"How much do you believe your results?" by Eric Neyman - podcast episode cover

"How much do you believe your results?" by Eric Neyman

May 10, 202333 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

You are the director of a giant government research program that’s conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on two thousand health interventions, so that you can pick out the most cost-effective ones and promote them among the general population.

The quality of the two thousand interventions follows a normal distribution, centered at zero (no harm or benefit) and with standard deviation 1. (Pick whatever units you like — maybe one quality-adjusted life-year per ten thousand dollars of spending, or something in that ballpark.)

Unfortunately, you don’t know exactly how good each intervention is — after all, then you wouldn’t be doing this job. All you can do is get a noisy measurement of intervention quality using an RCT. We’ll call this measurement the intervention’s performance in your RCT.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nnDTgmzRrzDMiPF9B/how-much-do-you-believe-your-results

For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android