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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I have done some work on this, e.g,. Simple estimation examples in Squiggle and Five slightly more hardcore Squiggle models. Overall I'd say that e.g., a Fermi estimates around how valuable going vegan is compared to donating to effective charities is doable (calculate number of animals eaten, multiply by elasticity of production, compare against an estimate of value of effective charity per dollar. For some of these: this post might be relevant).
However, estimation is time-consuming and somewhat expensive, so my sense is that it's more meaningful for things larger than individual acts, e.g., how valuable would [random $1M intervention] be. Because for larger interventions, you are spending a smaller % of the time on the estimation.
That's my 2cts.