Hmm, your comment doesn’t really resonate with me. I don’t think it’s really about being monomaniacal. I think the (in hindsight) correct thought process here would be something like:
”Over the next 20 or 50 years, it’s very likely that the biggest lever in the space of malaria will be some kind of technological breakthrough. Therefore we should prioritize investigating the hypothesis that there’s some way of speeding up this biggest lever.”
I don’t think you need this “move heaven and earth” philosophy to do that reasoning; I don’t think you need to focus on EA growth much more than we did. The mental step could be as simple as “Huh, bednets seem kinda incremental. Is there anything that’s much more ambitious?”
(To be clear I think this is a really hard mental step, but one that I would expect from an explicitly highly-scope-sensitive movement like EA.)
I think part of my disagreement is I’m not sure what counts as “incremental.” Like bednets are an intervention, that broadly speaking, can solve ~half the malaria problem forever at ~20-40 billion dollars, with substantial cobenefits. And attempts at “non-incremental” malaria solutions have already costed mid-high single digit billions. So it’s not like the ratios are massively off. Importantly, “non-incremental” solutions like vaccines likely still requires fairly expensive development, distribution, and ongoing maintenance. So small mistakes might be there, but I don’t see enough room left for us to be making large mistakes in the space.
That’s what I mean by “not enough zeroes.”
To be clear my argument is not insensitive to numbers. If the incremental solutions to the problem have a price tag of >1T (eg global poverty, or aging-related deaths), and non-incremental solutions have had a total price tag of <1B, then I’m much more sympathetic to the “the EV for trying to identify more scalable interventions is likely higher than incremental solutions now, even without looking at details”-style arguments.
Ah, I see. I think the two arguments I’d give here:
Founding 1DaySooner for malaria 5-10 years earlier is high-EV and plausibly very cheap; and there are probably another half-dozen things in this reference class.
We’d need to know much more about the specific interventions in that reference class to confidently judge that we made a mistake. But IMO if everyone in 2015-EA had explicitly agreed “vaccines will plausibly dramatically slash malaria rates within 10 years” then I do think we’d have done much more work to evaluate that reference class. Not having done that work can be an ex-ante mistake even if it turns out it wasn’t an ex-post mistake.
Hmm, your comment doesn’t really resonate with me. I don’t think it’s really about being monomaniacal. I think the (in hindsight) correct thought process here would be something like:
”Over the next 20 or 50 years, it’s very likely that the biggest lever in the space of malaria will be some kind of technological breakthrough. Therefore we should prioritize investigating the hypothesis that there’s some way of speeding up this biggest lever.”
I don’t think you need this “move heaven and earth” philosophy to do that reasoning; I don’t think you need to focus on EA growth much more than we did. The mental step could be as simple as “Huh, bednets seem kinda incremental. Is there anything that’s much more ambitious?”
(To be clear I think this is a really hard mental step, but one that I would expect from an explicitly highly-scope-sensitive movement like EA.)
Yeah so basically I contest that this alone will actually have higher EV in the malaria case; apologies if my comment wasn’t clear enough.
I think part of my disagreement is I’m not sure what counts as “incremental.” Like bednets are an intervention, that broadly speaking, can solve ~half the malaria problem forever at ~20-40 billion dollars, with substantial cobenefits. And attempts at “non-incremental” malaria solutions have already costed mid-high single digit billions. So it’s not like the ratios are massively off. Importantly, “non-incremental” solutions like vaccines likely still requires fairly expensive development, distribution, and ongoing maintenance. So small mistakes might be there, but I don’t see enough room left for us to be making large mistakes in the space.
That’s what I mean by “not enough zeroes.”
To be clear my argument is not insensitive to numbers. If the incremental solutions to the problem have a price tag of >1T (eg global poverty, or aging-related deaths), and non-incremental solutions have had a total price tag of <1B, then I’m much more sympathetic to the “the EV for trying to identify more scalable interventions is likely higher than incremental solutions now, even without looking at details”-style arguments.
Ah, I see. I think the two arguments I’d give here:
Founding 1DaySooner for malaria 5-10 years earlier is high-EV and plausibly very cheap; and there are probably another half-dozen things in this reference class.
We’d need to know much more about the specific interventions in that reference class to confidently judge that we made a mistake. But IMO if everyone in 2015-EA had explicitly agreed “vaccines will plausibly dramatically slash malaria rates within 10 years” then I do think we’d have done much more work to evaluate that reference class. Not having done that work can be an ex-ante mistake even if it turns out it wasn’t an ex-post mistake.