Formerly research fellow @ Open Phil, now freelance. Mostly on Twitter.
Lauren Gilbert
Karma: 629
Career Advice For College Students (And Other People, I Guess)
Very interested to see it when it’s done! Always happy to update my thoughts based on new evidence.
Reading glasses might be one of the best buys in global health.
Air Conditioning Is A Survival Technology
Europe Should Require Foods Be Fortified With Folate
Why Brain Drain Isn’t Something We Should Worry About
Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning? [The Learning Crisis in LMIC Education]
Open New York is a c(4) (as noted in the writeup above).
This is not an object-level comment, but great to see you on the Forum, JueYan!
As the friend in question, I would like to second Gemma’s comment and endorse the idea that EA should take engagement with disability more seriously.
This is just a comment to say how much Sam’s colleagues appreciate him, and how much he has added to Open Philanthropy over the last year.
OK, but we should legit have an EAGxKampala. (Or possibly Kigali or Nairobi or Dar, but EAGxEast Africa.)
Marginal costs, and yes, you are completely correct.
Every Generator Is A Policy Failure [Works in Progress]
Life satisfaction for people with disabilities has been well studied. It is lower than people without disabilities (in most cases), but is not zero.
(A handful of sources to start with: paper on disabled people in Germany that shows happiness recovers after disability, paper on Spanish people with intellectual disabilities shows they are largely satisfied with their lives, the average life satisfaction of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland is 7⁄10, across EU member states it’s between 6.2 and 7 out of ten.)
You’re right; I misread Susannah’s tweet (and read the “ever” bar as “in school”).
Re. the Wikipedia article: those are ever harassed numbers; the Zambia number is within the last year. Assuming that sexual harassment is spread across all grades (K-12), “within the last year” (81/12) would be ~7% (which is how I got a quarter of the 26% I quote, though you’re right that I was misreading the tweet). Upon further thought, dividing by 12 is a little aggressive, since sexual harassment is more likely in last six years of that (grades 6-12), so say, 15% risk per year.
Lee and Susannah have a longer blog post in which they examine sexual violence in schools, and find somewhat higher rates of sexual violence in developing countries than developed.
Qualitatively, my impression is that what counts as “the kind of violence you’d remember and report in surveys” is a significantly lower bar in the US than in SSA. (I once tried to report being harassed in Uganda, and got completely blank looks like “this is normal, why are you are complaining”.). But I don’t have data to hand to back that up beyond my own experience.
(Edited to add: I edited my comment above to be correct.)
I agree with this comment. While less than 0.5% of American students face corporal punishment at school, some 70% of African students do. In school deaths are not incredibly uncommon.
26% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused in the last year. About 10% of Zambian boys and girls report having been sexually harassed at school within the last month.
Is it possible for visit for a shorter time than 12 weeks?
Yes, we also came to the conclusion that firm electrification > household electrification. My comment was meant as a gentle suggestion that perhaps electricity access is not the highest ROI margin. ;)
Also a longer response: I do think the lack of demand is worrying and could be suggestive that these studies are not showing real world effects. I haven’t spent enough time in rural Kenya to know how hard it is to get glasses, but I am updating based on what you say!
I do think it is easy to underestimate how bad your vision has gotten and not use glasses you need. Personally, I have failed to notice that my prescription has gotten out of date and continued to use old glasses, and then finally get around to getting new ones and I do notice a productivity improvement. Since your brain can somewhat compensate, I think it’s easy to underestimate the returns to a correct Rx.
I am very excited to see your longer comment when it’s done—make sure to sent it to both OP and Erin Crossett at GiveWell as well; it sounds like we will all benefit from it!