This is very exciting! Great to see the EA Infrastructure Fund is funding work in this space. I’ve been working on a similar venture called Better (your project is most analogous to our research division). Feel free to reach out if you’d like to hear about my experiences or discuss collaboration!
It would be interesting to see which areas of life/well-being you will evaluate. We have a breakdown on our website! And also your prioritization method. We’ve created one which we’re calling ABCD—audience, (net) benefits, certainty, and difficulty—which involves estimating and then multiplying the factors together. Loosely resembles the ITN and RICE frameworks.
A 2% well-being improvement seems pretty conservative, perhaps intentionally. Lynette reported adding 16.4 extra hours per month (a 10% increase assuming 160 hours worked per month), although I believe this was through self-reporting and not time tracking, and may not include survivorship bias and other adjustments. Still, I’d hope things like lighting adjustments are pretty high impact.
Thanks for reaching out! Better looks a very interesting project with a lot of scope for impact. I’ll message you to discuss experiences/ collaboration possibilities more.
I’m currently building a long list of interventions and wellbeing areas that seem particularly promising so what exactly I’ll evaluate is still somewhat up in the air. The same goes for an evaluation method—I expect I’ll use some adaptation of an expected value calculation, possibly combined with a weighted factor model—but I need to do more work on this before settling on a method.
As for the estimates, I agree that hopefully they are pretty conservative and that’s definitely intentional. Quality evidence on many of these things can be hard to come by so I think it’s best to shoot low. Also worth noting that I don’t think wellbeing improvements = productivity improvements so while I’ve estimated a 2% productivity increase, I’d expect the wellbeing increase to be higher (maybe closer to 5% - and 5% is a lot once you start spreading the information!).
Lighting adjustments are definitely on the long list of promising areas and is a recommendation I have high hopes for.
This is very exciting! Great to see the EA Infrastructure Fund is funding work in this space. I’ve been working on a similar venture called Better (your project is most analogous to our research division). Feel free to reach out if you’d like to hear about my experiences or discuss collaboration!
It would be interesting to see which areas of life/well-being you will evaluate. We have a breakdown on our website! And also your prioritization method. We’ve created one which we’re calling ABCD—audience, (net) benefits, certainty, and difficulty—which involves estimating and then multiplying the factors together. Loosely resembles the ITN and RICE frameworks.
A 2% well-being improvement seems pretty conservative, perhaps intentionally. Lynette reported adding 16.4 extra hours per month (a 10% increase assuming 160 hours worked per month), although I believe this was through self-reporting and not time tracking, and may not include survivorship bias and other adjustments. Still, I’d hope things like lighting adjustments are pretty high impact.
Thanks for reaching out! Better looks a very interesting project with a lot of scope for impact. I’ll message you to discuss experiences/ collaboration possibilities more.
I’m currently building a long list of interventions and wellbeing areas that seem particularly promising so what exactly I’ll evaluate is still somewhat up in the air. The same goes for an evaluation method—I expect I’ll use some adaptation of an expected value calculation, possibly combined with a weighted factor model—but I need to do more work on this before settling on a method.
As for the estimates, I agree that hopefully they are pretty conservative and that’s definitely intentional. Quality evidence on many of these things can be hard to come by so I think it’s best to shoot low. Also worth noting that I don’t think wellbeing improvements = productivity improvements so while I’ve estimated a 2% productivity increase, I’d expect the wellbeing increase to be higher (maybe closer to 5% - and 5% is a lot once you start spreading the information!).
Lighting adjustments are definitely on the long list of promising areas and is a recommendation I have high hopes for.
@josh-jacobson is also working on something similar.
Thanks Hauke! Yep, at https://derisked.org/.
There’s also James Norris at https://www.upgradable.org/.
Thanks to you both for the pointers!