Research Fellow @ Open Phil. Mostly on Twitter.
Lauren Gilbert
Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Civil Conflict Reduction
Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning? [The Learning Crisis in LMIC Education]
Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Telecommunications in LMICs
Every Generator Is A Policy Failure [Works in Progress]
OK, but we should legit have an EAGxKampala. (Or possibly Kigali or Nairobi or Dar, but EAGxEast Africa.)
Open New York is a c(4) (as noted in the writeup above).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Update: I texted an astrophysicist friend about including code in arxiv postings and got back “EXTREMELY GOOD”
I would love to see the arxiv expand to other disciplines that love preprints. I think centralizing the scattered social science preprint sphere would be doing good for science! (I am an ex-physicist turned political scientist, and I miss the arxiv so much.)
also, I would love if the arxiv had a good export to .bib file rather than just a copy-paste .bib formatted text, so I didn’t have to click through to the ADS to generate a .bib file. It would save me quite a few seconds. ;)
On a related note, if people reading this are interested in political economy & GHW, feel free to email me to chat about the advantages/disadvantages of being in a political science department instead of an econ department.
Oh, that’s a valid point about scaling; noted.
Re. job training: I was referring to Blattman and Annan 2016, where the intervention contained both counseling and job training.
Very excited to see the ten year results when they’re out!
Marginal costs, and yes, you are completely correct.
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.