![By U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Maddelin Angebrand [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://globalprioritiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1024px-thumbnail-150x150.jpg)
Sebastian Farquhar and Owen Cotton-Barratt Summary Global public health remains a top contender for the best way to improve welfare through aid. Within health interventions, it is natural to allocate marginal spending to avert the most expected DALYs (disability adjusted life-years) per dollar.1 However, not all DALYs are the same and there are important differences […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt Owen presents his research into uncertainty in a health context and time-discounting at the 2014 Brocher Summer Academy on Ethical Issues in Global Population Health. Looks at different reasons we might discount future health benefits, and explores how discounting for uncertainty differs from discounting for time preference. You can watch the talk here. You […]
Max Dalton This post was written in conjunction with Giving What We Can, and first appeared on their blog. It is part of the Global Priorities Project series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. How valuable is medical research? Finding the solution to a problem in medical research is not only […]
Photo by Ramunas Geciauskas Owen Cotton-Barratt Areas of endeavour This is part of a series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. In a previous post, we investigated methodology for estimating the expected returns from working on a problem of unknown difficulty. We argued that ex ante the expected benefits should often scale […]
Photo (c) Royal Observatory Edinburgh; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation Owen Cotton-Barratt This is part of a series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. In a previous post, we investigated methodology for estimating the expected returns from working on a problem of unknown difficulty. We argued that ex ante the […]
Max Dalton Max Dalton did this work while working on a research internship with Owen Cotton-Barratt at the Global Priorities Project. It is part of our project about prioritisation under uncertainty. It interfaces with Giving What We Can in providing estimates of the cost-effectiveness of interventions in developing-world health. Summary This post examines the returns to funding […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt This is part of a series of posts on how we should prioritise research and similar activities. In a previous post we explored how we should form subjective probabilities about chances of success of problems of unknown difficulty. This post is concerned with how to use these probabilities to estimate the expected value […]
Owen Cotton-Barratt This is the first in a series of posts which take aim at the question: how should we prioritise work on problems where we have very little idea of our chances of success. In this post we’ll see some simple models-from-ignorance which allow us to produce some estimates of the chances of success […]