Fair point that GiveWell has updated their RFMF and increased their estimated cost per QALY.
I do think that 300K EAs doing something equivalent to eliminating the global disease burden is substantially more plausible than 66K doing so. This seems trivially true since more people can do more than fewer people. I agree that it still sounds ambitious, but saying that ~3X the people involved in the Manhattan project could eliminate the disease burden certainly sounds easier than doing the same with half the Manhattan project’s workforce size.
This is getting into nits, but ruling out all arguments of the form ‘this seems to imply’ seems really strong? Like, it naively seems to limit me to only discussing to implications that the argument maker explicitly acknowledges. I’m probably mis-interpreting you here though, since that seems really silly! This is usually what I’m trying to say when I ask about implications; I note something odd to see if the oddness is implied or if I misinterpreted something.
Agreed that X-risk is very important and also hard to quantify.
Fair point that GiveWell has updated their RFMF and increased their estimated cost per QALY.
I do think that 300K EAs doing something equivalent to eliminating the global disease burden is substantially more plausible than 66K doing so. This seems trivially true since more people can do more than fewer people. I agree that it still sounds ambitious, but saying that ~3X the people involved in the Manhattan project could eliminate the disease burden certainly sounds easier than doing the same with half the Manhattan project’s workforce size.
This is getting into nits, but ruling out all arguments of the form ‘this seems to imply’ seems really strong? Like, it naively seems to limit me to only discussing to implications that the argument maker explicitly acknowledges. I’m probably mis-interpreting you here though, since that seems really silly! This is usually what I’m trying to say when I ask about implications; I note something odd to see if the oddness is implied or if I misinterpreted something.
Agreed that X-risk is very important and also hard to quantify.