Yes, I am familiar with the Value of Information, and I am building on it in this project. I have added the “Value of Information” tag.
I might be wrong, but I think this is assuming that this is the only >research project that is happening. I could easily assume that EA >spends more than 0.1% of it's resources on identifying/evaluting >new interventions. Although, I'm yet to know of how to do the >math with multiple research projects. It's currently a bit beyond >me.
Yes, this argument assumes that the alternative to investing some funds into R&D is that all the funds are invested into existing interventions/charities. I intended to answer the question ”When is it worthwhile for a grant maker, such as GiveWell, that currently does not fund any R&D projects to invest into the development of new interventions at all?”.
Your "lower bound" is entirely of your own construction. It's derived from your decleration at the start that p is the chance that you find a "investing c dollars into the research generates an intervention that is at least n times as effective as the best existing intervention with probability
p. If I was to call your construction the "Minimum value of information", it's possible to calculate the "Expected value of [Perfect|imperfect] information", which I feel like might be a more useful number. Guesstimate can do this as well, I could provide an example if you'd like.
I have done that. Those analyses are reported farther down in this post and in follow-up posts.
We have to remember that we are still uncertain about the cost-effectiveness of the new intervention, which means it would need to be expected to be more cost-effective even after considering all priors. This may increase or decrease . However, this is probably irrelevant to the argument.
Good point! One way to accommodate this is to add the cost of determining whether the new intervention is more cost-effective than the previous to the research cost c.
Thank you, Sam!
Yes, I am familiar with the Value of Information, and I am building on it in this project. I have added the “Value of Information” tag.
Yes, this argument assumes that the alternative to investing some funds into R&D is that all the funds are invested into existing interventions/charities. I intended to answer the question ”When is it worthwhile for a grant maker, such as GiveWell, that currently does not fund any R&D projects to invest into the development of new interventions at all?”.
I have done that. Those analyses are reported farther down in this post and in follow-up posts.
Good point! One way to accommodate this is to add the cost of determining whether the new intervention is more cost-effective than the previous to the research cost c.