I like that it frames safety as a noun, not just an adjective. “We’re 99% safe” vs. “we have two nines of safety.” For some reason, it hits you different if safety feels like a tangible product you can make, or buy, rather than an intangible perception or description.
My worry is that this proposal is meant to address lay people’s innumeracy. But it requires a lengthy explanation. I suspect there are many people who don’t understand that an earthquake generating a 6 on the Richter scale is a 10x more powerful earthquake than a 5.
Another alternative is just to say “this intervention would make us 10x safer,” rather than “this intervention gives us an extra nine of safety.”
So this proposal seems to me to have a tradeoff between the psychological impact of nounification and the potential confusion of a logarithmic scale. I don’t see any risk of harm, but I think that it is probably best used in contexts where you can expect the audience to know and feel comfortable with the log scale.
As a follow up, the more common proposal for this issue is to switch to ratios. For example, rather than saying you have a 99.99999% chance (7 nines) of not dying from a lightning strike this year, say that only 1 in 10,000,000 people die from lightning strikes per year.
I think this is harder when we’re discussing global risks and unprecedented risks. It’s hard to conceptualize humanity going extinct in 1 in 6 earths-this-century (Toby Ord’s guess). Easier to think of a 17% chance. Maybe percentages work best for one-off risks, and ratios work better when we have a base rate to work with?
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 like that it frames safety as a noun, not just an adjective. “We’re 99% safe” vs. “we have two nines of safety.” For some reason, it hits you different if safety feels like a tangible product you can make, or buy, rather than an intangible perception or description.
My worry is that this proposal is meant to address lay people’s innumeracy. But it requires a lengthy explanation. I suspect there are many people who don’t understand that an earthquake generating a 6 on the Richter scale is a 10x more powerful earthquake than a 5.
Another alternative is just to say “this intervention would make us 10x safer,” rather than “this intervention gives us an extra nine of safety.”
So this proposal seems to me to have a tradeoff between the psychological impact of nounification and the potential confusion of a logarithmic scale. I don’t see any risk of harm, but I think that it is probably best used in contexts where you can expect the audience to know and feel comfortable with the log scale.
As a follow up, the more common proposal for this issue is to switch to ratios. For example, rather than saying you have a 99.99999% chance (7 nines) of not dying from a lightning strike this year, say that only 1 in 10,000,000 people die from lightning strikes per year.
I think this is harder when we’re discussing global risks and unprecedented risks. It’s hard to conceptualize humanity going extinct in 1 in 6 earths-this-century (Toby Ord’s guess). Easier to think of a 17% chance. Maybe percentages work best for one-off risks, and ratios work better when we have a base rate to work with?
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.”