Why is it that I must return from 100% of EAGs with either covid or a cold?
Perhaps my immune system just sucks or itās impossible to avoid due to asymptomatic cases, but in case itās not: If you get a cold before an EAG(x), stay home!
For those who do this already, thank you!
Thanks, you just bought me days of productivity
My organization has been working Dutch policy in the past few months, and Iāve been blown away by how welcoming and helpful the Dutch EA community has been to us.
The number of people who have gone out of their way to offer introductions and help us navigate the context has been incredibly inspiring.
Under all circumstances this is just a terrible day for EA. If the accusations are even half-accurate then I am appalled. If the accusations donāt hold water, then I am also appalled.
I donāt have an informed opinion as to whether it was correct to publish without waiting for Nonlinear to prepare a response. Iām leaning towards thinking it was the right decision given the supposed threatening behavior of nonlinear leadership.
With that said, I would encourage most readers to wait with making up their mind until Nonlinear has had a chance to leave a response. Save your sanity, block this thread from your browser, and come back in a few weeks once the dust has settled.
Witch hunts do happen among well-intentioned people. I have many more thoughts I want to share, but this is not the right time or place.
Iām am all for competition! If their answer is: āWe think giveffektivt.dk sucks and we can do way betterā and provide compelling reasons I am happy to support that effort.
But when someone wants me to invest in their startup, I want to understand what they will do and why there is a market for that.
Is the goal to have an international focus? If so could you go more into detail about your vision and plans?
If not then Iām a bit confused about how youāre planning on distinguishing yourself from Giveffektivt.dk
hmm yeah perhaps the downside isnāt as big as I think, I donāt have any idea to be honest.
My main reason for hesitancy on e-procurement is just how difficult it is to do well in ideal contexts. But perhaps in an LDC context the bar for what constitutes an improvement is also much lower.
I can highly recommend both Lomborgās book and the full reports! Itās the most clear and levelheaded work in development related to the SDGs Iāve read to date.
Charity Entrepreneurship is doing a research round based on these reports, so if the reports hold scrutiny hopefully thereāll be some wonderful new charities working on these problems not too long from now.
Specifically on e-procurement and land reform I have some thoughts:
E-procurement and land tenure stood out to me as the two EAās might be particularly well suited to attack. Iām very excited for both of them, with an enormous caveat that it is much easier to mess these up and cause harm than for the rest of CCCās recommendations.
Even for topics where we have a myriad of RCTs (ie. education), RCTs should only be a single step of a longer design process. A meta-review is a only a small signal (often the best available to decision makers) whether a project is likely to be impactful. If you want to implement āteaching at the right levelā (as CCC recommends), but the government is resistant and the NGO youāre contracting with is incompetent, your project will fail despite the meta-review looking positive.
For e-procurement, think of just how difficult it is for well-resourced western governments and corporations to get this right.
You run into one problem after another where some department claims the solution doesnāt work or fit their needs for reasons that never quite make any sense, as the real reason will be that it exposes corruption or makes them redundant.[1]
Land reform is even more tricky! A poorly implemented land tenure reform (where the rightful owners lose ownership) can just as well erode remaining trust that investments into land will pay off.
I remain very excited as these types of reforms have the potential to enormously increase growth in ways marginalist approaches wonāt ever compete with. But whether e-procurement is net-positive, I suspect, will come down entirely down to the government and people who are responsible.
I think a great team and willing government can pull this offāI am less confident in having it as a blanket recommendation for all governments.
I am reminded by my favorite story from Carl Icahn where he paints a picture of what this looks like
What would be cheap tests to determine if this would be valuable?
Iām not sure I love the next step of a 6-12 month transition grant. That seems like a rather expensive first step! Why not first see if you can develop an MVP mediation service in two weeks? Offer it to EA organizations and perhaps someone will bite. I suspect you would learn whether this is a good idea much faster that way.
From my perspective this seems like a project of dubious value. The AuthRev and Relating Languages links look like nonsense to me. That said, I think Iām generally more close-minded and than other effective altruists so take my opinion with a grain of salt. If you believe youāre onto something, I think itās better to test your hypothesis and prove the skeptics wrong.
Clear and well-written critique, that in my opinion misses the mark entirely.
ā[...]The presupposition that the magnitude of the benefits (or harms) generated by some charity vary continuously in the scale of the intervention performedā
Many, if not most, assessments made by the āEA Frameworkā do not rest on such a presupposition. Thereās plenty of examples of work that would be endorsed by a vast majority of effective altruistsā which is justified through non-marginal lumpy benefits.
These are the comments I come to the EA Forum for!
It wouldnāt be the first time Iāve seen the WHO reports on snakebites get something blatantly wrong. If I recall correctly, they accidentally flipped a figure for percentage of people who couldnāt afford treatment in the Bangladesh study.
Did you look into the Indian one million deathās study? As far as I remember, that was the study which led WHO to revise their previous global estimate of 50k, as it found 50k annual deaths to snakebites in India alone.
If you have, Iād be curious to get your take on how much weight to put on it. My understanding is that if not for this study, WHOās estimate would be around what you arrived at.
One theory is that we are early in the universe.
See, for example, Robin Hansons grabby aliens hypothesis which goes into why we would expect the universe to look empty from our perspective
Great post!
For those interested in global poverty, I saw there are 20 positions open with USAID which can be a great start for for a career in development.
See for example: https://āāopenopps.usajobs.gov/āāinternships/āā5811?fromSearch
In the 80k article, I noticed the claim that the Ukraine war had killed āhundreds of thousandsā.
Looking over various estimates collected on Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, it is around ~100,000. Is there a reason to believe it is much higher than this?
I felt uncertain whether to write this comment as it feels very pedantic, but I think making sure we get small details right is important to be credible about the speculative risk estimates that canāt be easily looked up.
Copenhagen Consensus Center has a good paper on the cost-effectiveness of agricultural R&D investment, that might answer some of your questions.
Iāve walked barefoot, but Iāve found that my feet get tired much quicker than when I wear running shoes. Sandals are a nice medium for me.
The main concern I would have walking barefoot in the long run, would be damaging my knees.
havenāt noticed anything like that. It gets warm near the engine, but not remotely hot enough to melt anything.
I donāt find this to be much of an issue. Generally, the higher the walking speed the more difficult things become.
At 3.5 km/āh which is what Iāve configured to be the default speed, the only thing Iāve found to be an issue is reading text that is small. I solve this by just zooming in. My ability to accurate write and click things is not affected.
If I turn the speed down to 2.5 km/āh, reading small text is also no problem for me.
The minute suffering I experience from the cold is not the real cost!
Iām probably an outlier, given that a lot of my work is networking but I have had to cancel attending an event where I was invited to speak and likely would have met at least a few people who would have been relevant to know for my work, canceled an in-person meeting (though I likely will get a chance to meet them later) and reschedule a third.
The cold probably hit at the best possible time (right after two meetings in parliament), had it come sooner it would have really sucked.
Additionally my roommate, who is an EA, has now gotten sick affecting his work as well.
(Come to think of it, I think itās actually more likely I got sick from somewhere else than eagx this time, and eagx just happened to be last weekend)