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.
I’ll try and give a general answer to your concern. I hope this helps?
Whilst there might be some aspects of research that can be evaluated without looking at WELLBYs (e.g., how costly is psychedelics treatment), the core point is still that wellbeing is what matters. More research will tell us that something is worth it if it does ‘good’; namely, it increases WELLBYs (cost-effectively).
We hope to obtain wellbeing data (life satisfaction, affect, etc.) for each area we evaluate. If it is lacking, then we hope to encourage more data collection and / or to evaluate pathways (e.g., if psychedelics affect variable X, do we know the relationship between X and wellbeing).
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.
Right. The psychedelic work will probably be a more speculative and a lower-bound estimate. I expect we’ll take the opportunity to cut our teeth on estimating the cost-effectiveness of research.
Hi Jack,
I’ll try and give a general answer to your concern. I hope this helps?
Whilst there might be some aspects of research that can be evaluated without looking at WELLBYs (e.g., how costly is psychedelics treatment), the core point is still that wellbeing is what matters. More research will tell us that something is worth it if it does ‘good’; namely, it increases WELLBYs (cost-effectively).
We hope to obtain wellbeing data (life satisfaction, affect, etc.) for each area we evaluate. If it is lacking, then we hope to encourage more data collection and / or to evaluate pathways (e.g., if psychedelics affect variable X, do we know the relationship between X and wellbeing).
Thanks Samuel.
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.
Hi Jack,
Right. The psychedelic work will probably be a more speculative and a lower-bound estimate. I expect we’ll take the opportunity to cut our teeth on estimating the cost-effectiveness of research.