Dec 5, 2018 in Model, Quick Fix
Every year, I check in to see if we’ve eradicated polio or guinea worm yet. Disease eradications are a big deal. We’ve only successfully eradicated one disease – smallpox – so being so close to wiping out two more is very exciting.
Still, when I looked at how much resources were committed to polio eradication (especially by the Gates Foundation), I noticed they seemed incongruent with its effects. No polio eradication effort can be found among GiveWell’s top charities, because it is currently rather expensive to prevent polio. The amount of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs, a common measure of charity effectiveness used in the Effective Altruism community) you can save with a donation to preventing malaria is just higher than for polio.
I briefly wondered if it might not be better for all of the effort going to polio eradication to instead go to anti-malaria programs. After...
Nov 19, 2018 in Model, Philosophy
So, there’s this thing that happens in certain intellectual communities, like (to give a totally random example) social psychology. This thing is that novel takes are rewarded. New insights are rewarded. Figuring out things that no one has before is rewarded. The high-status people in such a community are the ones who come up with and disseminate many new insights.
On the face of it, this is good! New insights are how we get penicillin and flight and Pad Thai burritos. But there’s one itty bitty little problem with building a culture around it.
Good (and correct!) new ideas are a finite resource.
This isn’t news. Back in 2005, John Ioannidis laid out the case for “most published research findings” being false. It turns out that when you have a small chance of coming up with a correct idea even using statistical tests for to find false positives can...