Research Fellow @ Open Phil. Mostly on Twitter.
Lauren Gilbert
Karma: 445
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.
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. ;)
FWIW, I found much higher ROI from improving quality of electricity access (e.g. reducing the number of blackouts; based pretty heavily on this paper from Fried and Lagakos) than from improving the quantity of electricity supplied.
Re. the intimidation factor: I regularly write for an audience of ~1.3M people. I found posting on the EA forum much more intimidating.
I am much more likely to get criticism in response to an EA forum post than elsewhere. This is good in terms of robustness of ideas, but it also means I am never going to dash off a post quickly.
You may want to disambiguate Great Lakes region—I had a moment where I was confused if you meant Ohio or Uganda.
Re. military service AND a PhD: we had a handful of active-duty people go through my PhD. They had three years to write their PhD—which is very short, and meant they did not write an academic-quality dissertation. (They all stayed in the military and went on to their next post; I do not think they regret not being academics.). That might be fine for you! But it’s worth bearing in mind that if you are interested in an academic job, using military service for funding probably won’t get you one.
I will confirm this and also say that if your PhD does not provide funding, you should not go. This also applies to PhDs that don’t provide enough funding to live (though this may eliminate a few good schools—I’m not sure either Isabel’s alma mater (UCLA) or mine (UCSD) provide stipends that make sense relative to housing costs.)
As far as I am aware, it is not true. Given most health conditions are rare, and even common health conditions are experienced by a minority of the population, DALY and QALY valuations are mostly produced by people with no lived experience of the condition they are ranking.
Two very quick notes:
It’s Caltech, no space.
As someone who went to Caltech (and turned down a couple of Ivys), I think EA’s focus on top tier schools is very weird and missing a lot of talent.
Edited to add: my MS and MA are from a less elite school (UCSD). I’ve tried to convince more of my friends from UCSD to apply to jobs at Open Phil than I have Caltech friends.
Oh, that’s really interesting. I’ve passed this along to the team.
When we spoke to experts in the field, this was not a major concern for them. Indeed, a couple mentioned that often convincing people to use a development intervention is an uphill battle—but people needed no convincing to use cell phones.
This seems to be borne out by usage statistics; even though devices are expensive (44% of monthly income is a lot), usage is growing a lot. GSMA has smartphone usage doubling in sub-Saharan Africa doubling from 2014-2019 (pg. 17). World Bank research suggests the major barrier entry to using a mobile device is not lack of interest, but affordability.
Open New York is a c(4) (as noted in the writeup above).