It feels like more research on this issue would have the effect of gradually improving the clarity of the existential risk picture. Do you think the current picture is sufficiently unclear that most potential interventions might backfire? Given limited resources, perhaps the best path is to do targeted investigation of what appear to be the most promising interventions and stop as soon as one that seems highly unlikely to backfire is identified, or something like that.

What level of clarity is represented by a "first pass"?