Adding uncertainty to a single intervention may not be too informative. Still, I think it’s more informative than you imply for comparing interventions—especially if you’re considering other decision frameworks for allocating funds beyond giving your money to the one with the highest average cost-effectiveness.
E.g., If you have a framework where you allocate your money in proportion to the probability it has the highest cost-effectiveness, then uncertainty quantification would be essential. I’m not sure anyone supports a rule like this.
Another potentially more real-world example: imagine you’re a grantmaker choosing between 10 interventions that are all 10x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly, but vary in uncertainty. If you’re a Bayesian with more sceptical priors than analysts, you will favour the relatively less uncertain analyses.
For instance, I never expected in my quantifaction of uncertainty in GiveDirectly that there would be practically any probability mass of it being more effective than AMF.
Really? What do you mean by practically? If we crunched the numbers, I guess there’d be a single digit likelihood that GiveDirectly would be more impactful than AMF.
Adding uncertainty to a single intervention may not be too informative. Still, I think it’s more informative than you imply for comparing interventions—especially if you’re considering other decision frameworks for allocating funds beyond giving your money to the one with the highest average cost-effectiveness.
E.g., If you have a framework where you allocate your money in proportion to the probability it has the highest cost-effectiveness, then uncertainty quantification would be essential. I’m not sure anyone supports a rule like this.
Another potentially more real-world example: imagine you’re a grantmaker choosing between 10 interventions that are all 10x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly, but vary in uncertainty. If you’re a Bayesian with more sceptical priors than analysts, you will favour the relatively less uncertain analyses.
Really? What do you mean by practically? If we crunched the numbers, I guess there’d be a single digit likelihood that GiveDirectly would be more impactful than AMF.