Hey Ben, thanks for the replies—adding some more to get closer to the same page 🙂
Re your 1), my criticism here is more one of emphasis and of the top-line messaging, as you indeed mention these cases of advocacy and research.
I just think that these cases are rather fundamental and affecting the conclusions very significantly—because we are almost never in the situation that all we can choose from are direct interventions so the solution space (and with it, the likely variance) will almost always look quite different than what is discussed as primary evidence in the article (that does not mean we will never choose direct interventions, to be sure, just that the variance of solutions will mostly be one that emerges from the conjunction of impact differentials).
Re your 2), I think this is mostly a misunderstanding—my comment was also very quickly written, apologies.
I am not saying we should always choose the most leveraged thing ever, but rather that the solution space will essentially always be structured by conjunction of multipliers. There are reasons to not only choose the most leveraged solution, as you point out, but I don’t think this is enough to argue that the most effective actions will not usually be conjunctive ones.
I agree that the data in the article is useful for specifying the shape of a particular impact differential, I am mostly arguing that it understates the variance of the solution space.
(I worry that we are mixing expected and realized value here, I am mostly talking about conjunctive strategies affecting how the variance of the solution space looks like on expected value, this does not preclude the realized value sometimes being zero (and that risk aversion or other considerations can drive us to prefer less leveraged actions.)).
Re your 3) & 4) I agree—my understanding was that these are the factors that lead you to only 10x and my comment was merely that I think direct intervention space variance is not that informative with regards to solution selection in most decision contexts. Aside: I agree with you that I don’t think that advocacy by itself is a 100x multiplier in expectation.
Hey Ben, thanks for the replies—adding some more to get closer to the same page 🙂
Re your 1), my criticism here is more one of emphasis and of the top-line messaging, as you indeed mention these cases of advocacy and research.
I just think that these cases are rather fundamental and affecting the conclusions very significantly—because we are almost never in the situation that all we can choose from are direct interventions so the solution space (and with it, the likely variance) will almost always look quite different than what is discussed as primary evidence in the article (that does not mean we will never choose direct interventions, to be sure, just that the variance of solutions will mostly be one that emerges from the conjunction of impact differentials).
Re your 2), I think this is mostly a misunderstanding—my comment was also very quickly written, apologies.
I am not saying we should always choose the most leveraged thing ever, but rather that the solution space will essentially always be structured by conjunction of multipliers. There are reasons to not only choose the most leveraged solution, as you point out, but I don’t think this is enough to argue that the most effective actions will not usually be conjunctive ones.
I agree that the data in the article is useful for specifying the shape of a particular impact differential, I am mostly arguing that it understates the variance of the solution space.
(I worry that we are mixing expected and realized value here, I am mostly talking about conjunctive strategies affecting how the variance of the solution space looks like on expected value, this does not preclude the realized value sometimes being zero (and that risk aversion or other considerations can drive us to prefer less leveraged actions.)).
Re your 3) & 4) I agree—my understanding was that these are the factors that lead you to only 10x and my comment was merely that I think direct intervention space variance is not that informative with regards to solution selection in most decision contexts.
Aside: I agree with you that I don’t think that advocacy by itself is a 100x multiplier in expectation.