I’m concerned about the SMS reminder thing for a weird reason: it looks too easy.
A number of reasons this is concerning—not sure which apply in this case since I don’t fully understand the process by which this list was created, but off the top of my head here they are:
The idea is so simple and “obvious” (yes, I know, retrospect) that there are probably lots of people who have tried various forms of it.
You may be subject to biases which cause it to look better than it is because you want the best interventions to be easy to execute.
There are no (obvious) schleps, which may be a corollary of #1 or #2, but it still seems concerning. From Paul Graham’s schlep blindness essay: “Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people’s broken code. Maybe that’s possible, but I haven’t seen it.” Swap “money” for “QALYs” and “startups” for “organizations”. (http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
Again, this may indeed be a good idea despite the above. But my alarm bells are going off.
Edit: Further thoughts—unsure if this ever could become a GiveWell top charity. It seems like the “room for more funding” isn’t that high, because the impact of this project doesn’t seem blocked on money.
Very briefly, the process was starting with GiveWell’s list of charities they might like to see (this was mostly broad cause areas) and doing further research into each area to determine a short list of promising specific charities.
1) I think my main thoughts around this is that the charity market is a lot less efficient than the for profit market so there are more low hanging opportunities. And even the for profit market isn’t perfect. There’s a specific brand of vegan sausages in the UK that is impossible to get in Canada, despite it being better than anything Canadian-made. Additionally, as we mentioned in our report, there are already charities doing this, it’s just it’s often easy to forget how large the world is. AMF and all the other enormous bed net charities still haven’t filled all the gaps for bednets because there are just so many people. Likewise with SMS. On top of that, mobile health is a relatively new field due to the nature of the technology, so a lot of obvious things are still just starting to permeate the space.
2) This could be true. We do have an explicit category for logistical difficulty, so we certainly have considered that as an important factor. That being said, I think even if we held logistical difficulty consistent across interventions, our team would still favour SMS based on the other criteria.
3) I can see this being tempting, but we do not think of SMS as something that we simply program and wait for the DALYs to roll in. We suspect there will be constant work for further expansion, tweaking of messaging and code, and testing to see what could improve the system.
I’m concerned about the SMS reminder thing for a weird reason: it looks too easy.
A number of reasons this is concerning—not sure which apply in this case since I don’t fully understand the process by which this list was created, but off the top of my head here they are:
The idea is so simple and “obvious” (yes, I know, retrospect) that there are probably lots of people who have tried various forms of it.
You may be subject to biases which cause it to look better than it is because you want the best interventions to be easy to execute.
There are no (obvious) schleps, which may be a corollary of #1 or #2, but it still seems concerning. From Paul Graham’s schlep blindness essay: “Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people’s broken code. Maybe that’s possible, but I haven’t seen it.” Swap “money” for “QALYs” and “startups” for “organizations”. (http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
Again, this may indeed be a good idea despite the above. But my alarm bells are going off.
Edit: Further thoughts—unsure if this ever could become a GiveWell top charity. It seems like the “room for more funding” isn’t that high, because the impact of this project doesn’t seem blocked on money.
Very briefly, the process was starting with GiveWell’s list of charities they might like to see (this was mostly broad cause areas) and doing further research into each area to determine a short list of promising specific charities.
1) I think my main thoughts around this is that the charity market is a lot less efficient than the for profit market so there are more low hanging opportunities. And even the for profit market isn’t perfect. There’s a specific brand of vegan sausages in the UK that is impossible to get in Canada, despite it being better than anything Canadian-made. Additionally, as we mentioned in our report, there are already charities doing this, it’s just it’s often easy to forget how large the world is. AMF and all the other enormous bed net charities still haven’t filled all the gaps for bednets because there are just so many people. Likewise with SMS. On top of that, mobile health is a relatively new field due to the nature of the technology, so a lot of obvious things are still just starting to permeate the space.
2) This could be true. We do have an explicit category for logistical difficulty, so we certainly have considered that as an important factor. That being said, I think even if we held logistical difficulty consistent across interventions, our team would still favour SMS based on the other criteria.
3) I can see this being tempting, but we do not think of SMS as something that we simply program and wait for the DALYs to roll in. We suspect there will be constant work for further expansion, tweaking of messaging and code, and testing to see what could improve the system.
Chobani was one of the world’s fastest growing companies for a while, based mainly just on bringing Turkish yogurt-making practices to the US.