Say I compare different GHD interventions that help the worst off. I know that most such interventions are not crazy effective and that it’s easy to under or overestimate those with little evidence. I have a good reference class. If someone tells me about a new intervention in the area, I don’t expect it to be crazy good. It’s much more likely to be close to the mean. I have a prior expectation. If my math tells me there’s some poorly-studied intervention that beats the one that has consistently proven most effective so far, this weak evidence should not override my prior expectation. The math without accounting for my prior would give an overestimated number, surely.
But now say someone presents me with an x-risk intervention. I don’t have a “cross-cause prior” that says that an intervention from any cause is close to the GHD mean, do I?[1] If I understand your post correctly, you are implicitly assuming we do have such a cross-cause prior. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any OC-related reason to downweight the x-risk intervention.)[2] Is that correct?
In fact, given how drastically different x-risks and GHD are, I would be surprised if the x-risk intervention doesn’t end up far at the bottom or at the top, here.
Say I compare different GHD interventions that help the worst off. I know that most such interventions are not crazy effective and that it’s easy to under or overestimate those with little evidence. I have a good reference class. If someone tells me about a new intervention in the area, I don’t expect it to be crazy good. It’s much more likely to be close to the mean. I have a prior expectation. If my math tells me there’s some poorly-studied intervention that beats the one that has consistently proven most effective so far, this weak evidence should not override my prior expectation. The math without accounting for my prior would give an overestimated number, surely.
But now say someone presents me with an x-risk intervention. I don’t have a “cross-cause prior” that says that an intervention from any cause is close to the GHD mean, do I?[1] If I understand your post correctly, you are implicitly assuming we do have such a cross-cause prior. (Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any OC-related reason to downweight the x-risk intervention.)[2] Is that correct?
In fact, given how drastically different x-risks and GHD are, I would be surprised if the x-risk intervention doesn’t end up far at the bottom or at the top, here.
We might downweight it because of ambiguity aversion or something, but that’s a completely different issue. No need to invoke OC.