And read this as you planning to continue evaluating everything in WELLBYs, which in turn I thought meant ruling out evaluating research—because it isn’t clear to me how you evaluate something like psychedelics research using WELLBYs.
If we said we plan to evaluate projects in terms of their ability to save lives, would that rule out us evaluating something like research? I don’t see how it would. You’d simply need to think about the effect that doing some research would have on the number of lives that are saved.
That’s fair. Just copying my response to Samuel as I think it better explains where my query lies:
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s impossible to collect data on interventions that don’t yet exist. We might be able to estimate the impact of current psychedelics on well-being, but it is going to be a lot more difficult to estimate the impact that psychedelics will have on well-being in say five years time if we fund loads of research into making them better.
As such I think a novel approach may be required to evaluate something like Usona. There might still be a WELLBY approach suitable but I suspect it would have to be expected WELLBYs, perhaps forecasting progress that we have seen in psychedelics research.
If we said we plan to evaluate projects in terms of their ability to save lives, would that rule out us evaluating something like research? I don’t see how it would. You’d simply need to think about the effect that doing some research would have on the number of lives that are saved.
That’s fair. Just copying my response to Samuel as I think it better explains where my query lies: