All very interesting, and yes letâs talk more later!
One quick thing: Sorry my comment was unclearâwhen I said âprecise probabilitiesâ I meant the overall approach, which amounts to trying to quantify everything about an intervention when deciding its cost effectiveness (perhaps the post was also unclear).
I think most people in EA/âAW spaces use the general term âprecise probabilitiesâ the same way youâre describing, but perhaps there is on average a tendency toward the more scientific style of needing more specific evidence for those numbers. That wasnât necessarily true of early actors in the WAW space and I think it had some mildly unfortunate consequences.
But this makes me realize I should not have named the approach that way in the original post, and should have called it something like the âquantify as much as possibleâ approach. I think that approach requires using precise probabilitiesâsince if you allow imprecise ones you end up with a lot of things being indeterminateâbut thereâs more to it than just endorsing precise probabilities over imprecise ones (at least as Iâve seen it appear in WAW).
All very interesting, and yes letâs talk more later!
One quick thing: Sorry my comment was unclearâwhen I said âprecise probabilitiesâ I meant the overall approach, which amounts to trying to quantify everything about an intervention when deciding its cost effectiveness (perhaps the post was also unclear).
I think most people in EA/âAW spaces use the general term âprecise probabilitiesâ the same way youâre describing, but perhaps there is on average a tendency toward the more scientific style of needing more specific evidence for those numbers. That wasnât necessarily true of early actors in the WAW space and I think it had some mildly unfortunate consequences.
But this makes me realize I should not have named the approach that way in the original post, and should have called it something like the âquantify as much as possibleâ approach. I think that approach requires using precise probabilitiesâsince if you allow imprecise ones you end up with a lot of things being indeterminateâbut thereâs more to it than just endorsing precise probabilities over imprecise ones (at least as Iâve seen it appear in WAW).