Anyone else ever feel a strong discordance between emotional response and cognitive worldview when it comes to EA issues?
Like emotionally I’m like “save the animals! All animals deserve love and protection and we should make sure they can all thrive and be happy with autonomy and evolve toward more intelligent species so we can live together in a diverse human animal utopia, yay big tent EA…”
But logically I’m like “AI and/or other exponential technologies are right around the corner and make animal issues completely immaterial. Anything that detracts from progress on that is a distraction and should be completely and deliberately ignored. Optimally we will build an AI or other system that determines maximum utility per unit of matter, possibly including agency as a factor and quite possibly not, so that we can tile the universe with sentient simulations of whatever the answer is.”
OR, a similar discordance between what was just described and the view that we should also co-optimize for agency, diversity of values and experience, fun, decentralization, etc., EVEN IF that means possibly locking in a state of ~99.9999+percent of possible utility unrealized.
Very frustrating, I usually try to push myself toward my rational conclusion of what is best with a wide girth for uncertainty and epistemic humility, but it feels depressing, painful, and self-de-humanizing to do so.
Often people post cost-effectiveness analyses of potential interventions, which invariably conclude that the intervention could rival GiveWell's top charities. (I'm guilty of this too!) But this happens with such frequency, and I am basically never convinced that the intervention is actually competitive with GWTC. The reason is that they are comparing ex-ante cost-effectiveness (where you make a bunch of assumptions about costs, program delivery mechanisms, etc) with GiveWell's calculated ex-post cost-effectiveness (where the intervention is already delivered, so there are much fewer assumptions).
Usually, people acknowledge that ex-ante cost-effectiveness is less reliable than ex-post cost-effectiveness. But I haven't seen any acknowledgement that this systematically overestimates cost-effectiveness, because people who are motivated to try and pursue an intervention are going to be optimistic about unknown factors. Also, many costs are "unknown unknowns" that you might only discover after implementing the project, so leaving them out underestimates costs. (Also, the planning fallacy in general.) And I haven't seen any discussion of how large the gap between these estimates could be. I think it could be orders of magnitude, just because costs are in the denominator of a benefit-cost ratio, so uncertainty in costs can have huge effects on cost-effectiveness.
One straightforward way to estimate this gap is to redo a GiveWell CEA, but assuming that you were setting up a charity to deliver that intervention for the first time. If GiveWell's ex-post estimate is X and your ex-ante estimate is K*X for the same intervention, then we would conclude that ex-ante cost-effectiveness is K times too optimistic, and deflate ex-ante estimates by a factor of K.
I might try to do this myself, but I don't have any experience with CEAs, and would welcome someone else doing it.
QALY/$ for promoting zinc as a common cold intervention
Epistemic status: Fun speculation. I know nothing about public health, and grabbed numbers from the first source I could find for every step of the below. I link to the sources which informed my point estimates.
Here’s my calculation broken down into steps:
1. Health-related quality of life effect for one year of common cold -0.2
2. Common cold prevalence in the USA 1.2/yr
3. Modally 7 days of symptoms having -0.2
4. ~1.5 million QALY burden per year when aggregated across the US population
1. This is the average of estimating from the above (1e6) with what I get (2e6) when deriving the US slice of the total DALY burden from global burden of disease data showing 3% global DALYs come from URI
2. There’s probably a direct estimate out there somewhere
5. 50% probability the right zinc lozenges with proper dosing can prevent >90% of colds. This comes from here, here, and my personal experience of taking zinc lozenges ~10ish occasions.
6. 15% best case adoption scenario, from taking a log-space mean of
1. Masks 5%
2. General compliance rate 10-90%
100,000 QALYs/year is my estimate for the expected value of taking some all-or-nothing action to promote zinc lozenges (without the possibility of cheaply confirming whether they work) which successfully changes public knowledge and medical advice to promote our best-guess protocol for taking zinc.
$35 million is my estimate for how much we should be willing to spend to remain competitive with Givewell’s roughly 1 QALY/$71. This assumes a 5 year effect duration. I have no idea how much such a thing would cost but I’d guess at most 1 OOM of value is being left on the table here, so I’m a bit less bullish on Zinc than I was before calculating.
EDIT: I calculated the cost of supplying the lozenges themselves. Going off these price per lozenge, this 5 year USA supply of lozenges costs ~35 million alone. Presumably this doesn't need to
[edit: a day after posting, I think this perhaps reads more combative that I intended? It was meant to be more 'crisis of faith, looking for reassurance if it exists' than 'dunk on those crazy longtermists'. I'll leave the quick take as-is, but maybe clarification of my intentions might be useful to others]
Warning! Hot Take! 🔥🔥🔥 (Also v rambly and not rigorous)
A creeping thought has entered my head recently that I haven't been able to get rid of...
The EA move toward AI Safety and Longtermism is often based on EV calculations that show the long term future is overwhelmingly valuable, and thus is the intervention that is most cost-effective.
However, more in-depth looks at the EV of x-risk prevention (1, 2) cast significant doubt on those EV calculations, which might make longtermist interventions much less cost-effective than the most effective "neartermist" ones.
But my doubts get worse...
GiveWell estimates around $5k to save a life. So I went looking for some longtermist calculations, and I really couldn't fund any robust ones![1] Can anyone point me in some robust calculations for longtermist funds/organisations where they go 'yep, under our assumptions and data, our interventions are at least competitive with top Global Health charities'?
Because it seems to me like that hasn't been done. But if we're being EA, people with high and intractable p(doom) from AI shouldn't work on AI, they should probably EtG for Global Health instead (if we're going to be full maximise EV about everything). Like, if we're taking EA seriously, shouldn't MIRI shut down all AI operations and become a Global Health org? Wouldn't that be a strong +EV move given their pessimistic assessments of reducing xRisk and their knowledge of +EV global health interventions?
But it gets worse...
Suppose that we go, 'ok, let's take EV estimates seriously but not literally'. In which case fine, but that undermines the whole 'longtermist interventions overwhelmingly dominate EV' move t
The Happier Lives Institute have helped many people (including me) open their eyes to Subjective Wellbeing and perhaps even update us to the potential value of SWB. The recent heavy discussion (60+ comments) on their fundraising thread disheartened me. Although I agree with much of the criticism against them, the hammering they took felt at best rough and perhaps even unfair. I'm not sure exactly why I felt this way, but here are a few ideas.
* (High certainty) HLI have openly published their research and ideas, posted almost everything on the forum and engaged deeply with criticism which is amazing - more than perhaps any other org I have seen. This may (uncertain) have hurt them more than it has helped them.
* (High certainty) When other orgs are criticised or asked questions, they often don't reply at all, or get surprisingly little criticism for what I and many EAs might consider poor epistemics and defensiveness in their posts (for charity I'm not going to link to the handful I can think of). Why does HLI get such a hard time while others get a pass? Especially when HLI's funding is less than many of orgs that have not been scrutinised as much.
* (Low certainty) The degree of scrutiny and analysis of some development orgs in general like HLI seems to exceed that of AI orgs, Funding orgs and Community building orgs. This scrutiny has been intense- more than one amazing statistician has picked apart their analysis. This expert-level scrutiny is fantastic, I just wish it could be applied to other orgs as well. Very few EA orgs (at least that have been posted on the forum) produce full papers with publishable level deep statistical analysis like HLI have at least attempted to do. Does there need to be a "scrutiny rebalancing" of sorts. I would rather other orgs got more scrutiny, rather than development orgs getting less.
Other orgs might see threads like the HLI funding thread hammering and compare it with other threads where orgs are criticised and don't eng
Risk neutral grantmakers should, if they have not already, strongly consider modifying their position. If such a grantmaker has a choice of an intervention with 1000 utils of potential impact but only 1% chance of working out (10 utils in expectation), and an intervention with 10 utils of potential impact but 90% likely to work out (9 utils in expectation), I would suggest that one should go with the latter at this point where the x-risk community is hopefully still in its early days.
The reason is that having wins has value in and of itself. I think this is especially true in the x-risk domain where the path to impact is uncertain and complex. At least now, in the hopefully early days of such work, there might be significant value by just demonstrating to ourselves, and perhaps major donors on the fence on whether to become "EA/x-risk donors" and also perhaps talent wondering if EA "is for real", that we can do something.
Radar speed signs currently seem like one of the more cost effective traffic calming measures since they don't require roadwork, but they still surprisingly cost thousands of dollars.
Mass producing cheaper radar speed signs seems like a tractable public health initiative
Surprised Animal Charity Evaluators Recommended Charity Fund gives equal amounts to around a dozen charities:
https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donation-advice/recommended-charity-fund/
Obviously uncertainty's involved, but a core tenant of EA and charity evaluators is that certain charities are more effective, so Givewell's Top Charities Fund giving different amounts to only a few charities per year makes more sense to me:
https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund