Iâm one of the contact people for the effective altruism community. I work at CEA as a community liaison, trying to support the EA community in addressing problems and being a healthy and welcoming community.
Please feel free to contact me at julia.wise@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
Besides effective altruism, Iâm interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
Thanks for the correction! Iâve adjusted the entries, do let me know if thereâs anything still not right.
I agree thereâs something here, but I think youâre overselling the theoryâs level of backup. It really lost me at the ADHD part.
My summary from when I looked at this when trying to figure out orthodontics for my kid:
âOrthodontists evaluated Norwegian skulls from 500 years ago and from now. https://ââpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ââ17561048/ââ âOnly 36% of the medieval group showed objective assessed needs for orthodontic treatment, compared with 65% of the present-day sample.â Similar study in China, with a 4000-year-old sample because China. https://ââpubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ââ22340477/âââ
This made me think that in pre-modern environments, tooth/âjaw problems were better but not absent.
Getting kids to do things differently (holding their body differently, eating different foods) seems pretty hard. One more tractable intervention could be informing parents as consumers of orthodontics that there are downsides to making the mouth smaller. E.g. when I talked to different orthodontists, one proposed pulling teeth to reduce teeth crowding, while the others wanted to use an expander to make more room.
Minor suggestion: you could link to the calculator earlier in this post. I was curious to see it sooner!
>btw your number should be 12,000 on the 88% cure rate, not 22,000.
Thanks, youâre right!
Sorry, I realize this is in the weeds, but I donât see where they say theyâre building up obstetric health infrastructure at all. They work with surgical teams to facilitate more reparative surgeries, but itâs not clear to me that those surgeons are providing any care before or during births. Again, repairs rather than prevention may just be the most cost-effective way to make immediate progress on this problem â I donât mean that itâs not a good strategy!
I was looking at the Vision page which describes âin it to end itâ several times as their vision (but vision statements are meant to be aspirational rather than realistic). An 88% cure rate on 100,000 surgeries is still 22,000 [edit, should be 12,000] uncured patients even after treatment, so I do think thereâs a gap between the vision and what one should expect in a practical sense.
Their own language is a little vagueâthe slogan âin it to end itâ is used a lot, but itâs unclear what exactly is being ended. âend the suffering caused by fistulaâ and âend the suffering caused by childbirth injuriesâ are used in some places. Certainly a world where everyone gets prompt treatment for such injuries is much better where they donât!
But I find their framing about ending fistulas strange, given that there are known risk factors (maternal malnutrition leading to small stature, very young maternal age, lack of obstetric care, infibulation) and theyâre not working on any of those. Thatâs probably a good decision if fistulas are more cost-effective to treat than to prevent, but I find their marketing choice kind of misleading.
Agree, I find their claim of âpermanenceâ strange. Itâs like claiming to permanently eliminate broken arms. We could reduce the causes of fistulas and broken arms, and we could ensure that everyone gets appropriate medical care to treat fistulas and broken arms, but the actual injuries will continue to happen and continue to need treatment. (And afaict Fistula Foundation isnât working on prevention, only treatment. Which is understandable, as underlying causes are less straightforward to work on.)
Whereas a contagious disease like malaria could in theory be actually eliminated.
But in general Iâm glad to see attention on quality of life type interventions!
Someone filled out my anonymous contact form earlier this week asking to talk, but didnât leave their contact info. If this was you, please let me know how to reach you!
So, now letâs allow for a more egalitarian society, where everyone works, but not for ever hour of the day, they get some time to contemplate the world, and be creative. Now out of your population of 1,000,000 you have 100 genuine 1 in 10,000 geniuses, each with a chance of being discovered
Thanks, this changed how I was thinking about this!
Thanks, fixed!
High Impact Athletes is one effort in this direction.
Iâm really glad I was able to help make this experience better, and that you stayed in the community.
Night work just does seem to be worse for peopleâs cognition: metastudy
Asking people to try out a minimum viable product, which they can abandon if they donât like it, seems fine. Asking people to take a minimum viable pledge about how they will orient their entire career seems very different to me.
Iâd think a better way to get feedback is to ask âWhat do you think of this pledge wording?â rather than encourage people to take a lifelong pledge before itâs gotten much external feedback.
For comparison, you could see when GWWC was considering changing the wording of its pledge (though I recognize it was in a different position as an existing pledge rather than a new one): Should Giving What We Can change its pledge?
Thanks, Iâve changed it to an article about them.