I cautiously like this idea. I wonder if it’s potentially a distraction where people end up spending lots of time trying to prove, or defend, their estimates, rather than give their talks.
Also tricky is the fact expected value estimates require you to take explicit stands of values that might not be very productive. i.e.you get this estimate for the Against Malaria Foundation if you think future people are X important, this is you think death is Y bad, etc.
I think we as a society (or intellectual circle) have a long way to go in terms of understanding EV calcs, but would say here that EV calcs don’t have to be relative to total utility. They could instead be split up into parts in cases where there is uncertainty in how to resolve it from there.
For instance, saying that this intervention ‘saves 1 life per 10k to 30k dollars in region X’ seems fine to me, if it’s a fair interval/estimate. If there are multiple things, maybe, “Every 10k dollars saves 10-30 QALYS in the next 3 years, and separately seems to decrease the long term risks by Y factor”
I cautiously like this idea. I wonder if it’s potentially a distraction where people end up spending lots of time trying to prove, or defend, their estimates, rather than give their talks.
Also tricky is the fact expected value estimates require you to take explicit stands of values that might not be very productive. i.e.you get this estimate for the Against Malaria Foundation if you think future people are X important, this is you think death is Y bad, etc.
I think we as a society (or intellectual circle) have a long way to go in terms of understanding EV calcs, but would say here that EV calcs don’t have to be relative to total utility. They could instead be split up into parts in cases where there is uncertainty in how to resolve it from there.
For instance, saying that this intervention ‘saves 1 life per 10k to 30k dollars in region X’ seems fine to me, if it’s a fair interval/estimate. If there are multiple things, maybe, “Every 10k dollars saves 10-30 QALYS in the next 3 years, and separately seems to decrease the long term risks by Y factor”