term, institutions will still matter, and we don’t think they are hopeless.

Do we actually think innovation will help here?

This isn’t clear, but there is promising evidence.

• The internet is still very young and promising.
• The recent forecasting literature is highly promising and still very early. See the work around Superforecasting, for example.
• Technology is just emerging (last ~10 years) to allow people to do complex probabilistic reasoning. See recent probabilistic programming languages and simulation systems.
• AI is advancing quickly. It’s quite possible it can be useful for strategic decisions if harnessed well.

What kinds of things might QURI do in the next 10 years?

• Make open source probabilistic tooling for improved analyst decision making.
• Run quick experiments on systematic forecasting techniques.
• Offer ongoing services to:
  • Verify the decision making, modeling, and estimation of other groups.
  • Make useful forecasts on-demand.
• Organize idealistic initiatives to show and manage large sets of forecasts for how the future may go.
• Help set up a rubric for Effective Altruist projects, a committee to review projects on this rubric, and a financial prize structure for those with projects that get rated well.
• Help formalize and organize a long list of precise definitions about global risk and risk factors.
• Write research reports outlining expectations and opportunities in the fields of forecasting and decision making.