Do you have a write-up of your beliefs that lead you to 2030 as your median?

I think this really depends on the research output. $100k for a report with roughly one person year's worth of effort seems about right. Or roughly one good academic paper or master's thesis. I suspect a lot of Rethink's reports are more valuable than that.

That's $100k all in cost, including costs that aren't specific to a project. Including salary, overheads, taxes, travel, any expenses, training, recruitment etc.

That's true for means, where we can simply apply the CLT. However, this is a median. Stack Exchange suggests that only the density at the median matters. That means a very peaky distribution, even with wide tails will still lead to a small confidence interval. Due to forecasters rounding answers, the distribution is plausibly pretty peaky.

The confidence interval width still goes with sample size as $1/\sqrt{n}$. There's a decent sample size here of superforecasters.

Intuitively: you don't care how spread out the tails are for the median, only how much of the mass is in the tails.

The confidence intervals are for what the median person in the class would forecast. Each forecaster's uncertainty is not reflected.

I'm confused about the mathematics of a a fee-paying membership society. I'm having a hard time seeing how that would generate more than a modest fraction of current revenues.

I'm confused why you think this is required, I don't think Michael implied it would.

Intesesting article and framing, thank you. I've only just got round to reading it but have a few questions.

First, by clean air, do you mean low CO2 or no pathogens? These seem to have quite different solutions and benefits but the article doesn't cleanly distinguish. Most of the solutions (excepting ventilation) do not reduce CO2 levels, and hence would not give the benefits to cognition etc that ventilation do. Furthermore, monitoring CO2 levels won't tell you much because, once you implement these solutions, the link between CO2 levels and pathogen levels is broken.

Second, I'm not convinced the evidence supports the size of benefit you suggest here: near-elimination of respiratory illness through clean air alone. The updated 1DaySooner report (which I appreciate wasn't published when you wrote this piece) estimates reducing transmission by 30--75%. While the mid-to-top-end of that range might remove flu epidemics (R0 up to around 2) as a threat, this seems less likely for all respiratory illnesses such as endemic coronaviruses (R0 around 10) or even original, Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 (R0 at least 3, likely 4 or higher). It certainly wouldn't be enough for measles (R0 15--20). Indoor air cleaning still seems valuable but I wouldn't want to oversell it as a silver bullet, rather than one line in multi-factorial pathogen defence.

Finally, I was wondering if there was a reason you didn't mention the update to UK building regulations to include indoor air quality (published 2021). These look really promosing to me, although I'm not an expert in either the regulatary or technical side, so would appreciate further commentary!

I agree a more nuanced definition is probably required, or at least to distinguish acceptable from (possibly) unacceptable power-seeking.

I think longtermism stands out for the amount of power it has and seeks relative to the number of members of the movement, and that there isn't much consensus (across wider society) around its aims. I've not fully thought this through but I'd frame it around democratic legitemacy.

I don't think those points support your conclusion at all. There are few/no details on specific outcomes they want to achieve over the next 1--2 years, and no clarification of how resources are spent. I think that page provides less detail on scope for CEA than this forum post does for CE, and certainly less than the linked report.

To address your specific quotes.

"We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community"

This is an aim/desire, not what they are actually doing.

"We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work."

Similar. It is something they aim not to do (with arguable effectiveness) and then a call for other people to do things.

"We currently manage the EA Forum, and provide resources and support calls for all EA groups. We've also held or supported global and regional conferences in countries including the US, the UK, Singapore, Germany, and Australia."

This is a good high-level summary of their scope. It would be a great intro to something describing their intended scope.

"Where we are not focusing...This blog post gives more information on areas that we are not planning to focus on (as of March 2021)."

This is over two years old.

Thank you for the feedback on both the arguments and writing (something I am aiming to improve through this writing). Sorry for being slow to respond, it's been a busy few of weeks!

In response to your points.

In short, I don't think future people counting for less really dents longtermism that much at all as it isn't reasonable to discount that much. You seem to accept that we can't discount that much, so if you accept the other core claims of the argument longtermism will still go through. Discounting future people less is pretty irrelevant in my opinion.

I suspect this depends strongly on your overall shape for the value of the future. If you have infinite exponential growth you're correct. For, in my opinion, more reasonable shapes of future value then this will probably start mattering. In any case, it damages the case for future people to some extent but I agree it is not fatal.

I would say however that even if the expected number of people in the future isn't as high as many longtermists have claimed, it's still got to be at least somewhat large and large enough to mean GiveWell charities that focus on near-term effects aren't the best we can do. One could imagine being a 'medium-termist' and wanting to say address climate change and boost economic growth which affect the medium and long-term. Moving to GiveWell would seem to me to be overcorrecting.

Interesting claim. I would be very interested in a cost-effectiveness analysis (even at BOTEC level) to support this. I don't think we can resolve this without being quantative.

The assumption that future people will be happy isn't required for longtermism (as you seem to imply). The value of reducing extinction risk does depend on future people being happy (or at least above the zero level of wellbeing), but there are longtermist approaches that don't involve reducing extinction risk. My post touches on some of these in the Sketch of the strong longtermist argument section.

I'm pretty sceptical of the tractability of non-x-risk work and our ability to shape the future in broad terms.

You can point out weaknesses in the arguments for specific existential risks, it just takes some effort!

You can, and sometimes (albeit rarely) these arguments are productive, but I still think any numeric estimate you end up with is pretty much just based on intuitions and heavily on priors.

Personally I think the risks are credible enough to take them seriously, especially given how bad the outcomes would be.

Yes, we should certainly take them seriously. But "seriously" is rather imprecise to suggest how many resources we should be willing to throw at it.

Good point, I will consider this for next time. Thank you.