Thanks, this is a good criticism. I think I agree with the main thrust of your comment but in a bit of a roundabout way.
I agree that focusing on expected value is important and that ideally we should communicate how arguments and results affect expected values. I think it’s helpful to distinguish between (1) expected value estimates that our models output and (2) the overall expected value of an action/intervention, which is informed by our models and arguments etc. The guesstimate model is so speculative that it doesn’t actually do that much work in my overall expected value, so I don’t want to overemphasise it. Perhaps we under-emphasised it though.
The non-probabilistic model is also speculative of course, but I think this offers stronger evidence about the relative cost-effectiveness than the output of the guesstimate model. It doesn’t offer a precise number in the same way that the guesstimate model does but the guesstimate model only does that by making arbitrary distributional assumptions, so I don’t think it adds much information. I think that the non-probabilistic model offers evidence of greater cost-effectiveness of THL relative to AMF (given hedonism, anti-speciesism) because THL tends to come out better and sometimes comes out much, much better. I also think this isn’t super strong evidence but that you’re right that our summary is overly agnostic, in light of this.
In case it’s helpful, here’s a possible explanation for why we communicated the findings in this way. We actually came into this project expecting THL to be much more cost-effective, given a wide range of assumptions about the parameters of our model (and assuming hedonism, anti-speciesism) and we were surprised to see that AMF could plausibly be more cost-effective. So for me, this project gave an update slightly in favour of AMF in terms of expected cost-effectiveness (though I was probably previously overconfident in THL). For many priors, this project should update the other way and for even more priors, this project should leave you expecting THL to be more cost-effective. I expect we were a bit torn in communicating how we updated and what the project showed and didn’t have the time to think this through and write this down explicitly, given other projects competing for our time and energy. It’s been helpful to clarify a few things through this discussion though :)
Thanks, this is a good criticism. I think I agree with the main thrust of your comment but in a bit of a roundabout way.
I agree that focusing on expected value is important and that ideally we should communicate how arguments and results affect expected values. I think it’s helpful to distinguish between (1) expected value estimates that our models output and (2) the overall expected value of an action/intervention, which is informed by our models and arguments etc. The guesstimate model is so speculative that it doesn’t actually do that much work in my overall expected value, so I don’t want to overemphasise it. Perhaps we under-emphasised it though.
The non-probabilistic model is also speculative of course, but I think this offers stronger evidence about the relative cost-effectiveness than the output of the guesstimate model. It doesn’t offer a precise number in the same way that the guesstimate model does but the guesstimate model only does that by making arbitrary distributional assumptions, so I don’t think it adds much information. I think that the non-probabilistic model offers evidence of greater cost-effectiveness of THL relative to AMF (given hedonism, anti-speciesism) because THL tends to come out better and sometimes comes out much, much better. I also think this isn’t super strong evidence but that you’re right that our summary is overly agnostic, in light of this.
In case it’s helpful, here’s a possible explanation for why we communicated the findings in this way. We actually came into this project expecting THL to be much more cost-effective, given a wide range of assumptions about the parameters of our model (and assuming hedonism, anti-speciesism) and we were surprised to see that AMF could plausibly be more cost-effective. So for me, this project gave an update slightly in favour of AMF in terms of expected cost-effectiveness (though I was probably previously overconfident in THL). For many priors, this project should update the other way and for even more priors, this project should leave you expecting THL to be more cost-effective. I expect we were a bit torn in communicating how we updated and what the project showed and didn’t have the time to think this through and write this down explicitly, given other projects competing for our time and energy. It’s been helpful to clarify a few things through this discussion though :)