Project summary

How should you allocate resources given moral uncertainty? Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool allows you to explore answers to this important question. 

This tool could be useful for donor advising. However, the beta version of the tool is complex in ways that may make it challenging for such users. Some, for instance, may not be familiar with the normative principles that feature in the tool; others may not know how to specify their credences in particular worldviews. 

With additional funding, we could enhance the tool to make it easier for users to quickly get practical guidance from the tool given their attitudes. This could take the form of a brief quiz about how the user would prefer to handle informative tradeoffs, which would suggest how their profile should be configured. In addition, with more funding we could streamline the UI, provide richer documentation around key components of the tool, and create more detailed walkthroughs for users who want to take deep dives into their uncertainties.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The tool aims to adapt the tool to make it more accessible to users, including donors who may be less familiar with theoretical debates in the EA community, and those who are advising them. 

We aim to do this through various enhancements to the tool, such as:

• A simple ‘quiz’ for users to indicate their normative views

• Simplifications to the interface to make it less intimidating for new users, without removing functionality for advanced users

• Improving documentation to guide users through the tool
  

How will this funding be used?

Funding will cover staff time (Derek Shiller and Arvo Muñoz Morán) to work on the extensions. We are asking for funding to cover up to 1 month of total staff time to work on this project.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

The Worldview Investigations Team is Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Muñoz Morán, and Derek Shiller; it’s overseen by David Moss, Principal Research Director. 

The Worldview Investigations Team previously published the CURVE sequence, introducing the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model, to model the expected impact of interventions under uncertainty and recently published, a Portfolio Builder Tool, as well as the Moral Parliament Tool, aimed at informing judgements about resource allocations based on empirical, decision-theoretic and moral uncertainty. 

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

Given our track record developing this and other tools, we are confident that we would be able to successfully implement these new additions to the tools. 

Two closely related possible failure modes involve a failure of product-market fit.

• One is that there are no interested users of a simpler product. We are relatively confident that this is not the case based on previous conversations with prospective users, who expressed interest in using the tool for donor advising, but suggested the current tool was too complex for them to use with their donors.

• A second is that our changes fail to make the tool sufficiently easy for users to use. We will endeavor to mitigate this possibility through further consultations and testing with potential users.

In both cases there is little risk of harm actively resulting from these failure modes, only a waste of resources, due to the tool receiving no additional uptake.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

We are not receiving any additional dedicated funding for this project.