Yes, indeed, what we call 'confidence interval' in our report is better described by the term 'credible interval'.
We chose to use with the term 'confidence interval' because my impression is that this is the more commonly used and understood terminology within EA specifically, but also global health in general - even though it is not technically entirely accurate.
Thanks, David! Nice post, and interesting to see a range of options pointed out by different people.
Some suggestions touch upon topics we've done research on at Rethink Priorities. For example, we have a report on charter cities and one on improving weather forecasting for agriculture for anyone who's interested in more detail. We're also planning to publish something on improving scientific research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa soon.
Hi Oscar, Thanks for your comment. I've actually read your post and thought your points are valid! The reason why it is not mentioned in our report is that we agreed with GiveWell that this aspect of discount rates would be out of scope for this particular report (which does not mean it is not important).
Thanks a lot for your elaborate and thoughtful comment! A quick reaction to your thoughts:
Yes, you're right, that could definitely be the case. We have not looked into that.
Good examples with auction theory and the deferred acceptance algorithm! I've been frustrated for a while that my municipality doesn't want to try out the deferred acceptance mechanism for school/kindergarten choice :)
Thank you so much for sharing additional literature! I really appreciate the effort.
As far as I can tell from a skimming these articles, they seem to be mostly theoretical or modeling studies.
In our report, we mainly focused on the empirical (and especially the (quasi-)experimental) literature in our report because (1) we wanted to understand how well prizes work in practice, and (2) our impression was that the theoretical literature on prizes seemed somewhat too removed from the way that typical large prizes are implemented in real life.
Do you have any advice for individuals who are interested in starting a charity, but who cannot or do not want to go through the CE incubation program (e.g. because their application was rejected, or because they didn't find the time to participate in the program, or because they do not fully agree with CE's approach)?
I agree this is most likely a lower bound - we tried to emphasize this in the report.
I was not aware of the theory that fungal infections are the primary cause of cancer - many thanks for sharing!