He also literally lies in his cost-benefit analysis (by more than 10x).
What’s the literal lie, here? The link seems to say that a group led by Lomborg made misleading statements about how they made their prioritisations, but I can’t see any outright falsehoods.
b/c of doing the analysis and then not ranking shit in order.
Further down the list, we find a very controversial project, that is geo-engineering to reduce the intensity of incoming solar radiation to counteract global warming. According to a background paper, such investments would give a return rate of about 1,000. In spite of this enormous return rate, this is given moderate priority, apparently because it is deemed rather uncertain if this will actually work as intended.
> The lowest ranking accepted project, project no. 16, is called “Borehole and public hand pump intervention”. This has an estimated benefit-cost-ratio of loess than 3.4.
Next, we come to priority no. 17, the highest ranking not-accepted project. This is “Increased funding for green energy research and development”. According to the authors of the background paper, this has benefit-cost-ratios of 10 or more if the time horizon is slightly more than 1 decade. It is therefore a bit strange that this is placed below a project with a clearly less favourable benefit-cost-ratio.
do your own research if you disagree, but if you use “apparently because it is deemed rather uncertain if this will actually work as intended.” as an excuse to rate something poorly because you wanted to anyways rather than either do more research and update it, or even just make a guess, then wtf?
We are not playing, “is this plausibly defensible”, we are playing, “what was this person’s algorithm and are the systematically lying”.
I prefer to reserve “literally lying” for when people intentionally say things that are demonstrably false. It’s useful to have words for that kind of thing. As long as things are plausibly defensible, it seems better to say that he made “misleading statements”, or something like that.
Actually, I’m not even sure that this was a particularly egregious error. Given that they never say they’re going to rank things after the explicit cost-effectiveness estimates, not doing that seems quite reasonable to me. See for example givewell’s why we can’t take expected value estimates literally. All the arguments in that article should be even stronger when it’s different people making estimates across different areas. If you think that people should “make a guess” even when they don’t have time to do more research, that’s a methodological disagreement with a non-obvious answer.
I still think it’s plausible that some of the economists were acting in bad faith (it’s certainly bad that they don’t even give qualititive justifications for some of their rankings). But when their actions are plausibly defensible in any particular instance, you need several different pieces of evidence to be confident of that (like where they get their funding from, if they’re making systematic errors in the same direction, etc). If someone are saying things that I would classify as “literal lies”, that’s significantly stronger evidence that they’re acting in bad faith, which means you can skip over some of that evidence-gathering. I thought that you were claiming that Lomborg had made such a statement, and the fact that he hadn’t makes a large difference from my epistemical point of view, even if you have heard sufficiently much unrelated evidence to belive that he’s systematically acting in bad faith.
If you want to spend time predictably spinning in circles in your analysis because you can’t bring yourself to believe someone is lying, be my guest.
As for the specific authors: the individual reports written seem fine in themselves, and as for the geoengineering one, I know a guy who did a PhD under the author and said he’s generally trustworthy (I recall Vaniver was in his PhD program too). Like what I’m saying is the specific reports, e.g. Bickel’s report on geoengineering, seem fine, but Lomborg’s synthesis of them is shit, and you’re obscuring things with your niceness-and-good-faith approach.
Less of this, please. From what Lanrian is citing Lomborg does not come close to outright lying. (there might be more in the link, I have not read anything but the comments.) Accusing somebody of literally lying is a very strong accusation and should only be done in the egregious cases for all the usual reasons.
You are clearly well-informed about this matter. Your earlier comment was helpful and updated me in various directions. You could make me update me even more by applying the Principle of Charity.
What’s the literal lie, here? The link seems to say that a group led by Lomborg made misleading statements about how they made their prioritisations, but I can’t see any outright falsehoods.
b/c of doing the analysis and then not ranking shit in order.
do your own research if you disagree, but if you use “apparently because it is deemed rather uncertain if this will actually work as intended.” as an excuse to rate something poorly because you wanted to anyways rather than either do more research and update it, or even just make a guess, then wtf?
We are not playing, “is this plausibly defensible”, we are playing, “what was this person’s algorithm and are the systematically lying”.
I prefer to reserve “literally lying” for when people intentionally say things that are demonstrably false. It’s useful to have words for that kind of thing. As long as things are plausibly defensible, it seems better to say that he made “misleading statements”, or something like that.
Actually, I’m not even sure that this was a particularly egregious error. Given that they never say they’re going to rank things after the explicit cost-effectiveness estimates, not doing that seems quite reasonable to me. See for example givewell’s why we can’t take expected value estimates literally. All the arguments in that article should be even stronger when it’s different people making estimates across different areas. If you think that people should “make a guess” even when they don’t have time to do more research, that’s a methodological disagreement with a non-obvious answer.
I still think it’s plausible that some of the economists were acting in bad faith (it’s certainly bad that they don’t even give qualititive justifications for some of their rankings). But when their actions are plausibly defensible in any particular instance, you need several different pieces of evidence to be confident of that (like where they get their funding from, if they’re making systematic errors in the same direction, etc). If someone are saying things that I would classify as “literal lies”, that’s significantly stronger evidence that they’re acting in bad faith, which means you can skip over some of that evidence-gathering. I thought that you were claiming that Lomborg had made such a statement, and the fact that he hadn’t makes a large difference from my epistemical point of view, even if you have heard sufficiently much unrelated evidence to belive that he’s systematically acting in bad faith.
If you want to spend time predictably spinning in circles in your analysis because you can’t bring yourself to believe someone is lying, be my guest.
As for the specific authors: the individual reports written seem fine in themselves, and as for the geoengineering one, I know a guy who did a PhD under the author and said he’s generally trustworthy (I recall Vaniver was in his PhD program too). Like what I’m saying is the specific reports, e.g. Bickel’s report on geoengineering, seem fine, but Lomborg’s synthesis of them is shit, and you’re obscuring things with your niceness-and-good-faith approach.
Less of this, please. From what Lanrian is citing Lomborg does not come close to outright lying. (there might be more in the link, I have not read anything but the comments.) Accusing somebody of literally lying is a very strong accusation and should only be done in the egregious cases for all the usual reasons.
You are clearly well-informed about this matter. Your earlier comment was helpful and updated me in various directions. You could make me update me even more by applying the Principle of Charity.