First, I wanted to thank all of the Effective Altruism Global organizers and participants. I found it to be very valuable and overall well put together. There was obviously a ton of work put into it, most by conference organizers who I don't believe will get that much credit for it, and I very much commend their work.
That said, there's always a lot of room for new ideas, and I find I often get a bunch of ideas at and after these conferences. Because of the EAGx events, ideas described now may be able to be put into action somewhat soon and experimented with.
As may be expected, I recommend that people make all of their ideas be independent comments, then upvote the ideas that they think would be the most useful.
I cautiously like this idea. I wonder if it's potentially a distraction where people end up spending lots of time trying to prove, or defend, their estimates, rather than give their talks.
Also tricky is the fact expected value estimates require you to take explicit stands of values that might not be very productive. i.e.you get this estimate for the Against Malaria Foundation if you think future people are X important, this is you think death is Y bad, etc.
I think we as a society (or intellectual circle) have a long way to go in terms of understanding EV calcs, but would say here that EV calcs don't have to be relative to total utility. They could instead be split up into parts in cases where there is uncertainty in how to resolve it from there.
For instance, saying that this intervention 'saves 1 life per 10k to 30k dollars in region X' seems fine to me, if it's a fair interval/estimate. If there are multiple things, maybe, "Every 10k dollars saves 10-30 QALYS in the next 3 years, and separately seems to decrease the long term risks by Y factor"