EA - EA and LW Forum Weekly Summary (20th - 26th March 2023) by Zoe Williams

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA & LW Forum Weekly Summary (20th - 26th March 2023), published by Zoe Williams on March 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA and LW forums - you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.If you'd like to receive these summaries via email, you can subscribe here.Podcast version: Subscribe on your favorite podcast app by searching for 'EA Forum Podcast (Summaries)'. A big thanks to Coleman Snell for producing these!Author's note: I'm currently travelling, which means:a) Today's newsletter is a shorter one - only 9 top posts are covered, though in more depth than usual.b) The next post will be on 17th April (three week gap), covering the prior three weeks at a higher karma bar.After that, we'll be back to the regular schedule.Object Level Interventions / Reviewsby EJT, CarlShulmanLinkpost for this paper, which uses standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) with detrimental assumptions (eg. giving no value to future generations, only assessing benefits to Americans, and only assessing value from preventing existential threats) to show that even under those conditions governments should be spending much more on averting threats from nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and AI.Their analysis primarily relies on previously published estimates of risks, concluding US citizens alive today have a ~1% risk of dying from these causes in the next decade. They estimate $400B in interventions could reduce the risk by minimum 0.1 percentage points, and that using the lowest figure for the US Department of Transportation’s value of a statistical life, this would result in ~$646B in value of American lives saved.They suggest longtermists in the political sphere should change their messaging to revolve around this standard CBA-driven catastrophe policy, which is more democratically acceptable than policies relying on the cost to future generations. They suggest it would also reduce risk almost as much as a strong longtermist policy (particularly if the CBA incorporates an argument for citizens ‘altruistic willingness to pay’ ie. some level of addition for the benefit to future generations).by GiveWellThe Happier Lives Institute (HLI) has argued that if Givewell used subjective well-being (SWB) measures in their moral weights, they’d find StrongMinds more cost-effective than marginal funding to their top charities. Givewell assessed this claim and estimated StrongMinds is ~25% (5%-80% pessimistic to optimistic CI) as effective as these marginal funding opportunities when using SWB - this equates to 2.3x the effectiveness of GiveDirectly.Key differences in analysis from HLI, by size of impact, include:GiveWell assumes lower spillover effects to household members of those receiving treatment.Givewell translates decreases in depression into increases in life satisfaction at a lower rate than HLI.Givewell expects lower effect in a scaled program, and lower durations of effects (not passing a year) due to the program being only 4-8 weeks.Givewell applies downward adjustments for social desirability bias and publication bias in studies of psychotherapy.These result in an ~83% discount in the effectiveness vs. HLI’s analysis. For all points except the fourth, two upcoming RCTs from StrongMinds will provide better data than currently exists.HLI has posted a thorough response in the comments, noting which claims they agree / disagree with and why (5% agree, 45% sympathetic to some discount but unsure of magnitude, 35% unsympathetic but limited evidence, and 15% disagree on the basis of current evidence).Givewell also note for context that HLI’s original estimates imply that a donor would pick offering StrongM...