Hi Jaime, I've updated to clarify that the "MEV" column is just "DALYs per USD 100,000". Have hidden some of the other columns (they're just for internal administrative/labelling purposes).

Thanks for the thoughts, Jaime and Nick!

For what it's worth, CEARCH's list of evaluated causes (or more specifically, top interventions in various causes) and their estimated cost-effectiveness is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14y9IGAyS6s4kbDLGQCI6_qOhqnbn2jhCfF1o2GfyjQg/edit#gid=0

I think Nick is fundamentally correct that because uncertainty is so high, sorting isn't particularly useful. Most grantmaking organizations, to my understanding, prefer to use a cost-effectiveness threshold/funding bar, to decide whether or not to recommend/support a particular cause/intervention/charity.

For ourselves, we use 10x GiveWell for GHD, as (a) most of the money we move is EA and the counterfactual is GiveWell (so to have impact we the ideas we redirect funding/talent to be more cost-effective than GiveWell in expectation, and (b) we have such an aggressive bar because GiveWell is very robust in their discounting relative to us (which takes a lot of time and effort). An aggressive bar helps ensure that even if your estimated cost-effectiveness estimate is too optimistic relative to GiveWell, it can eat a lot of implicit discounts while still ensuring that the true cost-effectiveness is >GiveWell. (so when we say something is >=10x GiveWell it's not literally so, more of a reasonably high confidence claim that it's probably more cost-effective (in expectation).

If I'm understanding this concern correctly, it's along the lines of: "they're not making a financial sacrifice in shutting down, so it's less praiseworthy than it otherwise would be".

Just to clarify, charity founders (at least CE ones) take a pay cut to start their charity - they would earn more if working for other EA organizations as employees, and much more if in tech/finance/consulting/careers that typical of people with oxbridge/ivy/etc education levels. The financial sacrifice was already made when starting the charity, and if anything, quitting is actually better for you financially.

Disclosure: Sarah and Ben are friends, and we came out of the same CE incubation batch, so I'm not unbiased here.

I think it's speaks well of a person's integrity, objectivity, and concern for impact that they're able to make a clear eyed assessment that their own project isnt having the desired impact, and then going ahead to shut it down so as to not burn counterfactually valuable resources.

It's something that's worth emulating, and I do try to apply this myself - via regular CEAs and qualitative evaluations of CEAECH's expected impact (especially as a meta org with a more indirect path to impact). We're only wasting our own time otherwise!

Hi Vasco,

The GiveWell team handling the nutrition portfolio reached out to me to discuss salt policy, and SSB taxes are on their longlist, iirc. Of note is the fact that Vital Strategies (which have gotten GiveWell grants for their alcohol policy work, also does SSB tax advocacy).

I've generally moved to the view that geomeans are better in cases where the different estimates don't capture a real difference but rather a difference in methodology (while using the arithmetic makes sense when we are capturing a real difference, e.g. if an intervention affects a bunch of people differently).

In any case, this report is definitely superseded/out-of-date; Stan's upcoming final report on abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is far more representative of CEARCH's current thinking on the issue. (Thanks for your inputs on ASRS, by the way, Vasco!)

Hi Nick!

Yep, that's definitely a concern for governments (same with other policy interventions for nutrition). For funders - to be fair, that's not much different from direct delivery (e.g. for vaccinations or contraception, we can't really know the impact until we finish our M&E and see the uptake rates/disease rates change)

Hi Mo,

I don't think I read that part of Michael's thesis before, but it does look interesting!

In general, I think it's fairly arbitrary what a cause is - an intervention/solution can also be reframed as a problem (and hence a cause) through negation (e.g. physical activity is a preventative solution to various diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, and in a real sense physical inactivity is a problem; having an ALLFED-style resilient food supply is a mitigatory solution to nuclear winter - even if we can't prevent nuclear exchange, we can perhaps stop billions from dying from famine - and in that sense lack of foods capable of growing in abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is a problem).

Yep, that's what Jeroen submitted, and he posted it to the forum after. I think it's a really useful perspective to have. In GHD, we already have various risk factors that we can address to solve multiple diseases (e.g. hypertension for coronary heart disease, stroke, kidney disease etc), and it makes sense to apply this perspective more broadly.