Do ‘broad’ approaches to improving effective governance, and ultimately serving the farfuture, tend to be more or less effective in expectation than ‘narrow’ approaches (such asworking on reducing the risk of bioengineered pandemics)?

How can evidence be disseminated mosteffectively?

Under what conditions should a social planner preserve ‘option value’ bydelaying an important, irreversible decision to acquire more information, thereby delegatingdecision-making authority to future agents with potentially different values and preferences(cf. Bishop 1982; Dixit and Pindyck 1994)?

hen et al 2023; Toma andBell 2023

Intergenerational governance and policy-making

Vivalt, Coville, KC 2023

Gonzalez-Ricoy and Gosseries 2017

Can we design mechanisms to ensure that AI systems exhibit desirable behavioursuch as truth-telling or a lack of deception?

govern powerful non-state entities

inequalities,

Read and Toma, 2023

Song et al 2012)

Healy and Malhorta 2009

economic models predict the impact of advancedAI systems on political institutions and inequalities

(Acemoglu, 2023

Bersiroglu andErdil, 2023

Shulman, C., & Thornley, E. (2023). How Much Should Governments Pay to Prevent Catastrophes? Longtermism'sLimited Role. In Barratt, Greaves, Thorstad (eds.) Essays on Longtermism.

Alexandrie and Eden, forthcoming

E.g. Jordà et al. 2022

ased on the historical record of such events, what is the tail distributionof harmful impacts (e.g., fatalities) from pandemics, asteroids, wars, and other potentialdisasters? (E.g. Marani 2021;

Aschenbrenner2019

2023

Klenow et al. 2023

To what extent are forecasting methods informative for assessing the probability of globalcatastrophic risks and other future events of special importance for social welfare? (Karger

Karger, E., Rosenberg, J., Jacobs, Z., Hickman, M., Hadshar, R., Gamin, K., ... & Tetlock, P. E. (2023). ForecastingExistential Risks Evidence from a Long-Run Forecasting Tournament. FRI Working Paper No. 1.

Kalai & Kalai 2001)

Andreoni 2018

1.1 Strategic issues in altruistic decision

(cf.Andreoni & Payne 2003)

Whatdetermines the optimal spending schedule for altruistic decision-makers?

n altruistic decision-maker that funds a charitable intervention may crowd out fundingfrom other actors (e.g., governments or philanthropists)

Research agenda draft for GPI Economics

single chat requests: chatgpt_single()

ecause military shocks generate plausibly exogenous variationin economic production, the findings improve upon the correlational evidence in Section 3.Second, the implied biodiversity-GDP elasticities from the quasi-experiment are largerthan their OLS counterparts. By leveraging shocks in a 2SLS setting, the quasi-experiment-based elasticity estimates alleviate classic measurement error and endogeneity problems.However, the fact that the two methods produce elasticities of similar order of magnitudeadds confidence to the overall credibility of the estimates.

states’relative differences in response to aggregate military buildups (which are themselves largelydriven by geopolitical factors) – are unlikely to be correlated with unobservable determinantsof local biodiversity. That is, we assume the United States will not increase national mili-tary spending because states that receive larger military procurement contracts have worsebiodiversity

First, we producecausal estimates of the elasticities between biodiversity outcomes and air pollution. We use aresearch design that isolates variation in local pollution driven by transported pollution fromdistant, upwind cities (e.g., Deryugina et al., 2019; Anderson, 2020). We show that “upwindpollution” coming from areas over 300 km away generates substantial variation in local airquality, and these imported pollution shocks cause reductions in local biodiversity outcomes.Second, we estimate the impact of the military spending shocks on air pollution, and multiplythese estimates by the biodiversity-pollution elasticities we obtain from step one. Together,these exercises give us the expected impact of the military shocks on biodiversity throughair pollution. We find that pollution accounts for 20-60 percent of the reduced form effect ofmilitary shocks, suggesting air pollution is a first-order pathway underlying the production-biodiversity link

Second, there is substantial distributional heterogeneity, where the negativeassociation at the lowest decile of biodiversity is almost twice as large as the average.

FC = /opt/homebrew/bin/gfortran-11

CXX = /opt/homebrew/bin/g++-11

CC = /opt/homebrew/bin/gcc-11

book

We are now planning a further update in response to additional comments (e.g., from James Snowden and GiveWell). We expect this will include updating our analysis with recently completed studies  and refining some technical aspects of the analysis, including:Our systematic review, and the weight we place on different sources of evidenceEstimated spillover benefits for household membersCost estimatesTechnical details, such as:How long do the effects of psychotherapy last?How important is the expertise of the deliverer or number of sessions?Are the effects of psychotherapy affected by publication bias?

but longtermists often claim priorities such as AI alignment and preventing pandemics are important, even if we solely consider present wellbeing, so we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility.

we have a full list of research ideas that we hope to explore

If such views are true, that would count against longtermism

credible cause for longtermists.

We’ve published two working papers on moral uncertainty: The property rights approach to moral uncertainty and Wheeling and dealing: An internal bargaining approach to moral uncertainty, which both explore a novel, bargaining-based approach to acting when you’re uncertain what’s morally right. (This is very roughly akin to the ‘moral parliament’ approach.) We’re currently working with two external  co-authors  on a new paper that combines these ideas, which we plan to publish in an academic journal.

5.1 Using WELLBYs to compare the value of extending lives against improving lives

Although unlikely, we may also do some work relating to animal welfare; a challenge is that we prefer to rely on self-reports, which animals can’t give.

Assess the social desirability bias and other self-reporting biases in SWB data (for example: Do people give answers surveyors want? Is it a problem? If so, can anything be done?)Explore whether the measure of SWB matters (for example, if the key outcome is happiness rather than life satisfaction, do we get different priorities?)

Our working paper A Happy Possibility about Happiness (and other) Scales, a working paper attempts to provide the first overview of both the theory and evidence of the comparability of subjective wellbeing scales (e.g., is your 7/10 the same as my 7/10?). We plan to revise this for publication in an academic journal.

Our article To WELLBY or not to WELLBY? sets out the WELLBY method, its strengths, weaknesses, and areas for future work. To expand on this, we are:

3. The nature of wellbeing

existing work (where a public document is available)

Some work is both existing and current (where we have extant research we are updating).

which means we have a number of ongoing projects.

The notable ones are:

We also have a long list of organisations we would like to explore, including the Shamiri Institute, Action for Happiness, and Koko.

e expect others will provide different types of mental health interventions, such as social-emotional learning. We expect to examine Friendship Bench, Sangath, and CorStone unless we find something more promising.

Based on our cause area report on mental health and our cost-effectiveness analysis of psychotherapy, we think mental health is a promising area in which to find cost-effective interventions to improve wellbeing.

so we will also update our assessment of StrongMinds after we update our psychotherapy evaluation.

2.1 Updated evaluation of psychotherapy

Are the effects of psychotherapy affected by publication bias?

e’ve found that psychotherapy for depression is several times more cost-effective than cash transfers for improving happiness, deworming has an unclear long-term effect,

From this work, we’ve found that psychotherapy is several times more cost-effective than cash transfers or deworming for improving happiness. We concluded that comparing psychotherapy to antimalarial bednets, a life-saving intervention, depends heavily on various philosophical assumptions: treating depression ranges from about as good as to several times better than antimalarial bednets, depending on the assumptions.

evaluated the cost-effectiveness of organisations that provide  psychotherap

e, including psychedelics, opioids, poverty, loneliness, sleep, and air pollution.

Longlist of future cause areas to explore

1.2 Child development effects (e.g., abuse, trauma, nutrition)

that may have large impacts on wellbeing as well. So far we have completed shallow reviews on pain, lead exposure, and immigration.

Research agenda

A working paper exploring a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty

A revised paper on the theory and current evidence on scale cardinality (e.g., is your 7/10 the same as my 7/10?)

An academic paper setting out our method for measuring impact using wellbeing

We will conduct new research on how to measure and interpret subjective wellbeing measures:

2. Organisation evaluations

Non-mood-related mental health issues (e.g., psychotic and trauma-related disorders)Child development effects (e.g., abuse, trauma, nutrition)Fistula repair surgeryBasic housing improvements (e.g., concrete floors)

1. Cause area explorations

Conduct further theoretical work:

asurement of wellbeing. This has included evaluating philosophical views of wellbeing and life satisfaction, pioneering methods to conduct cost-effectiveness analyses using wellbeing, and conducting novel research on wellbeing measurement. We

Where relevant, we hone in and compare the top organisations implementing those interventions.

picking new cause areas to investigate, then narrowing down to the specific organisations – which will enable us to look broadly and deeply at the same time.

large, solvable, and unduly neglected.

broad analyses of different causes.

An ultimate goa

We will explore whether we should improve the wellbeing of people alive now or in future generations:

An academic journal book review of Will MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future

An experimental survey to test assumptions about subjective wellbeing measures, including comparability, linearity, and the neutral point

An academic paper on life satisfaction theories of wellbeing

the cost-effectiveness of several organisations (partially informed by our cause exploration work)

Applied research to maximise global wellbeing

Non-mental health organisations (organisations TBD)

To find new promising solutions to the biggest problems,

From this work, we’ve found that psychotherapy is several times more cost-effective than cash transfers or deworming for improving happiness.

engineering a paradigm shift towards a wellbeing approach among decision-makers

Ultimately, we measure impact in WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years), a method born in academia

For the first time in human history

The idea that the quality of a society should be judged by the happiness of its people is an old idea, stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, if not Aristotle.

[This post contains the Happier Lives Institute's research agenda for next 18 month. After a foreword, we give a brief summary of our plans, then go into more depth]

Making referee payments or charity donations: Three-quarters of our respondents said that referees would do a better job if they were better rewarded for their effort. Among them, about 75% indicated that referees should be paid for timely completion of the report. This payment could take many forms e.g., a donation to a charity or research fund.

OftW pre-giving-tuesday-email upselling split test (considering ‘impact vs emotion’) c

Phase 2: EAMTT – Bringing together and engaging Academics, EA orgs, and marketers

The output shows we need to set a prior on sigma, the Intercept, and on the male coefficient.

Post-event (complete) response rates, ratings (1-6), by school

we can change the question to “What is the probability that this intervention is better than 1x (i.e. cash transfers)?” We can set a critical value for that threshold (e.g. we accept programs that we are 90% sure are better than cash transfers). As above, that value comes straight out of the distribution from our PSA: it’s simply the proportion of outcome results from our PSA-generated distribution which are ≥1.

as a preview of what might happen with a full accounting of uncertainty. Code, data, and modified workbook are available.

Looked for a handful of key parameters pertaining to the overall effectiveness of the program and prevalence of the issue being addressed Traced those parameter values back to the original data, and located the statistical sampling uncertainty provided

we see that there is a substantial bias in the programs that we select. Programs that we select have a large positive bias on average.

n the first tab (“True vs false rejections”), we see the distribution of programs we accept and reject compared with whether or not they were truly better or worse than cash transfers. As expected, we generate many false rejections, due largely to the decision threshold of 3 being a “hedge” of sorts. More importantly, we observe false positives (i.e. programs that got “lucky”).

nce this set of matched communities has been generated generalised linear mixed models (e.g., multilevel models) will be used to assess changes in outcomes before and after the intervention, at different time periods, while controlling for other variables including whether the area is a control or intervention area.

All we need to do is change the units of the calculation and see if the result changes because of it. If it does, the calculation violates scale invariance, and for some reason the result depends on the units of measure that are used to calculate it.

Major Future Additions​

Static / sensitivity analysis Guesstimate has Sensitivity analysis that's pretty useful. This could be quite feasible to add, though it will likely require some thinking.

Right now Squiggle mostly works with probability distributions only, but it should also work smoothly with probabilities.

Gallery

Some distribution operations (like horizontal shift) return an unnormalized distriibution.

distriibution

Second argument to SampleSet.fromDist must be a number.

Recall the three formats of distributions. We can force any distribution into SampleSet format

For every point on the x-axis, operate the corresponding points in the y axis of the pdf.

Pointwise operations are done with PointSetDist internals rather than SampleSetDist internals.

TODO: this isn't in the new interpreter/parser yet.

A projection over a stretched x-axis.

Samples are converted into PDF shapes automatically using kernel density estimation and an approximated bandwidth. Eventually Squiggle will allow for more specificity.

mixture(1,2,normal(5,2)), the first two arguments will get converted into point mass distributions with values at 1 and 2.

mixture(pointMass(1),pointMass(2),pointMass(5,2)).

Array of Distributions Input

Most functions are namespaced under their respective types to keep functionality distinct. Certain popular functions are usable without their namespaces.

For example,

Squiggle dictionaries work similarly to Python dictionaries. API.

Example

mixture​

If both values are above zero, a lognormal distribution is used. If not, a normal distribution is used.

[5].

Say that $2B to $20B, or 10x to 100x the amount that Open Philanthropy has already spent, would have a 1 to 10% chance of succeeding at that goal [5].

[0]. This number is $138.8 different than the $138.8M given in Open Philanthropy's website, which is probably not up to date with their grants database.

For completeness, I do estimate the impacts of a standout intervention as well.

cost = 2B to 20B

probabilityOfSuccess = 0.01 to 0.1 # 1% to 10%.

counterfactualAccelerationInYears = 5 to 50

We guess that implementation challenges would limit effectiveness and funding opportunities. As a result, we do not anticipate doing further research on this program in the near future.

we estimate that this net distribution will reduce the number of deaths each year within this population from 12 to about 11.4

Step Four: 12 of those people are expected to die every year of any cause In order to estimate how many lives these nets might save, we first need to know how many people in this population would have died without the protection of the nets. The mortality rates and population demographics in Guinea suggest that about twelve out of 1,431 people would have died per year of any cause (including malaria).8

skeptical that a 4- to 8-week program like StrongMinds would have benefits that persist far beyond a year.

t conclusions.

they seem unintuitive to us and further influence our belief that StrongMinds is less cost-effective than HLI’s estimates.

This post provides an overview and analysis of the Doing Good Better  book giveaway through Effective Altruism New Zealand (EANZ). The analysis covers data collected from survey responses between 05-Jan-17 and 17-Dec-19, for which there were a total of 298 responses, with appreciable variance in the amount of the survey which was completed. This analysis was initially completed around Jan 2020 so any reference to "to date" refers to then.

We found that Fundraising Pages which received the £5 donation raised £118 more (on average) than the pages in the control group.

ngle claim published in a paper to evaluating the credibility of published papers more holistically. In phase 2, which began in 2021, 200 "bushel" papers were evaluated holistically. Participants working in IDEA groups evaluated the seven credibility signals:

drop_na(ends_with("_s"))

‘BOTEC’: Back of the envelope calculations are central to RP’s work

A NATIONWIDE TWITTER EXPERIMENT PROMOTING VACCINATION IN INDONESIA

SECTOR

somemustuseIDEAprotocol,butmostcanuseasingleroundofelicitation.Whatthey allhaveincommonisthatthey mathematically aggregatejudgments abouttheprobability ofsomeeventorsubjectivedegrees ofbelief,intoasingle,value.

Interestingly, this also means that the prior for σ is now dependent on the prior for the slope, because

This means that the estimate for sigma is the square root of 1 minus the variance of the slope estimate (0.75²). I

prior(normal(0, 0.5), class = "b", lb = -1, ub = 1)

add_predicted_draws(model_height_weight) %>%

add_epred_draws(model_height_weight) %>%

CEARCH discovering a Cause X every three years and significantly increasing support for it.

sample_prior = TRUE,

The output shows us that we need to set two priors, one for the Intercept and one for sigma. brms also already determined a default prior for each, but we’ll ignore that for now.

The prior for the slope is a lot easier now. We can simply specify a normal distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation equal to the size of the effect we deem likely, together with a lower bound of 0 and upper bound of 1.

Apparently our prior was still very uninformed because the posterior shows we can be a confident in a much narrower range of slopes!

I increased the adapt_delta, as suggested in the documentation, from .8 to .9.

he Rhat values did not show this was problematic but

egression model into a simple correlation analysis. That way we can specify a prior on what we think the correlation should be

Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

ScreenIT Sep 27, 2021 SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.22.461342: (What is this?)Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

Is the study design appropriate and are the methods used valid? Yes

Some details of the methods are lacking. For example, the MUpro provides two methods, it is necessary to specify which method was used in the analysis. The confidence score of each prediction should also be provided. Besides, some results from I-Mutant and MUpro were conflicting, the authors may want to discuss the discrepancy.

Discussion, revision and decision Discussion and Revision Author response We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments. Below we provide pointwise response and the changes made in the revised manuscript. To Dr. Jyotsnamayee Sabat

PeerRef Dec 15, 2021 Discussion, revision and decision

Author response

Nov 26, 2021 Peer review report Reviewer: Hurng-Yi Wang Institution: Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, National Taiwan University email: hurngyi@gmail.com Section 1 – Serious concerns Do you have any serious concerns about the manuscript such as fraud, plagiarism, unethical or unsafe practices? No Have authors’ provided the necessary ethics approval (from authors’ institution or an ethics committee)? not applicable Section 2 – Language quality How would you rate the English language quality? Medium quality Section 3 – validity and reproducibility Does the work cite relevant and sufficient literature? No Is the study design appropriate and are the methods used valid? No Are the methods documented and analysis provided so that the study can be replicated? Yes Is the source data that underlies the result available so that the study can be … More Peer review report Reviewer: Hurng-Yi Wang Institution: Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, National Taiwan University email: hurngyi@gmail.com

Read the original source

I agree to change to Verified manuscript.

and are shown below.

We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments. Below we provide pointwise response and the changes made in the revised manuscript.

Pt-12:

The “Analysis of the Mutational Profile of Indian Isolates” should be moved to Materials and Methods.

Read the full article

Article activity feed Version 2 published on bioRxiv

AgarwalNita Parekh

Abstract

In this study we carried out the early distribution of clades and subclades state-wise based on shared mutations in Indian SARS-CoV-2 isolates collected (27 th Jan – 27 th May 2020). Phylogenetic analysis of these isolates indicates multiple independent sources of introduction of the virus in the country, while principal component analysis revealed some state-specific clusters. It is observed that clade 20A defining mutations C241T (ORF1ab: 5’ UTR), C3037T (ORF1ab: F924F), C14408T (ORF1ab: P4715L), and A23403G (S: D614G) are predominant in Indian isolates during this period. Higher number of coronavirus cases were observed in certain states, viz ., Delhi, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana. Genetic analysis of isolates from these states revealed a cluster with shared mutations, C6312A (ORF1ab: T2016K), C13730T (ORF1ab: A4489V), C23929T, and C28311T (N: P13L). Analysis of region-specific shared mutations carried out to understand the large number of deaths in Gujarat and Maharashtra identified shared mutations defining subclade, I/GJ-20A (C18877T, C22444T, G25563T (ORF3a: H57Q), C26735T, C28854T (N: S194L), C2836T) in Gujarat and two sets of co-occurring mutations C313T, C5700A (ORF1ab: A1812D) and A29827T, G29830T in Maharashtra. From the genetic analysis of mutation spectra of Indian isolates, the insights gained in its transmission, geographic distribution, containment, and impact are discussed.

Pt-13: I want to know how the representative sequences were selected for different states. Is it based on no. of sequences submitted or positivity rate of a particular region? All the Indian isolates available in GISAID for the period 27th Jan – 27th May 2020 were download and considered for analysis. NO state-wise selection was done.

Demographic Analysis of Mutations in Indian SARS-CoV-2 Isolates

Demographic Analysis of Mutations in Indian SARS-CoV-2 Isolates

What cause area(s) is/are you interested in working in if there was a role or project that was a good fit? (select all that apply)

What type of role(s) would you be interested in working in? (select all that apply)

What obstacles are holding you back from changing roles or co-founding a new project? (select all that apply)

Add the SurveyMonkey account’s OAuth token to your .Rprofile file. To open and edit that file, run usethis::edit_r_profile(),

15desire to “pay it forward” for other donors by supporting the matching fund after receiving matching funds. This possibility may be explored infuture research. About a third ofdonors werewilling to support the matching fund with some or all of their donation. This provided enough matching funds to cover the matching funds received by donors, making the micro-matching system self-sustaining.Despite a long history of altruism,including centuries of organized philanthropy, humans have only recently attempted to systematically measure the cost-effectiveness of altruistic endeavors with the goal of doing as much good as possible10,11. The effective altruism movement is growing and has been notably successful in securing large commitments from relatively few people32,33. Effective altruism’s potential for more widespread adoptionis unknown. The sevenstudiesandproof-of-conceptdemonstration presented here are cause for optimism, grounded in a more detailed understanding of altruistic motivation. Today, relatively few donors prioritize effectiveness. But our results suggest that effective giving can be a satisfying complement to giving based on personal feelings, adding a “competence glow”27to the proverbial “warm glow” of giving. Some donors are willing to incentivize bundle donations in others, promoting a chain of giving that is both personally meaningful and effective. The stakes are high, as ordinary people have the power to do enormous good. The limited proof-of-concept demonstrationreported onhere raised funds sufficient to provide 100,700deworming treatments and 17,500 malaria nets, among other benefits. (See Supplementary Materials.) A better understanding of moral motivation, and how to channel it, could dramatically increase the impact of human altruism.MethodsAll reported studies, including the final proofofconcept,were pre-registered, except forStudy 7 (which was a pre-test for the proof of concept). Formore detailed descriptions of the methodsand results, please refer to our Supplementary Materialsavailable at https://osf.io/zu6j8/?view_only=28050663bd6b4b5cae0a73ad8068bc34. Across Studies 1-7w

add_predicted_draws

howed us the posterior distributions of the two parameters

Apparently our posterior estimate for the Intercept is 154.63

Here we see that the posterior distribution

Notice that we sample from the prior so we can not only visualize our posterior later, but also the priors we have just defined.