I’m a doctor working towards the dream that every human will have access to high quality healthcare. I’m a medic and director of OneDay Health, which has launched 35 simple but comprehensive nurse-led health centers in remote rural Ugandan Villages. A huge thanks to the EA Cambridge student community in 2018 for helping me realise that I could do more good by focusing on providing healthcare in remote places.
NickLaing
Karma: 9,132
Zipline have been around for about 10 years I think—boy do they have the cool factor. One big issue is that they can only carry as really tiny amount of stuff. Also the places where they can potentially save money have to be super hard to access, because a dirt cheap motorcycle which can go 50km for a dollar of fuel can carry 50x as much weight.
My lukewarm take is that hey have done well, but as with most things haven’t quite lived up to their initial hype.
Love this.Has there really not been an RCT on floor replacements yet? That surprises me as it would be a relatively easy RCT to do. EarthEnable from Rwanda just won the 2 million dollar Skoll award doing this at scale.
GiveWell must have considered it I would have thought?
“being funny is a virtue, being edgy is not” is pretty darn insightful, I’m going to use that in future as it rings so true with my experience.
And in my limited experience when humor is combined with epistemic humility (forgive the jargon :D) I have seen some beautiful moments of breakthrough with EA ideas.
Thanks so much man, these are awesome reflections and a great post to wake up to!
I would imagine there are some replicability issues…
Love the post 🤩
Lead alliance could so go for this
I don’t think she’s saying that people shouldn’t think and plan responses, I think it’s more that endless naval gazing about timelines and rapidly shifting responses isn’t the most useful response
Thanks what’s the core difference between this and forecasting?
I wouldn’t consider car company CEOs a serious data point here for the same reasons. I agree it seems a reasonable move but I don’t think it actually is.
Asking workers and technicians within companies, especially off the record though I would consider a useful data point, although still biased of course.
I would have thought there might even be data on the accuracy of industry head predictions, because there would be a lot of news sources to look back on which could now be checked for accuracy. Might have a look.
This fantastic post by @Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸 “Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything” carries a similar sentiment from a bit of a different angle.
I think there can also a bit of a prisoners dilemma dynamic at times here where defecting individually away from stubbornness, or away from EA can seem be the best thing for the individual and even perhaps for a short term tangible outcome, but may actually be worse for the cause we fight for or the EA movement in general over the longer term.
I think anyone who’s been involved in advocacy, organising and activism knows that sometimes you need to be stubborn for purposes of leverage, movement longevity and morale even when it can be a bit anti-truth seeking at times. I’ve done it a number of times.
Also in the GWWC pledge we have fantastic commitment device, which is obviously for a specific use case, but we could learn from it for other cases.
That’s true. If CEOs doubled down on things that were against the interest of their company I would listen to them intently
My experience from the church is the salary doesn’t correlate will with likelihood of donating, although it does of course correlate with donating larger amounts of money.
If EAs working in AI policy and safety were serious about AI Doom being a near-term possibility, I would expect they would donate huge amounts towards that cause. A clear case of “revealed preferences” not just stated ones.
I think I was assuming people working in highly paid AI jobs were donating larger percentages of their income, but I haven’t seen data in either direction?
There’s no heel prick in low income countries because there isn’t the money for newborn screening.
Yep here it’s super common here in UgAnda the baby gets whisked away to check breathing, temperature, then gets washed, then gets wrapped up. Often babies are then given to mother wrapped in clothes. Skin to skin is highly variable and I would say the majority of babies don’t get it.
We should be careful about criticizing cultural norms. Cleaning and wrapping up the baby is often seen here as the best care they can get—it’s just unfortunate that it isn’t.
I don’t think it’s that wild that it isn’t the standard, I can easily see how other options after birth could be seen as “better” for a whole bunch of reasons.
Probably for the best. Nearly fell off a motorcycle taxi yesterday when a bunch of bublys exploded into my face :D
As do I brother, thanks for this declaration! I think now might not be the worst time ogir those who do identify directly as EAs to stay so to encourage the movement, especially some of the higher up thought and movement leaders. I don’t think a massive sign up form or anything drastic is necessary, just a few higher status people standing up and saying “hey, I still identify with this thing”.
That is if they think it isn’t an outdated term...
I appreciated it :)
I think there are good arguments here. I think though starting with the opinions of CEOs of companies though is a weak opening. These guys are just outrageously motivated as company heads to state timelines as short as possible.
Add to that increasing race dynamics with companies vying for investment and from a business perspective they almost “have” to say these things for the good of their investors. It’s their job to overhype.
We don’t listen very seriously to Crypto CEOs on the trajectory of Crypto, or Tobacco CEOs on the safety of tobacco, or Elon Musk on the trajectory of Tesla and Space X (usually hugely overoptimistic). Why then do we listen to AI company CEOs about AGI timelines? Perhaps we are lulled by their intelligence and ability but that can never outweigh the sheer weight of incentives and even the very nature of their position.
There are plenty of forecasters and AI experts outside of companies that we can look to for this, I think we should perhaps consider the statements from AI company CEOs a weak data point.
This is super encouraging—I’m impressed how you leaned into the areas where liberal arts students might already have a felt need and interest, both empathetic and smart.
1) Finding a meaninful job (apparently a big deal for Gen Z)
2) Diverse food options including vegetarian meals
No suggestions here unfortunately, at 38 I’m not sure what the youth are into ;).
100 percent man
Most changed mind votes in history of EA comments? This blew my mind a bit, I feel like I’ve read so much about American productivity outpacing Europe, think this deserves a full length article.
Yep Snakebite is one of the few slamdunk usecases for me here. Until we design a cheap, heat stable antivenom I think drones that can get there in under an hour might be the best option in quite a wide range of places.