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.
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.