Yeah, in GiveWell classic, you’re generally going to estimate that a high-impact charity is on the 95th percentile but with uncertainty around that. Which is in-between the cases that you describe.
I can imagine that knowing that something is on the 95th percentile with high certainty might be worse than guessing that something is on the 95th percentile with high uncertainty, if you have a prior that is some mixture of log-normal, normal and power-law. That’s what we’d have to show to really question the classic GiveWell model.
Yeah, in GiveWell classic, you’re generally going to estimate that a high-impact charity is on the 95th percentile but with uncertainty around that. Which is in-between the cases that you describe.
I can imagine that knowing that something is on the 95th percentile with high certainty might be worse than guessing that something is on the 95th percentile with high uncertainty, if you have a prior that is some mixture of log-normal, normal and power-law. That’s what we’d have to show to really question the classic GiveWell model.