Thanks a lot for your detailed comments Aidan, and others at Founders Pledge! We really appreciate the feedback and think our future work on this will benefit from it a great deal. Michael, Joel and I will reply to your comments individually.
On the major comment: This is a great point and something I hadn’t thought of before. Your explanation is very helpful. It’s really striking how large a difference it makes. We will update the post and Guesstimate model soon to correct this.
One thing I can’t quite get my head round—if we divide E(C) by E(L) then don’t we lose all the information about the uncertainty in each estimate? Are we able to say that the value of averting a death is somewhere between X and Y times that to doubling consumption (within 90% confidence)?
You’re very welcome! I really enjoyed reading and commenting on the post :)
One thing I can’t quite get my head round—if we divide E(C) by E(L) then don’t we lose all the information about the uncertainty in each estimate? Are we able to say that the value of averting a death is somewhere between X and Y times that to doubling consumption (within 90% confidence)?
Good question, I’ve also wondered this and I’m not sure. In principle, I feel like something like the standard error of the mean (the standard deviation of the sample divided by the square root of the sample size) should be useful here. But applying it naively doesn’t seem to give plausible results because guesstimate uses 5000 samples, so we end up with very small standard errors. I don’t have a super strong stats background though—maybe someone who does can help you more here
Thanks a lot for your detailed comments Aidan, and others at Founders Pledge! We really appreciate the feedback and think our future work on this will benefit from it a great deal. Michael, Joel and I will reply to your comments individually.
On the major comment: This is a great point and something I hadn’t thought of before. Your explanation is very helpful. It’s really striking how large a difference it makes. We will update the post and Guesstimate model soon to correct this.
One thing I can’t quite get my head round—if we divide E(C) by E(L) then don’t we lose all the information about the uncertainty in each estimate? Are we able to say that the value of averting a death is somewhere between X and Y times that to doubling consumption (within 90% confidence)?
You’re very welcome! I really enjoyed reading and commenting on the post :)
Good question, I’ve also wondered this and I’m not sure. In principle, I feel like something like the standard error of the mean (the standard deviation of the sample divided by the square root of the sample size) should be useful here. But applying it naively doesn’t seem to give plausible results because guesstimate uses 5000 samples, so we end up with very small standard errors. I don’t have a super strong stats background though—maybe someone who does can help you more here