lukeprog comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 18 August 2011 11:38:38PM 7 points [-]

Minor tweaks suggested...

There are some formatting issues. For example there is an extra space below the heading 'The approach we oppose: "explicit expected-value" (EEV) decisionmaking' instead of above it, and the heading 'Informal objections to EEV decisionmaking' is just blended into the middle of a paragraph, along with the first sentence below it. The heading 'Approaches to Bayesian adjustment that I oppose' is formatted differently than the others are.

Use 'a' instead of 'an' here:

pre-existing view of how cost-effective an donation

Add 'and' before '(b)' here:

(a) have significant room for error (b) ...

You may want to add 'marginal' before 'value' here; I'm not sure that EEV proponents neglect the issue of marginal value:

I estimate that each dollar spent on Program P has a value of V

In this paragraph, you may want to link to this video as an example:

We've encountered numerous people who argue that charities working on reducing the risk of sudden human extinction must be the best ones to support...

For example, at 7:15 in the video, Anna says:

Don't be afraid to write down estimates, even if the unknowns are very large, or even if you don't know very much about the particular domain. And the reason you shouldn't be afraid to write down estimates is that we need to make decisions, decisions are necessarily based on implicit or explicit estimates, and if we write down our estimates and put our thinking in plain view, we can often make our estimates better: we can notice errors in our thinking, others can notice errors in our thinking, we can begin to improve the process.

She goes on to say:

But equally, ...don't trust your estimates too much... If the issue is important, recalculate, look at how other people estimate these sorts of quantities, and try to get the estimates better.

Anna then applies this reasoning to Singularity scenarios, mentions GiveWell, and more.