FWIW a big thing for Open Phil and a couple other EA-ish orgs I’ve spoken to is that very few lawyers are willing to put probabilities on risks, so they’ll just say “I advise against X,” but what we need is “If you do X then the risk of A is probably 1%-10% and the risk of B is <1% and the risk of C is maybe 1%-5%.” So would be nice you could do some calibration training etc. if you haven’t already.
Thanks for the suggestion, Luke. I hadn’t considered this. I’m going to have a go at the Open Phil Calibration Training applet first, and will scour the forum and Lesswrong for other useful training.
I’ve had mixed experiences using probabilistic language in my legal advice. It really depends on the client and the advisor being able to think like that. But I’ve got some internal clients who have responded well to this sort of advice—explaining things in terms of expected value can be especially good when giving advice about counterparties who won’t tell us what they’re thinking (e.g. in litigation or commercial negotiations). It would be excellent to work with EAs who think like this without prompting, and who actually expect that kind of advice.
FWIW a big thing for Open Phil and a couple other EA-ish orgs I’ve spoken to is that very few lawyers are willing to put probabilities on risks, so they’ll just say “I advise against X,” but what we need is “If you do X then the risk of A is probably 1%-10% and the risk of B is <1% and the risk of C is maybe 1%-5%.” So would be nice you could do some calibration training etc. if you haven’t already.
Thanks for the suggestion, Luke. I hadn’t considered this. I’m going to have a go at the Open Phil Calibration Training applet first, and will scour the forum and Lesswrong for other useful training.
I’ve had mixed experiences using probabilistic language in my legal advice. It really depends on the client and the advisor being able to think like that. But I’ve got some internal clients who have responded well to this sort of advice—explaining things in terms of expected value can be especially good when giving advice about counterparties who won’t tell us what they’re thinking (e.g. in litigation or commercial negotiations). It would be excellent to work with EAs who think like this without prompting, and who actually expect that kind of advice.