EA - The winners of the Change Our Mind Contest—and some reflections by GiveWell

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: The winners of the Change Our Mind Contest—and some reflections, published by GiveWell on December 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Author: Isabel Arjmand, GiveWell Special Projects OfficerIn September, we announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses. Today, we're excited to announce the winners!We're very grateful that so many people engaged deeply with our work. This contest was GiveWell's most successful effort so far to solicit external criticism from the public, and it wouldn't have been possible without the participation of people who share our goal of allocating funding to cost-effective programs.Overall, we received 49 entries engaging with our prompts. We were very happy with the quality of entries we received—their authors brought a great deal of thought and expertise to engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses.Because we were impressed by the quality of entries, we've decided to award two first-place prizes and eight honorable mentions. (We stated in September that we would give a minimum of one first-place, one runner-up, and one honorable mention prize.) We also awarded $20,000 to the piece of criticism that inspired this contest.Winners are listed below, followed by our reflections on this contest and responses to the winners.The prize-winnersGiven the overall quality of the entries we received, selecting a set of winners required a lot of deliberation.We're still in the process of determining which critiques to incorporate into our cost-effectiveness analyses and to what extent they'll change the bottom line; we don't agree with all the critiques in the first-place and honorable mention entries, but each prize-winner raised issues that we believe were worth considering. In several cases, we plan to further investigate the questions raised by these entries.Within categories, the winners are listed alphabetically by the last name of the author who submitted the entry.First-place prizes – $20,000 each[1]Noah Haber for "GiveWell's Uncertainty Problem." The author argues that without properly accounting for uncertainty, GiveWell is likely to allocate its portfolio of funding suboptimally, and proposes methods for addressing uncertainty.Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present for "An Examination of GiveWell’s Water Quality Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Analysis." The authors suggest several changes to GiveWell's analysis of water chlorination programs, which overall make Dispensers for Safe Water's program appear less cost-effective.To give a general sense of the magnitude of the changes we currently anticipate, our best guess is that Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present's entry will change our estimate of the cost-effectiveness of Dispensers for Safe Water by very roughly 5 to 10% and that Noah Haber's entry may lead to an overall shift in how we account for uncertainty (but it's too early to say how it would impact any given intervention). Overall, we currently expect that entries to the contest may shift the allocation of resources between programs but are unlikely to lead to us adding or removing any programs from our list of recommended charities.Honorable mentions – $5,000 eachAlex Bates for a critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness modelDr. Samantha Field and Dr. Yannish Naik for "A critique of GiveWell’s CEA model for Conditional Cash Transfers for vaccination in Nigeria (New Incentives)"Akash Kulgod for "Cost-effectiveness of iron fortification in India is lower than GiveWell's estimates"Sam Nolan, Hannah Rokebrand, and Tanae Rao for "Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Analyses"Isobel Phillips for "Improving GiveWell's modelling of insecticide resistance may change their cost per life saved for AMF by up to 20%"Tanae Rao and Ricky Huang for "...