Thanks for doing an estimate of the long-term impact of ALLFED!
A marginal donation to a resilient-food organization produces about one-third as much risk reduction per dollar as Buhl’s modeled pilot program. Buhl spent about 10 hours on the initial analysis and another 5-10 hours revising it after feedback from ALLFED. The model covered a hypothetical $10-$100 million project rather than a current marginal donation. Additional hazards, research, and advocacy provide some omitted upside. This assumption raises the estimated cost per microprobability by 3x as one all-things-considered adjustment.
Since ALLFED has not gotten that much money, I would argue that the marginal cost effectiveness should be higher than Buhl’s estimate, not 3x lower. Indeed, we are focusing now on pilots that cost a lot less money, but still have similar impact. One example is growing plants in simulated nuclear winter conditions.
Strong work across this broader category produces half as much risk reduction per dollar as the resilient-food organization-level anchor. Resilient food is the only intervention in this category with a quantitative independent estimate of this pathway. Cross-hazard planning, infrastructure continuity, and recovery work have less direct evidence, although some interventions could be better. This assumption raises the estimated cost per microprobability by 2x.
For the impact on this century, the AI argued that policy was evaluated, but other things like resilient food pilots have not been evaluated, so it assigned an overall lower cost effectiveness. Now for the long-term future impact, the AI is arguing that resilient food pilots have been quantified, and other things like policy have not, so it is assigning a lower cost effectiveness. I think it’s more defensible to assign about the same cost effectiveness across the board (we do try hard at ALLFED to equate the marginal cost effectiveness of different projects we can work on), though I agree it would be best to do a separate cost effectiveness analysis on the biosecurity work.
But the most important thing is that there is a long-term future impact of ALLFED quantified at all, so I appreciate your effort.
Thanks for the additional thoughts. I’ll feed in your suggestions when I get some time and make any updates that result from that.
RE: unknown EAs/rationalists, yeah I agree having some of them on the list is valuable. I plan to add some soon if I don’t get enough volunteers.
Thanks for doing an estimate of the long-term impact of ALLFED!
Since ALLFED has not gotten that much money, I would argue that the marginal cost effectiveness should be higher than Buhl’s estimate, not 3x lower. Indeed, we are focusing now on pilots that cost a lot less money, but still have similar impact. One example is growing plants in simulated nuclear winter conditions.
For the impact on this century, the AI argued that policy was evaluated, but other things like resilient food pilots have not been evaluated, so it assigned an overall lower cost effectiveness. Now for the long-term future impact, the AI is arguing that resilient food pilots have been quantified, and other things like policy have not, so it is assigning a lower cost effectiveness. I think it’s more defensible to assign about the same cost effectiveness across the board (we do try hard at ALLFED to equate the marginal cost effectiveness of different projects we can work on), though I agree it would be best to do a separate cost effectiveness analysis on the biosecurity work.
But the most important thing is that there is a long-term future impact of ALLFED quantified at all, so I appreciate your effort.