AB

Alexander_Berger

CEO @ Open Philanthropy
1238 karmaJoined Nov 2014

Comments
30

FWIW I think I'm an example of Type 1 (literally, in Lorenzo's data) and I also agree that abstractly more of Type 2 would be helpful (but I think there are various tradeoffs and difficulties that make it not straightforwardly clear what to do about it). 

Exciting news! I worked closely with Zach at Open Phil before he left to be interim CEO of EV US, and was sad to lose him, but I was happy for EV at the time, and I'm excited now for what Zach will be able to do at the helm of CEA.

Great to hear about finding such a good fit, thanks for sharing!

Hi Dustin :)

FWIW I also don't particularly understand the normative appeal of democratizing funding within the EA community. It seems to me like the common normative basis for democracy would tend to argue for democratizing control of resources in a much broader way, rather than within the self-selected EA community. I think epistemic/efficiency arguments for empowering more decision-makers within EA are generally more persuasive, but wouldn't necessarily look like "democracy" per se and might look more like more regranting, forecasting tournaments, etc.

Just wanted to say that I thought this post was very interesting and I was grateful to read it.

Just wanted to comment to say I thought this was very well done, nice work! I agree with Charles that replication work like this seems valuable and under-supplied.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it to others!

In case of of interest to EA forum folks, I wrote a long tweet thread with more substance on what I learned from it and remaining questions I have here: https://twitter.com/albrgr/status/1559570635390562305

Thanks MHR. I agree that one shouldn't need to insist on statistical significance, but if GiveWell thinks that the actual expected effect is ~12% of the MK result, then I think if you're updating on a similarly-to-MK-powered trial, you're almost to the point of updating on a coinflip because of how underpowered you are to detect the expected effect.

I agree it would be useful to do this in a more formal bayesian framework which accurately characterizes the GW priors. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the conclusions was that I'm misinterpreting GiveWell's current views, or that it's hard to articulate a formal prior that gets you from the MK results to GiveWell's current views.

Thanks, appreciate it! I sympathize with this for some definition of low FWIW: "I have an intuition that low VSLs are a problem and we shouldn't respect them" but I think it's just a question of what the relevant "low" is.

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