# Elicit's Mission Is to Scale Up Good Reasoning

**Andreas Stuhlmüller**  
*Cofounder & CEO*

Oct 2, 2023

### In brief:

- Our mission is to **scale up good reasoning.**
- Good reasoning is reasoning that reliably arrives at true beliefs and good decisions.
- Good reasoning is rare but essential for government, companies, and research.
- Advanced AI systems are an opportunity to radically scale up good reasoning.
- Getting this right is crucial for guiding the transition to a society that runs on machine thinking.

## What is good reasoning?

We want people, organizations, and machines to arrive at:

- True beliefs
- Good decisions

_Good reasoning_ is reasoning that reliably leads to these outcomes.

## The status quo

Right now, good reasoning is rare. Bad reasoning is everywhere:

- Governments allocate resources for pandemics and similar risks based on biases, political pressures, or vested interests.
- Courts judge cases based on selective, fallacious, or unfair use of evidence, arguments, and law.
- Companies decide their strategies based on overconfidence, underestimation, or complacency.
- Investors allocate capital based on herd mentality, hype, or fear.
- Researchers do work that is unimpactful or harmful, and manipulate or hide data.

We know that better reasoning is possible. We already see glimpses of it in rare cases:

- [GiveWell](https://www.givewell.org/?ref=blog.elicit.com)’s and [OpenPhil](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/?ref=blog.elicit.com)’s reports that evaluate the evidence for and cost-effectiveness of charitable interventions.
- [Cochrane](https://www.cochrane.org/?ref=blog.elicit.com)’s systematic reviews that aggregate the medical literature and reflect on what the findings are.
- Some of the work done by [Elizabeth Van Nostrand](https://acesounderglass.com/?ref=blog.elicit.com) (on various medical questions), [Zvi Mowshowitz](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/?ref=blog.elicit.com) (on Covid), [Scott Alexander](https://www.astralcodexten.com/?ref=blog.elicit.com) (misc), and [Holden Karnofsky](https://www.cold-takes.com/?ref=blog.elicit.com) (misc) who do deep dives on topics, try to dig up the raw data, build mental models, and figure out what’s actually true.
- [Superforecasters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster?ref=blog.elicit.com) who start with outside view base rates, then apply corrections based on the particulars of the situation.
- The [IPCC](https://www.ipcc.ch/?ref=blog.elicit.com)’s synthesis of the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts, and its policy recommendations.

## The better world

We want to live in a world where good reasoning is applied much more widely:

- Researchers do work that addresses important and neglected problems, with high standards for evidence and conclusions.
- Governments allocate resources for pandemics, AI risk, and other risks based on rigorous, evidence-based analyses.
- Courts judge cases based on careful, logical, and fair evaluation of evidence, arguments, and law.
- Companies decide their strategies based on accurate, reasoned assessment of customers, competitors, and market.
- Investors allocate capital based on financial analysis, growth potential, risk profile, and investment goals and strategies.

Good reasoning should be the default, not the exception.

## Scaling up good reasoning with AI

We think it’s likely that, over the next 2-20 years, AI systems will have the capacity to do human-like reasoning at superhuman quality and quantity. This could lead to a radical shift in our society, with most thinking happening in machines instead of human brains.

This presents both an opportunity and a need:

- **Opportunity:** Automation could make it extremely cheap to apply good reasoning, enabling a massive scale-up.
- **Need:** It’s not obvious that all this automated thinking will be deployed well by default. It’s easier to train AI systems to generate outputs that look good (e.g. persuasive, impressive, entertaining, helpful-seeming) than outputs that are well-reasoned and robustly helpful. This is especially bad because good decision-making is unusually important during the transition to a society that runs on machine thinking.

Our mission is to direct machine thinking towards supporting true beliefs and good (beneficial) decisions, using the opportunity and addressing the need. [Join us](/content/careers?ref=blog.elicit.com)!