I think quantifying tends to be the right approach almost always when it’s an in-depth exploration based on 80,000 hours’ reasoning. That said, when it is used in a public summary of reasoning it can give a false pretense of certainty in cases where the estimate is very uncertain, leading to problems like those described here in animal advocacy. I think the best solution is to reason quantitatively when possible but to keep that in a public document linked to in any announcements and not to highlight the quantitative estimates in a way that often misleads people.
Another important step to take on this issue is probably to distinguish between problems that are unmeasurable and those that simply have not been measured yet. On those that have not been measured yet, we should try to measure them, and that might take some creativity by ingenious researchers.
I think quantifying tends to be the right approach almost always when it’s an in-depth exploration based on 80,000 hours’ reasoning. That said, when it is used in a public summary of reasoning it can give a false pretense of certainty in cases where the estimate is very uncertain, leading to problems like those described here in animal advocacy. I think the best solution is to reason quantitatively when possible but to keep that in a public document linked to in any announcements and not to highlight the quantitative estimates in a way that often misleads people.
Another important step to take on this issue is probably to distinguish between problems that are unmeasurable and those that simply have not been measured yet. On those that have not been measured yet, we should try to measure them, and that might take some creativity by ingenious researchers.