Thanks for the write-up! I appreciate the orientation towards simplicity and directness of value quantification (including uncertainty) and the overall mindset and spirit of the processes that this induces in people’s minds.
I am wondering why I am not actually surprised that I don’t see people (esp. EAs, and including myself) doing this more. I would expect some of the (assumed) reasons to be simple to state and (in principle) overcome (e.g. lack of skills, not as valued in culture, inadequate epistemic habits, …) and some to be complex and hard (bias towards quantifiable parts of the model, estimation issues with long-tailed distributions, various elephants in the brains or social/cultural dynamics, robustness, ..). In particular, I would expect some hard obstacles or downsides to actually exist as it seems to me that some people whose epistemics, agency and models of the world I highly respect use quantitative estimates way less they could, at least in some domains. (In particular I assume they don’t lack skill or epistemics in general.)
What is your take on why people may not want to use this (or a similar) quantitative framework for speculative interventions (or some types of projects)?
Thanks for the write-up! I appreciate the orientation towards simplicity and directness of value quantification (including uncertainty) and the overall mindset and spirit of the processes that this induces in people’s minds.
I am wondering why I am not actually surprised that I don’t see people (esp. EAs, and including myself) doing this more.
I would expect some of the (assumed) reasons to be simple to state and (in principle) overcome (e.g. lack of skills, not as valued in culture, inadequate epistemic habits, …) and some to be complex and hard (bias towards quantifiable parts of the model, estimation issues with long-tailed distributions, various elephants in the brains or social/cultural dynamics, robustness, ..).
In particular, I would expect some hard obstacles or downsides to actually exist as it seems to me that some people whose epistemics, agency and models of the world I highly respect use quantitative estimates way less they could, at least in some domains. (In particular I assume they don’t lack skill or epistemics in general.)
What is your take on why people may not want to use this (or a similar) quantitative framework for speculative interventions (or some types of projects)?