While I agree that the optimizer’s curse is a problem, and one that is relevant for certain sectors of EA, I will also say that given the very high variance in expected impact between causes, this is much less of a problem than other problems in EA epistemics, which is why it hasn’t received much attention.
That said, you do note some very interesting things about the optimizer’s curse, so the post is valuable beyond restating the problem, so I will give credit where it’s due, it’s a nice incremental improvement.
While I agree that the optimizer’s curse is a problem, and one that is relevant for certain sectors of EA, I will also say that given the very high variance in expected impact between causes, this is much less of a problem than other problems in EA epistemics, which is why it hasn’t received much attention.
That said, you do note some very interesting things about the optimizer’s curse, so the post is valuable beyond restating the problem, so I will give credit where it’s due, it’s a nice incremental improvement.