Love this and I mostly agree with your points. I do think though that GiveWell is the easiest thing to compare to in this case, and that’s probably fair enough. Comparing to very different and harder-to-measure policy and tech work is less easy to understand and feels a bit disparate.
My only tiiiiiiny nicpick would be your point 2 - I don’t think its that hard to positively shape the trajectory of malaria vaccines (although yes trade policy and influencing development aid is hard-ish). The uncertainties are high yes, but especially with malaria vaccines I would hazard a guess that even the lower end of the effect range might compete with GiveDirectly. Can’t be bothered trying to calculate that right now though :D :D :D
I think even for something that seems quite certain on the intervention level (if you think that is true for malaria vaccine) then one needs to account for funding and activity additionality which make this more uncertain and, relatively speaking, lowers the estimate to GD where the large size of the funding gap ensures funding and activity additionality to be near 1 (i.e. no discount).
Love this and I mostly agree with your points. I do think though that GiveWell is the easiest thing to compare to in this case, and that’s probably fair enough. Comparing to very different and harder-to-measure policy and tech work is less easy to understand and feels a bit disparate.
My only tiiiiiiny nicpick would be your point 2 - I don’t think its that hard to positively shape the trajectory of malaria vaccines (although yes trade policy and influencing development aid is hard-ish). The uncertainties are high yes, but especially with malaria vaccines I would hazard a guess that even the lower end of the effect range might compete with GiveDirectly. Can’t be bothered trying to calculate that right now though :D :D :D
I think even for something that seems quite certain on the intervention level (if you think that is true for malaria vaccine) then one needs to account for funding and activity additionality which make this more uncertain and, relatively speaking, lowers the estimate to GD where the large size of the funding gap ensures funding and activity additionality to be near 1 (i.e. no discount).