I think exercises like this are incredibly underrated and that the quantitative updates to the cost-effectiveness of each charity are the most important contribution of this post. But I do think that this would benefit a lot from putting the spreadsheet correction details in a technical appendix and dedicating more of the body to a substantive review of uncertainty analysis. You flag it as the most important disadvantage of GiveWell’s framework and then only promise to talk about it in a future post—the result is that this post does not have that much substance for people to discuss or think about, and most of the 45 minute read is spreadsheet details. So I wish I could engage in a critical discussion but I don’t think there’s much to engage with, except that AMF is looking pretty juicy right now.
I had the same thought. I enjoyed this, and I super appreciate the author writing it all up! Fascinating stuff. But it sort of felt like a home inspector telling me, “So your foundation is definitely going to crack and cause your house to fall into a sinkhole. I might tell you how to fix that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s an incredibly detailed analysis showing your roof is in good shape!”
I think exercises like this are incredibly underrated and that the quantitative updates to the cost-effectiveness of each charity are the most important contribution of this post. But I do think that this would benefit a lot from putting the spreadsheet correction details in a technical appendix and dedicating more of the body to a substantive review of uncertainty analysis. You flag it as the most important disadvantage of GiveWell’s framework and then only promise to talk about it in a future post—the result is that this post does not have that much substance for people to discuss or think about, and most of the 45 minute read is spreadsheet details. So I wish I could engage in a critical discussion but I don’t think there’s much to engage with, except that AMF is looking pretty juicy right now.
I had the same thought. I enjoyed this, and I super appreciate the author writing it all up! Fascinating stuff. But it sort of felt like a home inspector telling me, “So your foundation is definitely going to crack and cause your house to fall into a sinkhole. I might tell you how to fix that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s an incredibly detailed analysis showing your roof is in good shape!”