It's definitely true that all else equal, uncertainty inflates CEAs of funded grants, for the reasons you identify. (This is an example of the optimizer's curse.) However:

1. This risk is lower when the variance in true CE is large, especially if its larger than the variance due to measurement error. To the extent we think this is true in the opportunities we evaluate, this reduces the quantitative contribution of measurement error to CE inflation. More elaboration in this comment.
2. Good CEAs are conservative in their choices of inputs for exactly this reason. The goal should be to establish the minimal conditions for a grant to be worth making, as opposed to providing precise point estimates of CE.

Makes sense!

Thanks for the helpful answer!

In some orgs, internships are sort of a training/test period or lead-in to a full-time role, but my understanding is that's mostly a thing for bigger organizations that hire for the same roles every year, and definitely not realistic for us.

Can you elaborate on why it's not realistic for small organizations? It seems like a small organization could use an internship as a lead-in for a full time role, too. You can get a clearer signal about whether someone is a good fit for a full time job without committing to hire them upfront.

I don't care about population ethics so don't take this as a good faith argument. But doesn't astronomical waste imply that saving lives earlier can compete on the same order of magnitude as x risk?

I do think they are a sufficient condition to kick off an arms race. Export controls are a declaration of hostility, and they force the two countries to decouple from each other. China and the US being decoupled makes the downside of an arms race much lower and the upside much higher.

It's hard to justify export controls unless you believe that we actually are in an arms race, sooner or later. If you wanted to prevent an arms race you couldn't pick a worse policy to put your weight behind. That leads me to conclude that AI policy people who back export controls find an arms race to be acceptable.

Do you see advocating for export controls as fundamentally different from an arms race? Because it seems like export controls are pretty popular among AI policy people.

Cash transfers are not targeted (i.e. lots of households receive transfers that don't have young children) and are very expensive relative to other ways to avert child deaths ($1000 vs a few dollars for a bednet). The latter varies over more orders of magnitude than child mortality effects, so it dominates the calculation.

I redirected my giving from GiveWell to EA Animal Welfare Fund. I had been meaning to for a while (since the donation election), so wouldn't necessarily call it marginal, but it was the trigger.

Interestingly, metaculus forecast on this was off by an order of magnitude (15% vs 300-400%). Only three people forecasted, so I wouldn't read too much into it, but it is a wide gap.

I've had a substantive/technical conversation with Emmanuel over Zoom, can confirm he is not a scammer.