As noted by Sam Nolan here:
GiveWell's cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) of top charities are often considered the gold standard. However, they still have room for improvement. One such improvement is the quantification of uncertainty.
Why does GiveWell not provide lower and upper estimates for the cost-effectiveness of its top charities?
Hello! Thanks for showing interest in my post.
First of all, I don't represent GiveWell or anyone else but myself, so all of this is more or less speculation.
My best guess as why GiveWell does not quantify uncertainty in their estimates is because the technology to do this is still somewhat primitive. The most mature candidate I see is Causal, but even then it's difficult to identify how one might do something like have multiple parallel analyses of the same program but in different countries. GiveWell has a lot of requirements that their host plaftorm needs t ohave. Google Sheets has the benefit that it can be used, understood, and edited by anyone. I'm currently working on Squiggle with QURI to make sweeten the deal to quantifying uncertainty explicitly, but there's a long way to go before it becomes somehing that could be readily understood and trusted to be stable like Google Sheets.
On a second note, I would also say that providing lower and upper estimates for cost-effectiveness for its top charities wouldn't actually be that valuable, in the sense that it doesn't influence any real world decisions. I know that I decided to spend hours making the GiveDirectly quantification but in truth, the information gained from it directly is extremely little. The main reason I did it is that it makes a great proof of concept for usage in non-GiveWell fields which need it much more.
There are two reasons why there is so little information gained from it:
I see much more value in quantifying uncertainty when we might expect the uncertainty to be much larger, for instance, when dealing with moral uncertainty, or animal welfare/longtermist interventions.
Wildly guessing, but I don't think it's a technological issue.
Givewell does publish upper and lower estimates for some of their analyses, at least they did for malnutrition interventions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IdZLSBgEK46vc7cX9C7KnFgUcOk_M0UIYJ8go_DrvS0/edit#gid=1468241237 see at the bottom, 4x to 19x cash.
Many of their CEAs (e.g. new incentives) are just one column. Even for the ones that have one column per country, they could have multiple sheets for upper and lower bounds.
I agree with your second point, I think GiveWell's missio... (read more)