EA - Winners of the Squiggle Experimentation and 80,000 Hours Quantification Challenges by NunoSempere

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: Winners of the Squiggle Experimentation and 80,000 Hours Quantification Challenges, published by NunoSempere on March 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In the second half of 2022, we of QURI announced the Squiggle Experimentation Challenge and a $5k challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career paths. For the first contest, we got three long entries. For the second, we got five, but most were fairly short. This post presents the winners.Squiggle Experimentation ChallengeObjectivesFrom the announcement post:[Our] team at QURI has recently released Squiggle, a very new and experimental programming language for probabilistic estimation. We’re curious about what promising use cases it could enable, and we are launching a prize to incentivize people to find this out.Top EntriesTanae adds uncertainty estimates to each step in GiveWell’s estimate for AMF in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and ends up with this endline estimate for lives saved (though not other effects):Dan creates a probabilistic estimate for the effectiveness of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project in Malawi. In the process, he gives some helpful, specific improvements we could make to Squiggle. In particular, his feedback motivated us to make Squiggle faster, first from part of his model not being able to run, then to his model running in 2 mins, then in 3 to 7 seconds.Erich creates a Squiggle model to estimate the number of future EA billionaires. His estimate looks like this:That is, he is giving a 5-10% probability of negative billionaire growth, i.e., of losing a billionaire, as, in fact, happened. In hindsight, this seems like a neat example of quantification capturing some relevant tail risk.Perhaps if people had looked to this estimate when making decisions about earning to give or personal budgeting decisions in light of FTX’s largesse, they might have made better decisions. But it wasn’t the case that this particular estimate was incorporated into the way that people made choices. Rather my impression is that it was posted in the EA Forum and then forgotten about. Perhaps it would have required more work and vetting to make it useful.ResultsEntryAdding Quantified Uncertainty to GiveWell's Cost Effectiveness Analysis of the Against Malaria FoundationCEA LEEP MalawiHow many EA Billionaires five years from now?Estimated relative value(normalized to 100%)Prize67%$60026%$3007%$100Judges were Ozzie Gooen, Quinn Dougherty, and Nuño Sempere. You can see our estimates here. Note that per the contest rules, we judged these prizes before October 1, 2022—so before the downfall of FTX, and winners received their prizes shortly thereafter. Previously I mentioned the results in this edition of the Forecasting Newsletter.$5k challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career pathsObjectivesWith this post, we hoped to elicit estimates that could be built upon to estimate the value of 80,000 hours’ top 10 career paths. We were also curious about whether participants would use Squiggle or other tools when given free rein to choose their tools.EntriesVasco Grillo looks at the cost-effectiveness of operations, first looking at various ways of estimating the impact of the EA community and then sending a brief survey to various organizations about the “multiplier” of operations work, which is, roughly, the ratio of the cost-effectiveness of one marginal hour of operations work to the cost-effectiveness of one marginal hour of their direct work. He ends up with a pretty high estimate for that multiplier, of between ~4.5 and ~13.@10xrational gives fairly granular estimates of the value of various community-building activities in terms of first-order effects of more engaged EAs, and second-order effects of more donations to effective charities and more people ...