I’m 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, I’m interested in folk dance and trying to keep up with my three children.
Good writeup!
Pathways is another online treatment program. There are also workbooks like The Pain Management Workbook.
Agree—in general when we want to keep someone warm we wrap them in warm clothes or blankets. I can see why it’s not intuitive to keep the baby undressed (and keep them warm in a different way).
Also of interest on this topic: Ansh, a CE-incubated charity on kangaroo care for newborns.
I made a tag for posts about maternal and newborn health.
Want to share this in the Boston EA Facebook group? https://www.facebook.com/groups/1552072601751317
Nice piece, but I feel like many of the examples were cherry-picked to be alarming.
One project aimed at mid-career people: https://www.successif.org/our-work
I definitely don’t want to frame this as primarily my work — I think projects like Magnify have played more of a role. But thank you for the kind words!
I also think it’s really hard to tell what contributes to change or lack of change in demographics.
Thanks, I’ve changed it to an article about them.
Thanks for the correction! I’ve adjusted the entries, do let me know if there’s anything still not right.
I agree there’s something here, but I think you’re overselling the theory’s 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:
”Orthodontists evaluated Norwegian skulls from 500 years ago and from now. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17561048/ “Only 36% of the medieval group showed objective assessed needs for orthodontic treatment, compared with 65% of the present-day sample.” Similar study in China, with a 4000-year-old sample because China. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22340477/”
This made me think that in pre-modern environments, tooth/jaw 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, you’re right!
Sorry, I realize this is in the weeds, but I don’t see where they say they’re building up obstetric health infrastructure at all. They work with surgical teams to facilitate more reparative surgeries, but it’s 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 — I don’t mean that it’s not a good strategy!
I was looking at the Vision page which describes “in it to end it” 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 there’s a gap between the vision and what one should expect in a practical sense.
Their own language is a little vague—the slogan “in it to end it” is used a lot, but it’s unclear what exactly is being ended. “end the suffering caused by fistula” and “end the suffering caused by childbirth injuries” are used in some places. Certainly a world where everyone gets prompt treatment for such injuries is much better where they don’t!
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 they’re not working on any of those. That’s 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 “permanence” strange. It’s 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 isn’t 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 I’m glad to see attention on quality of life type interventions!
Someone filled out my anonymous contact form earlier this week asking to talk, but didn’t leave their contact info. If this was you, please let me know how to reach you!
So, now let’s 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!
To be painfully accurate (hey, it’s the Forum), I think my first donation was actually a bit under this. Jeff donated a larger amount that was probably part of the same transaction.