I only skimmed this really quickly, so sorry if these points are redundant:
Matheny (2006) is relevant here. He finds ~ $2.50 per expected life-year saved, which is obviously much more optimistic than your estimate (iirc because he’s less conservative about accounting for human extinction).
In case it’s relevant/useful for readers, here’s a more qualitative post about risks from asteroids.
In general I’m pretty wary about direct comparisons to GiveWell, because very often these favourable comparisons compare apples to oranges, even in subtle ways. In particular, it might be worth looking at how GiveWell discount along different lines (especially time), and seeing what happens if you use the same assumptions.
Anyway, thanks for writing this! It is surprising that the stereotype of “popularly salient catastrophic risk that in fact seems thousands of times less significant than other catastrophic risk” still looks worth trying to mitigate.
Hi Finm! Your post was definitely a great starting point for me—CEARCH is working through various causes, and we’re relying heavily on Nuno’s big list (which linked to your post as an excellent primer on the issue).
On your two other points:
(a) I understand that Matheny’s analysis turns on (i) philosophical views on the view of the value of potential (as opposed to future but actual) human lives, and perhaps more controversially (ii) not implementing standard discounts. Not sure if I would go for (ii), but I do see people reasonably being far more bullish on the value of asteroid defence given (ii).
(b) In any case, I definitely agree that CEAs like this are likely to be overoptimistic, which is why CEARCH is unlikely to be spending more time on this cause. As our research methodology post (link) lays out—only if a cause’s estimated cost-effectiveness is at least one magnitude greater than a GiveWell top charity, will it pass on to the intermediate/deep rounds of research, with the idea being that research at the shallower level tends to overestimate a cause’s cost-effectiveness. So if a cause doesn’t appear effective early on, it’s probably not going to be a better-than-GiveWell bet (initial impressions notwithstanding), let alone a Cause X magnitudes more important than our current top causes.
I only skimmed this really quickly, so sorry if these points are redundant:
In case it’s relevant/useful for readers, here’s a more qualitative post about risks from asteroids.
In general I’m pretty wary about direct comparisons to GiveWell, because very often these favourable comparisons compare apples to oranges, even in subtle ways. In particular, it might be worth looking at how GiveWell discount along different lines (especially time), and seeing what happens if you use the same assumptions.
Anyway, thanks for writing this! It is surprising that the stereotype of “popularly salient catastrophic risk that in fact seems thousands of times less significant than other catastrophic risk” still looks worth trying to mitigate.
Hi Finm! Your post was definitely a great starting point for me—CEARCH is working through various causes, and we’re relying heavily on Nuno’s big list (which linked to your post as an excellent primer on the issue).
On your two other points:
(a) I understand that Matheny’s analysis turns on (i) philosophical views on the view of the value of potential (as opposed to future but actual) human lives, and perhaps more controversially (ii) not implementing standard discounts. Not sure if I would go for (ii), but I do see people reasonably being far more bullish on the value of asteroid defence given (ii).
(b) In any case, I definitely agree that CEAs like this are likely to be overoptimistic, which is why CEARCH is unlikely to be spending more time on this cause. As our research methodology post (link) lays out—only if a cause’s estimated cost-effectiveness is at least one magnitude greater than a GiveWell top charity, will it pass on to the intermediate/deep rounds of research, with the idea being that research at the shallower level tends to overestimate a cause’s cost-effectiveness. So if a cause doesn’t appear effective early on, it’s probably not going to be a better-than-GiveWell bet (initial impressions notwithstanding), let alone a Cause X magnitudes more important than our current top causes.