Lazily pursuing earn-to-give. Very excited about AI Safety, GHD, and the weirder parts of animal welfare.
I agree my claim for tighter error estimates is very weak.
I could say that looking at the estimate you get by aggregating many different folks' together reduces variance (assuming you believe the estimates have some amount of uncorrelated signal). Individual estimates are noisy, but aggregate estimates are less noisy. This is basically the point discussed in the 'Why do different groups have the same rankings' section of OP's post.
But frankly I'm largely making a vibes claim (ie, model gives silly results -> model probably wrong).
Sure, I understand where the values come from. I'm saying the distribution created leads to (IMO) clearly wacky results. The difference between the most vs least spooky X-risks is way more than a 100X difference.
I personally get some value out of numbers & sanity checking them like this, but your mileage may vary.
Yes, if you assume your errors are log normal distributed, you expect to see big errors.
Your simulation says that the range of actual threats is tightly bounded between 10e-5 and 10e-7 (IMO much too small a range). In contrast, your error estimates span 8 orders of magnitude (IMO likely too large a range).
I really think your choice of parameters fully explains your results.
[I did not downvote]
The paper IMO spends too little time on the important question, which is how much impact you get per dollar. The paper instead assumes that you could plausibly hasten developing full aging reversal by 1 second for 5,500$.
For neglectedness, it would be good to discuss current funding levels. Gemini suggested ballpark 11 billion annually.
For tractability, it would be good to discuss particular research lines that have had success. For example, how much have we lengthened mice lifespans? What is our rate of progress there?
Also, many folks on the EA Forum dislike posting links without copying the text to the forum. I mostly agree, although IMO it is fine to do in a 'Quick Take'.
In response to "EA doesn't recommend becoming a politician":
80000 does recommend policy work. https://80000hours.org/skills/political-bureaucratic/
EA forum posts making similar recommendations seem common.
It is hard to say if EA-as-a-monolith recommends any particular thing, but I think many EAs would encourage (competent and electable) folks to consider a policy career.
[6] If strange situations result in me saving money having more net-expect-impact this year than donating, I'm allowed to do so. Didn't expect this to come up. Less than a 1% increase in savings, I won't beat myself up about it.