Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Some thoughts.
As long as we don’t have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
Lobbying smaller bodies of government is definitely easier. Whoever decides on policies in small countries has fewer bids of attention and is targeted by fewer lobbyists. You might need a lot of connections and effort to make your voice heard to a decision-maker in a big body of government. In a small body of government, you might be able to set up a meeting by writing an email without any prior connection. There’s definitely a trade-off of scale vs tractability here. And to me, it’s not obvious at all which choice would be more cost-effecitve. I’m not talking from experience here, it’s just my common sense intuitions.
If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).
I agree that country borders impact word of mouth but I’m not sure how much. Especially in Africa since I’ve heard that African borders were drawn kind of randomly and I don’t know how important they are culturally. For example, if I look at Africa language map like this, I see that bigger countries have many languages. Language barriers might limit the meme spread within the country. And it also seems that languages often cross national boundaries, Meme spread through internet content, TV, and radio might often transcend national boundaries, I imagine. But I don’t know how much, I know little about Africa.
It’s just food for thought, I think your view is reasonable and you probably have already thought about these things. You could just reduce the weight of the variable a little bit if I convinced you a little bit :)
Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think it’s a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.
In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.
Nice ^_^ One final thought. I mentioned that scale depends on multiple parameters:
Current human population
Expected growth in the human population
Current animal production per capita
Expected change in the production per capita
You account for 2,3, and 4 with a separate variable “expected growth in animal production” which would be something like “projected number of farmed animals in 2050 divided by the current number of farmed animals”. And then also have a variable “Current human population”. I think it makes sense to split because these two variables matter for different reasons, and someone may put weight on one but not the other.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Some thoughts.
Lobbying smaller bodies of government is definitely easier. Whoever decides on policies in small countries has fewer bids of attention and is targeted by fewer lobbyists. You might need a lot of connections and effort to make your voice heard to a decision-maker in a big body of government. In a small body of government, you might be able to set up a meeting by writing an email without any prior connection. There’s definitely a trade-off of scale vs tractability here. And to me, it’s not obvious at all which choice would be more cost-effecitve. I’m not talking from experience here, it’s just my common sense intuitions.
I agree that country borders impact word of mouth but I’m not sure how much. Especially in Africa since I’ve heard that African borders were drawn kind of randomly and I don’t know how important they are culturally. For example, if I look at Africa language map like this, I see that bigger countries have many languages. Language barriers might limit the meme spread within the country. And it also seems that languages often cross national boundaries, Meme spread through internet content, TV, and radio might often transcend national boundaries, I imagine. But I don’t know how much, I know little about Africa.
It’s just food for thought, I think your view is reasonable and you probably have already thought about these things. You could just reduce the weight of the variable a little bit if I convinced you a little bit :)
Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think it’s a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.
In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.
Nice ^_^ One final thought. I mentioned that scale depends on multiple parameters:
Current human population
Expected growth in the human population
Current animal production per capita
Expected change in the production per capita
You account for 2,3, and 4 with a separate variable “expected growth in animal production” which would be something like “projected number of farmed animals in 2050 divided by the current number of farmed animals”. And then also have a variable “Current human population”. I think it makes sense to split because these two variables matter for different reasons, and someone may put weight on one but not the other.