You might be interested in Gregory Lewis’ person-affecting value of existential risk reduction CE estimate (Guesstimate model), which arrives at a mean ‘cost per life year’ of $1,500-$26,000(mean $9,200) via this chain of reasoning. My sense is that it’s a lot lower than even your pessimistic estimate mainly due to the person-affecting view constraint, but the takeaways still favor continued work & funding on reducing x-risk. Quoting Lewis:
[There] is a common pattern of thought along the lines of, “X-risk reduction only matters if the total view is true, and if one holds a different view one should basically discount it”. Although rough, this cost-effectiveness Guesstimate suggests this is mistaken. …
The comments section in that post surfaces a number of other x-risk CE estimates too. 80K Hours also has a (simpler) CE estimate. All of them seem pretty conservative.
As to discount rates, I was a bit confused reading William MacAskill’s discount rate post, it wasn’t clear to me that he was talking about the moral value of lives in the future, it seemed like it might be having something to do with value of resources. In “What We Owe The Future” which is much more recent, I think MacAskill argues quite strongly that we should have a zero discount rate for the moral patienthood of future people.
In general, I tend to use a zero discount rate, I will add this to the background assumptions section, as I do think it is an important point. In my opinion, future people and their experience do not have any more or less valuable than people live today, though of course other people may differ. I try to address this somewhat in the section titled “Inspiration.”
You might be interested in Gregory Lewis’ person-affecting value of existential risk reduction CE estimate (Guesstimate model), which arrives at a mean ‘cost per life year’ of $1,500-$26,000 (mean $9,200) via this chain of reasoning. My sense is that it’s a lot lower than even your pessimistic estimate mainly due to the person-affecting view constraint, but the takeaways still favor continued work & funding on reducing x-risk. Quoting Lewis:
The comments section in that post surfaces a number of other x-risk CE estimates too. 80K Hours also has a (simpler) CE estimate. All of them seem pretty conservative.
Another remark is on discount rate, which you didn’t seem to include in your post (maybe I missed it?). The discount rate effectively determines whether long- or near-termism is the best use of philanthropic resources is a post by professional cost-effectiveness modeller Froolow that explores this in more detail, using threshold analysis and assuming exponential discounting (although I suspect many people’s actual discount rates including mine look more like Will MacAskill’s, which is more lay-intuitive if not very mathematically nice).
Thanks Mo! These estimates were very interesting.
As to discount rates, I was a bit confused reading William MacAskill’s discount rate post, it wasn’t clear to me that he was talking about the moral value of lives in the future, it seemed like it might be having something to do with value of resources. In “What We Owe The Future” which is much more recent, I think MacAskill argues quite strongly that we should have a zero discount rate for the moral patienthood of future people.
In general, I tend to use a zero discount rate, I will add this to the background assumptions section, as I do think it is an important point. In my opinion, future people and their experience do not have any more or less valuable than people live today, though of course other people may differ. I try to address this somewhat in the section titled “Inspiration.”