For the first question, I was one of the forecasters who gave close to the current Metaculus median answer (~30%). I can’t remember my exact reasoning, but roughly:
1. Outside view on how frequently things have changed + some estimates on how likely things are to change in the future, from an entirely curve fitting perspective.
2. Decent probability that the current top charities will go down in effectiveness as the problems become less neglected/we’ve had stronger partial solutions for them/we discover new evidence about them. Concretely:
Malaria: CRISPR or vaccines. But also I place decent probability on bednet production and distribution being fully solved by states/international actors/large NGOs. Deworming: Possibilities include a) we uncover new evidence that suggests deworming is less effective than we previously thought, especially at 2021/2030 worm loads* or b) mass deworming decreases the total amount of worms, decreasing marginal value, or c) both. Cash: At GiveWell scale, I don’t think direct cash transfers is ever competitive with your current best guess for top health/development interventions under naive cost-effectiveness unless you apply a strong robustness penalty to everything else. Vitamin A: haven’t thought much about it tbqh, so retreat to priors.
*The evidentiary base for deworming was always shaky to begin with, I think (within the randomista paradigm) it’s reasonable to model deworming as a relatively high-risk high-reward economic intervention, and we may eventually discover evidence that conclusively demonstrates that deworming isn’t economically that effective.
For the first question, I was one of the forecasters who gave close to the current Metaculus median answer (~30%). I can’t remember my exact reasoning, but roughly:
1. Outside view on how frequently things have changed + some estimates on how likely things are to change in the future, from an entirely curve fitting perspective.
2. Decent probability that the current top charities will go down in effectiveness as the problems become less neglected/we’ve had stronger partial solutions for them/we discover new evidence about them. Concretely:
Malaria: CRISPR or vaccines. But also I place decent probability on bednet production and distribution being fully solved by states/international actors/large NGOs.
Deworming: Possibilities include a) we uncover new evidence that suggests deworming is less effective than we previously thought, especially at 2021/2030 worm loads* or b) mass deworming decreases the total amount of worms, decreasing marginal value, or c) both.
Cash: At GiveWell scale, I don’t think direct cash transfers is ever competitive with your current best guess for top health/development interventions under naive cost-effectiveness unless you apply a strong robustness penalty to everything else.
Vitamin A: haven’t thought much about it tbqh, so retreat to priors.
*The evidentiary base for deworming was always shaky to begin with, I think (within the randomista paradigm) it’s reasonable to model deworming as a relatively high-risk high-reward economic intervention, and we may eventually discover evidence that conclusively demonstrates that deworming isn’t economically that effective.