We’d like to express our sincere thanks to GiveWell for providing such a detailed and generous response. We are delighted that our work may lead to substantive changes, and echoing GiveWell, we encourage others to critique HLI’s work with the same level of rigour.
In response to the substantive points raised by Alex:
Using a different starting value: Our post does not present a strong argument for how exactly to include the decay. Instead, we aimed to do the closest ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison possible using the same values that GiveWell uses in their original analysis. Our main point was that including decay makes a difference, and we are encouraged to see that GiveWell will consider incorporating this into their analysis.
We don’t have a strong view of the best way to incorporate decay in the CEA. However, we intend to develop and defend our views about how the benefits change over time as we finalise our analysis of deworming in terms of subjective wellbeing.
How to weigh the decay model: We agree with Alex’s proposal to put some weight on the effects being constant. Again, we haven’t formed a strong view on how to do this yet and recognise the challenges that GiveWell faces in doing so. We look forward to seeing more of GiveWell’s thinking on this.
Improving reasoning transparency: We strongly support the plans quoted below and look forward to reading future publications that clearly lay out the importance of key judgements and assumptions.
We plan to update our website to make it clearer what key judgment calls are driving our cost-effectiveness estimates, why we’ve chosen specific parameters or made key assumptions, and how we’ve prioritized research questions that could potentially change our bottom line.
In retrospect, I think my reply didn’t do enough to acknowledge that A. using a different starting value seems reasonable and B. this would lead to a much smaller change in cost-effectiveness foor deworming. While very belated, I’m updating the post to note this for posterity.
We’d like to express our sincere thanks to GiveWell for providing such a detailed and generous response. We are delighted that our work may lead to substantive changes, and echoing GiveWell, we encourage others to critique HLI’s work with the same level of rigour.
In response to the substantive points raised by Alex:
Using a different starting value: Our post does not present a strong argument for how exactly to include the decay. Instead, we aimed to do the closest ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison possible using the same values that GiveWell uses in their original analysis. Our main point was that including decay makes a difference, and we are encouraged to see that GiveWell will consider incorporating this into their analysis.
We don’t have a strong view of the best way to incorporate decay in the CEA. However, we intend to develop and defend our views about how the benefits change over time as we finalise our analysis of deworming in terms of subjective wellbeing.
How to weigh the decay model: We agree with Alex’s proposal to put some weight on the effects being constant. Again, we haven’t formed a strong view on how to do this yet and recognise the challenges that GiveWell faces in doing so. We look forward to seeing more of GiveWell’s thinking on this.
Improving reasoning transparency: We strongly support the plans quoted below and look forward to reading future publications that clearly lay out the importance of key judgements and assumptions.
In retrospect, I think my reply didn’t do enough to acknowledge that A. using a different starting value seems reasonable and B. this would lead to a much smaller change in cost-effectiveness foor deworming. While very belated, I’m updating the post to note this for posterity.