Guive
Comments4
Yeah. The words "estimates" and "about" are right there in the quote. There is no pretension of certainty here, unless you think mere use of numbers amounts to pretended certainty.
But what is decision relevant is the expected value. So by best estimate do they mean expected value, or maximum likelihood estimate, or something else? To my ear, "best estimate" sounds like it means the estimate most likely to be right, and not the mean of the probability distribution. For instance, take the (B) option in "Why it can be OK to predictably lose", where you have a 1% chance of saving 1000 people, and a 99% chance of saving no one, and the choice is non-repeatable. I would think the "best estimate" of the effectiveness of option (B) is that you will save 0 lives. But what matters for decision making is the expected value which is 10 lives.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm not very familiar with GiveWell.
Richard Chappell on consequentialism, theories of well-being, and reactive vs goal-directed ethics.
Ege Erdil on AI forecasting, economics, and quantitative history.
Chad Jones on AI, risk tolerance, and growth.
Phil Trammell on growth economics (the part of his work more directly focused on philanthropy was covered in his previous appearance).
Steven Pinker (there are a lot of things that he has written that are relevant to one aspect or another of EA).
Amanda Askell on AI fine-tuning, AI moral status, and AIs expressing moral and philosophical views (she talks some about this in a video Anthropic put out).
Pablo Stafforini on the history of EA and translations of EA content.
Finally, I think it would be good to have an episode with a historian of the world wars, similar to the episode with Christopher Brown. Anthony Beevor or Stephen Kotkin, maybe.
(1) I also heard this, (2) I'm pretty sure his name is spelled "Kuhn" not "Khun".