I think these are all good points, thanks for sharing!
To push back on the point about lay people innumeracy a bit, doesn’t expected value also need a somewhat lengthy explanation? In addition, I think a common mistake is to conflate EV and averages, so should we have similar concerns about EV as well?
Maybe a counterargument to this would be that “nines of safety” has obvious alternatives (e.g. ratios, as you point out), but perhaps it’s harder to do this for EV?
In general, it’s best to use knowledge that’s common to your audience when possible. If that’s not possible, then you have to find the right balance precision, brevity, and familiarity. The appropriate balance will heavily depend on the audience and topic.
My practice, when writing informally, is to notice when I’m about to use a jargon term, and then search my knowledge of colloquial speech to see if there’s a common term or phrase that captures this jargon term. If so, I tend to use it.
Here are two examples of sentences from the EA forum containing the phrase “expected value,” and how I might rephrase them in more colloquial speech. I won’t link to the source, because that would be a little tedious, but credit for the sentences goes to the authors, and you can find the source by searching for the sentence itself.
1.
“Here, the option with the greatest expected value is donating to the speculative research (at least on certain theories of value—more on those in a moment).”
->
“Here, speculative research is the best option because of its massive upside potential, at least depending on what we care about...”
2.
“My previous model, in which I took expected value estimates and adjusted them based on my intuition, was clearly inadequate.”
->
“Before, I estimated the costs and benefits and then adjusted those estimates intuitively, which definitely wasn’t good enough.”
I think these are all good points, thanks for sharing!
To push back on the point about lay people innumeracy a bit, doesn’t expected value also need a somewhat lengthy explanation? In addition, I think a common mistake is to conflate EV and averages, so should we have similar concerns about EV as well?
Maybe a counterargument to this would be that “nines of safety” has obvious alternatives (e.g. ratios, as you point out), but perhaps it’s harder to do this for EV?
In general, it’s best to use knowledge that’s common to your audience when possible. If that’s not possible, then you have to find the right balance precision, brevity, and familiarity. The appropriate balance will heavily depend on the audience and topic.
My practice, when writing informally, is to notice when I’m about to use a jargon term, and then search my knowledge of colloquial speech to see if there’s a common term or phrase that captures this jargon term. If so, I tend to use it.
Here are two examples of sentences from the EA forum containing the phrase “expected value,” and how I might rephrase them in more colloquial speech. I won’t link to the source, because that would be a little tedious, but credit for the sentences goes to the authors, and you can find the source by searching for the sentence itself.
1.
“Here, the option with the greatest expected value is donating to the speculative research (at least on certain theories of value—more on those in a moment).”
->
“Here, speculative research is the best option because of its massive upside potential, at least depending on what we care about...”
2.
“My previous model, in which I took expected value estimates and adjusted them based on my intuition, was clearly inadequate.”
->
“Before, I estimated the costs and benefits and then adjusted those estimates intuitively, which definitely wasn’t good enough.”