Joseph Pusey

Karma: 209

I currently work as a doctor near Manchester, England. Right now, I’m working on completing my Foundation training and deciding what I want to do with the rest of my career. Possible candidates, outside of continuing in clinical medicine, are jobs in operations or research at EA-aligned Global Health and Wellbeing organisations, and I’m excited about opportunities in these fields.

I’ve been involved with EA through volunteering and working for One for the World, attending EAG 2022, the Cause Innovation Bootcamp, the Hi-Med fellowship, and (most importantly) my GWWC pledge to GiveDirectly.

Joseph Pusey 11 Apr 2024 21:03 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?
It’s not unique to EA—although EA does tend to be quite elitist (which is reasonable, given that many of its core insights and values require a very high level of intelligence and openness to understand.)
Which parts of EA would you say require “a very high level of intelligence...to understand”? :)

Joseph Pusey 11 Apr 2024 21:01 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?
I think this is a lovely framing and one I’m going to apply more widely, both to myself and other people. I think the EA community, given our obvious difficulty productively deploying large numbers of talented people, ought to hold it in higher esteem also. Thanks, James.

Joseph Pusey 23 Feb 2024 15:55 UTC
4 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Can we help individual people cost-effectively? Our trial with three sick kids
Nick, this is one of the best posts I’ve ever read on the Forum. As you already know, I have huge respect for your commitment to living out your values and I can’t wait to read more about your efforts.

Joseph Pusey 13 Feb 2024 14:29 UTC
8 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Announcing leadership changes at One for the World
Huge thanks to Jack for his work. As a volunteer and (briefly) contractor at OFTW, I always found him to be extremely thoughtful, transparent, and committed to the success and impact of the org. I think he’s unusually good at, and committed to, seeking out and receiving critical feedback, more so than anyone I’ve met in other workplaces. On a more personal level I felt like he was interested in my wellbeing and development even as someone playing a very very minor role in the orgs work, and good fun to hang out with in the pub.

Joseph Pusey 7 Nov 2023 9:20 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: harfe’s comment on: Why you should publish your research in academic fashion
+1 for this suggestion; it seems promising for someone with a good understanding of different journals’ focus areas, submission requirements, and readership to suggest potential destinations to the authors of high-quality posts. Ideally, they would offer some coaching/assistance to the author to help them through the often arduous process of submitting.
I haven’t done a BOTEC but it seems potentially good to have more EA thought published in more traditional venues, if only to lend some credibility to the non-published stuff.

Joseph Pusey 26 Sep 2023 8:28 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vaipan’s comment on: How have you become more hard-working?
Enormous +1 for FocusMate, which transformed my (limited) ability to do cognitive work and improved my mental health a bunch.

Joseph Pusey 26 Sep 2023 8:25 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why is the impact of medical researcher bigger than clinical doctors?
DOI: A doctor who sucks at research.
My answer to both of these questions is that doctoring has a fairly low ceiling in terms of how much impact one can have.
The way that healthcare systems in the developed world work means that “making a diagnosis” is a fairly small part of the day-to-day work of what doctors do. Once a certain level of experience is reached, diagnostic ability probably plateaus; some doctors might be better than others, but even if they are the impact of that discrepancy probably isn’t that great. I’ve never (disclaimer- not been practicing very long) seen a “House MD” type situation where someone is desperately unwell because no one can make a diagnosis until some rogue genius comes along. Ready access to sophisticated investigations and interventions mean that clinical reasoning in that traditional style is probably less important than it was in the past.
You’re quite right that the average biomedical researcher probably doesn’t have a massive social impact; the difference is that it is possible to be 10x or 100x (1000x?) better at research than a colleague, in a way that it’s not really possible to a 10x better doctor than the average.
This leads to a much more “long tail” distribution of impact in biomedical research, where a few researchers have massive impact, some have significant impact, and many have little impact. Presumably, when effective altruists suggest that research is more impactful than clinical practice, they mean that a) you might end up in that small group of very impactful researchers and b) given that possibility, and the impact if you did, the “expected value” of becoming a researcher is higher than that of becoming a doctor.
If you were asking to compare impact between the median researcher (minimal impact) and the median doctor, the impact might be much closer.

Joseph Pusey 14 Sep 2023 10:49 UTC
19 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: rileyharris’s comment on: Who should we interview for The 80,000 Hours Podcast?
+1 on Rory Stewart- as well as being the President of GD, he was the Secretary of State for International Development in the UK, has started and run his own charity (I believe with his wife) in the developing world, has mentioned EA previously, is known to be an enjoyable person to listen to (judging by the success of his podcast), and has just released a book- and therefore might be more likely than usual to engage with popular media.

Joseph Pusey 14 Sep 2023 10:47 UTC
26 points
8 ∶ 1
in reply to: truthseeker23’s comment on: Writing about my job: Co-founder of a new charity (early stage)
I think I disagree with this quite strongly. As well as excellent posts (for example, by CE) that summarise information from lots of projects, I found this description of one individual’s experience of starting a charity really useful. I don’t think the author claims at any point that their conclusions apply universally, and I certainly didn’t read it in that way.
I think the post you’re asking for would be great but probably not practicable, particularly for someone who sounds like they have quite limited time; I’m grateful that they wrote this post rather than no post at all, and in general I hope that people are willing to write even broadly about their jobs rather than worrying that they have to give an exhaustive and highly nuanced account.

Joseph Pusey 17 Aug 2023 19:32 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Health AIM: A mapping tool helping Health providers reach remote rural areas
This is super exciting, interesting work. I’d love to know what kind of stuff already exists in this space because it seems such a great way forward I’m surprised that we aren’t more aware of it.
Do you think this mapping tool was only possible because of the in-depth local knowledge of Uganda the two of you bring? Or is this something that you could scale to other countries? Or could be done by desk-based researchers elsewhere?
I have also done some NGO/charitable/public sector mapping in Uganda and just remember it being an absolute nightmare driving around trying to work out which places were still open, had ever existed, or were open to our user base. Huge props to you guys for doing this work and I’m interested to follow its progress when you start talking to other orgs :)

Joseph Pusey 7 Aug 2023 9:06 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Soaking Beans—a cost-effectiveness analysis
I couldn’t find any data on bean soaking habits in Uganda or Sub-Saharan Africa in general but I have heard anecdotally that it is common in some countries, perhaps Zimbabwe? (insider knowledge appreciated).
I happen to have a friend from Zimbabwe staying with me- he says that he is aware of people who soak their beans (his sister, for example), but that it’s done pretty much purely for economic reasons and still not common- likely less than 10%.

Joseph Pusey 6 Aug 2023 22:48 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 4
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: University EA Groups Need Fixing
As in, paying UK undergrads ~£50/hr (assuming they work 15 hours all year round, including in the very lengthy university holidays)? (!) Or am I missing something here?

Joseph Pusey 6 Jun 2023 10:20 UTC
13 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Cause area report: Antimicrobial Resistance
This is a terrific distillation Akhil- very readable and it’s updated me strongly on the scale and neglectedness of the problem. Is there any source you’re aware of that explains the relative import of human, animal, and environmental overuse? I’d be interested to know the rough orders of magnitude of how much resistance they each contribute.

Joseph Pusey 14 Mar 2023 15:31 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths
I agree with this, and I think this might be a case where the largest donors, median donors, and beneficiaries might have very different intuitions.
Agreed that this seems very possible. Who should we listen to most closely if it is the case?

Joseph Pusey 14 Mar 2023 15:29 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths
Hi Michael. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
You’ve highlighted an issue I agree with- that this is something of a grey area where one’s personal position on complex moral issues can make a big difference to how effective you think this problem area might be.
I am not clear from your explanation on whether health impacts are talking about the effect on the mother or the effect on the stillborn child.
In the article, I’m defining the health impacts of a stillbirth as the years of health, or healthy life, lost to the child who is stillborn- this, as you point out, is very hard to define. Any health impacts on the mother (not related to economic or wellbeing impacts) were not described particularly fully in the readings I found, although there may be more research that I haven’t seen; I suspect they would be hard to entangle from the health problems which may have contributed to, rather than caused, a stillbirth.
It seems to me that you have to accept one of these or the other.
If I was smarter, I’d have a better impression on where I fell on this issue. What I hope to point out in the article is that taking either position to an extreme results in a position that clashes with my, and I suspect many people’s, moral intuition. Probably further thought on this is required by people who have more experience with time discounting/health economics/actuarial sciences than me.
If you are considering the effect on the stillborn child, it seems that you should consider increasing reproduction as approximately as good as decreasing stillbirths.
Presumably, some people do think this. I think for me to have a strong position on it I’d have to have strong positions on other, more fundamental moral questions that I haven’t come to good answers for.

Joseph Pusey 14 Mar 2023 15:18 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Liv’s comment on: Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths
Hi, Liv- yes, it’s pretty much my first time doing something like this. I do have some medical background but I haven’t got any experience in policy/evaluation/whatever this is.
Fortunately, I had some great help and direction from the Cause Innovation Bootcamp organisers (especially my mentor Leonie), who put together some great materials on how to approach writing like this. It’s not where I’d like it to be in terms of completeness but I think we all reached a point where the return on further time invested didn’t make much sense.
Thankyou so much for your kind words- it’s surprisingly nerve-wracking posting something on the Forum like this, especially for a first-timer.

Joseph Pusey 13 Mar 2023 20:09 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths
In addition to the $3.9M grant, there’s also a more recent $15M grant to scale up.
Thankyou for this- I’ve updated the post. I think this particular narrow intervention (adding syphilis testing to routine HIV screening programmes) is super exciting.
I was surprised to read that GiveWell estimates the value of “averting stillbirth or miscarriage” at 21(where 1 is the value of doubling someone’s income for 1 year) and the value of averting a stillbirth at 33based on a survey of “70 of our largest donors”, sadly it seems that they didn’t have beneficiaries survey data on the value of preventing stillbirths.
That’s more than what I would have guessed (for reference, the value of “preventing one 5-and-over death from malaria” is 83).
Interesting. What would your guess have been? My instinct is that people will have a very wide range of intuitions on this, at least until we’re able to be a bit more specific about what we’re asking for- even then, I expect quite a high degree of variance in how much people value averting a stillbirth. I don’t have a strong opinion myself on what the right number is.

Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths

Joseph Pusey13 Mar 2023 16:19 UTC

93 points

15 comments14 min readEA link

Joseph Pusey 25 Nov 2022 10:42 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Where are you donating this year, and why? (Open thread)
For me, the best part of finally having started work after 6-7 years in higher education is getting to donate 10% of my income (£200/month), which compared to some people here is a very small amount but still feels like a satisfyingly big step up from my effectively nominal student giving.
At the moment it all goes to GiveDirectly, chosen because I have (I suspect) a much higher uncertainty-discount rate than the median EA and I think there are hard-t0-measure benefits from their intervention that make it less suboptimal than many might think.
My work satisfaction gets a non-trivial boost from knowing that it enables this impact, especially because it’s not a supremely impactful job in and of itself.

Joseph Pusey 3 Nov 2022 20:14 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Mini summaries of GPI papers
Is there any scope for people to do this on an ad-hoc/crowdsourced basis? I used to a similar thing for medical AI papers (https://explainthispaper.com), where volunteers would summarise them and then the coordinators would vet, publish and distribute the summaries- is there a similar process that happens here?

Joseph Pusey

Shal­low In­ves­ti­ga­tion: Stillbirths

Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths