I explicitly address this in the second paragraph of the “The history of GiveWell’s estimates for lives saved per dollar” section of my post as well as the “Donating to AMF has benefits beyond saving lives” section of my post.
Not really. You do mention the flow-on benefits. But you don’t analyse whether your estimate of “good done per dollar” has increased or decreased. And that’s the relevant thing to analyse. If you argued “cost per life saved has had greater regression to your prior than you’d expected; and for that reason I expect my estimates of good done per dollar to regress really substantially” (an argument I think you would endorse), I’d accept that argument, though I’d worry about how much it generalises to cause-areas other than global poverty. (e.g. I expect there to be much less of an ‘efficient market’ for activities where there are fewer agents with the same goals/values, like benefiting non-human animals, or making sure the far-future turn out well). Optimism bias still holds, of course.
You say that “cost-effectiveness estimates skew so negatively.” I was just pointing out that for me that hasn’t been the case (for good done per $), because long-run benefits strike me as swamping short-term benefits, a factor that I didn’t initially incorporate into my model of doing good. And, though I agree with the conclusion that you want as many different angles as possible (etc), focusing on cost per life saved rather than good done per dollar might lead you to miss important lessons (e.g. “make sure that you’ve identified all crucial normative and empirical considerations”). I doubt that you personally have missed those lessons. But they aren’t in your post. And that’s fine, of course, you can’t cover everything in one blog post. But it’s important for the reader not to overgeneralise.
I agree with this. I don’t think that my post suggests otherwise.
Not really. You do mention the flow-on benefits. But you don’t analyse whether your estimate of “good done per dollar” has increased or decreased. And that’s the relevant thing to analyse. If you argued “cost per life saved has had greater regression to your prior than you’d expected; and for that reason I expect my estimates of good done per dollar to regress really substantially” (an argument I think you would endorse), I’d accept that argument, though I’d worry about how much it generalises to cause-areas other than global poverty. (e.g. I expect there to be much less of an ‘efficient market’ for activities where there are fewer agents with the same goals/values, like benefiting non-human animals, or making sure the far-future turn out well). Optimism bias still holds, of course.
You say that “cost-effectiveness estimates skew so negatively.” I was just pointing out that for me that hasn’t been the case (for good done per $), because long-run benefits strike me as swamping short-term benefits, a factor that I didn’t initially incorporate into my model of doing good. And, though I agree with the conclusion that you want as many different angles as possible (etc), focusing on cost per life saved rather than good done per dollar might lead you to miss important lessons (e.g. “make sure that you’ve identified all crucial normative and empirical considerations”). I doubt that you personally have missed those lessons. But they aren’t in your post. And that’s fine, of course, you can’t cover everything in one blog post. But it’s important for the reader not to overgeneralise.
I wasn’t suggesting it does.
Ok. Do you have any suggestions for how I could modify my post to make it more clear in these respects?