Nick Bostrom on crucial considerations
Strategic analysis is especially needful when we are radically uncertain not just about some detail of some peripheral matter but about the cardinal qualities of the central things. For many key parameters, we are radically uncertain even about their sign—that is, we know not which direction of change would be desirable and which undesirable. Our ignorance might not be irremediable. The field has been little prospected, and glimmering strategic insights could still be awaiting their unearthing just a few feet beneath the surface.
What we mean by “strategic analysis” here is a search for crucial considerations: ideas or arguments with the potential to change our views not merely about the fine-structure of implementation but about the general topology of desirability. Even a single missed crucial consideration could vitiate our most valiant efforts or render them as actively harmful as those of a soldier who is fighting on the wrong side. The search for crucial considerations (which must explore normative as well as descriptive issues) will often require crisscrossing the boundaries between different academic disciplines and other fields of knowledge. As there is no established methodology for how to go about this kind of research, difficult original thinking is necessary.
—Superintelligence, Chapter 15: Crunch Time
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