I think that what’s important is 1) the opportunity cost of the time, rather than the actual number of minutes, and 2) the fact that Elizabeth’s work can be outsourced/parallelised at all, even if it takes others a bit longer than her.
It’s unclear to me whether I should think of the forecasters as more replaceable than Elizabeth. If they’re all generalist researchers, having “a bunch of generalist researchers do generalist research for the same amount of time as the original researcher” doesn’t seem obviously scalable.
(That said, my current belief is that this work was pretty interesting and important overall)
The forecasters were only quite loosely selected for “some forecasting experience”. Some of them I know are very able forecasters, others are people much less experienced, and who I don’t think are affiliated that much with the rationality or effective altruism communities.
Yes.
Curious why you think it’s important?
I think that what’s important is 1) the opportunity cost of the time, rather than the actual number of minutes, and 2) the fact that Elizabeth’s work can be outsourced/parallelised at all, even if it takes others a bit longer than her.
It’s unclear to me whether I should think of the forecasters as more replaceable than Elizabeth. If they’re all generalist researchers, having “a bunch of generalist researchers do generalist research for the same amount of time as the original researcher” doesn’t seem obviously scalable.
(That said, my current belief is that this work was pretty interesting and important overall)
The forecasters were only quite loosely selected for “some forecasting experience”. Some of them I know are very able forecasters, others are people much less experienced, and who I don’t think are affiliated that much with the rationality or effective altruism communities.