Diminishing Returns on Existential-Level Threats

I posted a vague suggestion as a comment to the Lifeboat blog:

When considering what problem to work on, one question is "how many other people are working on this problem"? If the answer is "a lot", you may stay away because of the Law of Diminishing Returns. (This is only partly mitigated by the fact that if a lot of other people agree that P is an important problem and are working on it by doing S, that somewhat increases the chances that your assessment that "P is an important problem and S is a good solution" is correct.)

In the course of figuring out where to spend resources, people and organizations like the Lifeboat Foundation are presumably tracking who else is working on what problems and how many resources are being spent by other organizations. Ideally, the Lifeboat Foundation should publish their order-of-magnitude estimates so that other people deciding what projects to work on can use that data as well.

Self-interested people have the same problem, of course. If there are already five companies selling apple-flavored toothpaste, you might not want your startup to sell the same thing. If no one is selling apple-flavored toothpaste, you might consider selling it, with the caveat that you'd first want to make sure there isn't a *really good reason* why no company has attempted to sell apple-flavored toothpaste. The difference between self-interested people and an (ideal) nonprofit is that self-interested people have less incentive to share their research with each other.

I don't expect an enthusiastic reception. Apart from everything else, there are strong political reasons why people and organizations (including you and me) don't like to publicly share all the Wild Guesses that inevitably make up the foundations of our long-range strategies.