For Improving Infrastructure around Cost Effectiveness Analysis, my current project is pedant.
Pedant is a math DSL that’s designed to make it easier to write cost effectiveness analysis. It checks the calculations for things like dimensional violations, and hopefully in the future allows you to calculate with uncertainties and explore cost effectiveness calculations more graphically.
I wouldn’t say that there are people who are asking for cost effectiveness analysis, and more that they simply aren’t done or are of low quality to large amounts of EA causes. For instance, even GiveWell’s work that we consider to be the gold standard does not properly account for uncertainty in parameters (although Cole Haus has done so in the forum), there is controversy around the accuracy of ALLFED’s guesstimate Cost Effectiveness Model, which may be systematically optimistic about their parameters, and these are some of the best ones out there! I don’t believe ACE uses explicit cost effectiveness calculations, let alone smaller EA organisations. In conversions with Ozzie and Michael Aird I believe that they seem to share a similar sentiment.
I mainly just assumed that this problem could be because these calculations are quite difficult to do, take a lot of time, and can be very difficult to get right. So as a developer I just thought tooling. I’m not particularly creative.
I would be interested in collaborators. Help I would need includes:
Actual coding of pedant. Mainly you would need to be familiar with Haskell to the extent that you can code basic parsers.
Feedback on development. I’m always on the lookout for people who can tell me when I’m wrong and should work on something else. I’ve currently got two sources of feedback. I would be more than willing to have a third.
Testing and usage. I’d love to see someone use pedant to do a variety of cost effectiveness analysis just to see what types of features are most needed in the language. I’ve currently got a CEA for GiveDirectly and the Against Malaria Foundation, and would appreciate help on writing the rest of GiveWell’s charities out, and maybe even other calculations such as ALLFED’s CEAs or Nuno’s Shallow Evaluations of Longtermist Organizations. You need a lot of patience to do this, it does take a while, and you are doing really simple transformation from one format to another.
Documentation and recommendations. It would be lovely to get a list of recommendations and best practices for writing cost effectiveness calculations based on what say GiveWell has done. Currently, the only documentation for pedant is the README file on the main page.
Really, if you or anyone else is interested, probably best to just contact me directly.
For Improving Infrastructure around Cost Effectiveness Analysis, my current project is pedant.
Pedant is a math DSL that’s designed to make it easier to write cost effectiveness analysis. It checks the calculations for things like dimensional violations, and hopefully in the future allows you to calculate with uncertainties and explore cost effectiveness calculations more graphically.
I wouldn’t say that there are people who are asking for cost effectiveness analysis, and more that they simply aren’t done or are of low quality to large amounts of EA causes. For instance, even GiveWell’s work that we consider to be the gold standard does not properly account for uncertainty in parameters (although Cole Haus has done so in the forum), there is controversy around the accuracy of ALLFED’s guesstimate Cost Effectiveness Model, which may be systematically optimistic about their parameters, and these are some of the best ones out there! I don’t believe ACE uses explicit cost effectiveness calculations, let alone smaller EA organisations. In conversions with Ozzie and Michael Aird I believe that they seem to share a similar sentiment.
I mainly just assumed that this problem could be because these calculations are quite difficult to do, take a lot of time, and can be very difficult to get right. So as a developer I just thought tooling. I’m not particularly creative.
I would be interested in collaborators. Help I would need includes:
Actual coding of pedant. Mainly you would need to be familiar with Haskell to the extent that you can code basic parsers.
Feedback on development. I’m always on the lookout for people who can tell me when I’m wrong and should work on something else. I’ve currently got two sources of feedback. I would be more than willing to have a third.
Testing and usage. I’d love to see someone use pedant to do a variety of cost effectiveness analysis just to see what types of features are most needed in the language. I’ve currently got a CEA for GiveDirectly and the Against Malaria Foundation, and would appreciate help on writing the rest of GiveWell’s charities out, and maybe even other calculations such as ALLFED’s CEAs or Nuno’s Shallow Evaluations of Longtermist Organizations. You need a lot of patience to do this, it does take a while, and you are doing really simple transformation from one format to another.
Documentation and recommendations. It would be lovely to get a list of recommendations and best practices for writing cost effectiveness calculations based on what say GiveWell has done. Currently, the only documentation for pedant is the README file on the main page.
Really, if you or anyone else is interested, probably best to just contact me directly.