Hi Sela, thanks for the long and thoughtful comment, and for your kind words. That is reassuring that you also do not feel this is a key area for GiveWell/​OP to expand into.
Really interesting re EMDAT possibly being off by ~10x, I was aware that longer-term harms are a lot harder to measure but wasn’t expecting the effect to be that large.
Re my references to ending all flooding harms, that makes sense; I wasn’t trying to suggest that the average cost-effectiveness would be the same as marginal cost-effectiveness. Perhaps a better thing to say would be that in order to be competitive with top charities, marginal targeted interventions would need to be far better than the average of existing interventions.
Hmm yes I was a bit surprised at how expensive EWS were made out to be, particularly when I would have thought a lot of costs could be saved by rolling out the same model and infrastructure across different countries.
Thanks for the offer, I am not currently working on this and don’t expect to go back to it, so I don’t think there would be much value in talking further—I’ll let you know if I am coming back to this though. I hope you make great progress on your flood forecasting work!
Hi Sela, thanks for the long and thoughtful comment, and for your kind words. That is reassuring that you also do not feel this is a key area for GiveWell/​OP to expand into.
Really interesting re EMDAT possibly being off by ~10x, I was aware that longer-term harms are a lot harder to measure but wasn’t expecting the effect to be that large.
Re my references to ending all flooding harms, that makes sense; I wasn’t trying to suggest that the average cost-effectiveness would be the same as marginal cost-effectiveness. Perhaps a better thing to say would be that in order to be competitive with top charities, marginal targeted interventions would need to be far better than the average of existing interventions.
Hmm yes I was a bit surprised at how expensive EWS were made out to be, particularly when I would have thought a lot of costs could be saved by rolling out the same model and infrastructure across different countries.
Thanks for the offer, I am not currently working on this and don’t expect to go back to it, so I don’t think there would be much value in talking further—I’ll let you know if I am coming back to this though. I hope you make great progress on your flood forecasting work!