LW4EA: Value of Information: Four Examples

Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...

Two crazy-ish charitable global poverty project ideas

MathiasKB🔸·2d ago·4m read

I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to! Vulture preservation as a global health intervention Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures. ...

Five Wild Animal Welfare Organizations estimate $3-8M in room for additional funding in 2027

Rethink Priorities·6d ago·7m read

Summary 1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it. 2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...

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Gambling with Biased Coins

Normal coins are approximately fair.¹ Suppose you and your friend want to gamble, and fair coins are boring, so he takes out a quarter and some gum and sticks the gum to the face of the quarter near the edge. He then offers to pay you $24 if the coin lands gum down, so long as you pay him $12 to play the game. Should you take that bet?

First, let's assume risk neutrality for the amount of money you're wagering. Your expected profit is $24p-12, where p is the probability the coin lands gum down. This is a good deal if p>.5, but a bad deal if p<.5. So... what's p? More importantly, how much should you pay to figure out p?

A Bayesian reasoner looking at this problem first tries to put a prior on p. An easy choice is a uniform distribution between 0 and 1, but there are a lot of reasons to be uncomfortable with that distribution. It might be that the gum will be more likely to be on the bottom- but it also might be more likely to be on the top. The gum might not skew the results very much- or it might skew them massively. You could choose a different prior, but you'd have trouble justifying it because you don't have any solid evidence to update on yet.²

If you had a uniform prior and no additional evidence, then the deal as offered is neutral. But before you choose to accept or reject, your friend offers you another deal- he'll flip the coin once and let you see the result before you choose to take the $12 deal, but you can't win anything on this first flip. How much should you pay to see one flip? (Full Post on LW)