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 53 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: 13,820
This is the kind of content I crave here...
I put the distinction between delivery and Systems change generally at affecting policy or research use at a district or national level. So with GiveDirectly their systems change work might be convincing governments or refugee work to give cash rather than in-kind items. Their direct giving though isn’t systems change under any rubriks, even if you pair it with other things.
Fortify health have more recently become serious about systems change and making fortification part of national policy in India.
I was going to write a response but you wrote most of what I was thinking! In general the best way to start an org is small, and as you learn and develop you grow into being able to use more money cost effectively.
I think @Bentham’s Bulldog has good examples of orgs that need to be started, but lobbying organizations and new animal welfare can’t usually use millions cost effectively in the first couple of years.
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸 At least one Anthropic founder has actually committed recently to their pledge, on Opraha month ago what’s more!
”DANIELA AMODEI: And for us, the public benefit is the social good, social mission part of Anthropic. And the 80% pledge that Dario and I and our other 5 co-founders have all taken is really in spirit and in keeping with that mission. It’s this idea that we’re really doing this because we want AI to go well for everybody. And we hope that if a company is successful, we’ll be able to also do a lot of good in the world philanthropically.”https://singjupost.com/oprah-podcast-w-co-founders-of-claude-ai-transcript/
Thanks Ulf these are great examples! I will say though, At this stage us at OneDay Health are still growing and learning from our model—we’re not doing systems change yet but I hope we get there in the not so distant future!
With all its flaws, this forum remains probably the best place on the internet where a wide range of people can come together and discuss doing good.
As an overactive user, I just haven’t seen much of what you describe. I’ve hardly seen anything I’d call corrosive, and where are these “bitter, jealous people” you speak of?
”As a long-time EA, I don’t engage here because the EA Forum is awful and corrosive: it’s full of dumb criticisms and bitter, jealous people, and it’s hard to imagine anything good coming from engaging with it”I’ll agree with you that we make dumb criticisms, I’ve made more than my my fair share. But I think that can be a feature as much of a bug. We’re all fumbling around trying to figure out the best way to do good, and making stupid arguments along the way is part of the process. Dumb criticism can be a step on the path of figuring out how to be moreright.
I think it would be an interesting exercise to send a handful of articles to these services and see the quality of the feedback. I would also doubt it would be very good quality but would reserve judgement before trying!
“In addition, based on the “More options” drop-down in question 2 of the Donor Comass, you are modelling effects after 500 years, which I think are very uncertain.”
That’s not a bad point. I would be kind of on the opposite end of the scale though. We are so clueless about both 500 years in the future and soil arthropods I wouldn’t be modeling either of those....
Thanks that’s a fantastic reply, really appreciate all the humility thought, time and effort put in. Looking forward to seeing future work :)
Thanks @Vasco Grilo🔸 . Yes I was thinking about all those comments I just forgot exactly which invertebrates they referred to. I suspect they will have a similar answer about any soil invertebrates but we will see!
I think they’ve covered this a number of times and explained why they haven’t considered soil invertebrates responding to previous comments you’ve made @Vasco Grilo🔸
Thanks there’s some insightful stuff here. I really appreciated this. “If someone doesn’t have the time to investigate an area, it can be at times reasonable to check for this kind of bias and discount appropriately (I think this is most useful as a guide when a group or individual has shown repeated bias in the past) but I also think this can at times serve as a shortcut to dismissing anything that doesn’t already ideologically align with yourself. Balancing these two competing forces can be a constant struggle, particularly in areas outside of your expertise and I know it’s something constantly in my mind when I read about politics.”
Despite my best efforts, I’ve really struggled to understand arguments around the nature of consciousness and valenced states. I’m still not entirely sure that any consciousness model is very meaningful but that’s another discussion… This means my analysis has often stepped up the level to process. As a side note I still think far more EA funds should go to animal welfare than currently does, although the defensive nature of responses from RP and other animal welfare folk has updated me a bit against this over the last couple of years.
I think the GiveWell analogy is a great one, and it would be fair to look at the backgrounds of staff that were doing prioritisatoin. If most came from malaria backgrounds I would be quite concerned, I haven’t looked into that. In a cross-cause prioritisation process I think there is more room for bias than in a CEA.
I think we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on research team make-up being open to outside scrutiny. Like you say I don’t think it’s the most important thing but still important,. You’ve said that “personel is policy” carries weight, but haven’t suggested how we should approach examining that? My Claude ranking method isn’t the best for sure, what other way you would suggest? From an RP organisational perspective, I think there is a risk that the org’s work could be undermined somewhat by people who might feel like a bunch of animal welfare/GCR folks might have disproportionate sway over a cross-cause prioritisation process like this.
I agree it would be great to have other groups working on this stuff, a poll a while ago was overwhelmingly in favour. The reality is though, you guys are it for now. There aren’t other groups working on moral weights and cross-cause prioritisation. I think this means that there’s perhaps more responsibility for balance within the organisation. The situation is more “Aristotle” dominating philosophy than Friedman and Stiglitz. I think with our current levels of information, thre is far more shared ground in economics than in cross-cause prioritisatoin. Perhaps within RP there’s much agreement but I would argue there will be a heavy “groupthink” element built there over time. That there are 10+ moral theories in this model illustrates the extreme diversity. Between animal welfare and human welfare we have a bridge of one moral weights project? While GCR uncertainties are far bigger still, with moral and practical junctures going almost uncountable. On the GCR front even something as important and straightforward as as “have those who worked on AI risk done ill or good so far” is hotly debated.
As a final (if a bit sour) note, RP as I’ve experienced it on the forum has seemed pretty impervious to criticism and suggestion. Responses are always intelligent and very well reasoned, but l haven’t seen openness to mind-changing, and not just in response to my comments. When criticism comes in, the response is polite well reasoned refutation—very good arguments for maintaining status-quo. I don’t think I’ve seen a response along the lines of “hey you have a good point there, let’s look into that” or even “yes that decision was tricky and we did X because...”. As an example I put a big effort into understanding the moral weights project (for personal interest reasons). Then after writing a decent post about the MWP process, the response from RP members was excellent and well thought through, but never acknowledged that any of my process points might be reasonable. In contrast orgs like GiveWell in my experience are far more open to mind changing.
This is super cool. I especially love the invitation to creativity and blue sky thinking invited here. Shrimp Welfare project and FarmKind are great examples of genuine innovation IMO so it’s great to see those founders leading the charge here. Part of me wishes I...
1) Was suuuuper passionate about animal welfare
2) Wasn’t 8 years into running a global health charity
;)
Wow that’s crazy I listened to Elon musk being interviewed by Dwarkesh and I came out of that thinking data centers in space at scale seemed a bit absurd. This has updated me a little that maybe it’s more plausible than I thought.
Thanks so much @mal_graham🔸 that’s the web page appreciate that! I understand that the WIT doesn’t do all the work, but I think it was reasonable for me to assume that they were the major contributors given that they have been the team publishing the cross-cause work up to now, and were the team linked from the page.
Thanks Marcus for the reply. First this criticism is specifically about potential preferences and bias of the researchers. With a project like this with perhaps hundreds of junctures which require subjective decisions, I think that’s a reasonable discussion to have. I don’t think it’s fair to ask me shift the ground and ask to discuss the research methodology, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of great discussion about that. My point was purely concerns about potential researcher bias.
I completely agree with your 3 points, and specifically that there are larger areas of concern than the cause area orientation of researchers—but I still think it’s somewhat important .This comment seems to twist the point I was trying to make “More broadly, I would not consider Claude’s opinions about the priorities of our researchers to be a good method of gauging the quality of our work” I was not questioning the quality of your work, I think your work is extremely high quality. Yet even the highest quality work can go in different directions, based on the assumptions and biases of the researchers who generate it. In many imprecise fields like development, economics and political science, the highest quality researchers can argue opposite sides. Stiglitz and Friedman both produced high quality work which often ended up at almost opposite conclusions. I would put cross-cause categorisation in a similar-ish category due to the wealth of assumptions required and uncertainties to be reckoned with. So in research like these yes, I think the make-up of the research team is important and open to scrutiny outside of objective criticism of the work itself. You might disagree with me on this one. Assuming people’s backgrounds is open for discussion, I think a Claude analysis of people’s previous work is reasonable if obviously very imprecise and yes potentially misleading.
I could be wrong here, but I feel like I may have been baited-and-switched a little on who are the major contributors here.. I went to your website and just searched the cross-cause prioritisation team, finding a page with photos and bios. You’ve said that the researchers I listed were not the principal researchers - then who were? That Carmen van Schoubroeck led the work isn’t listed anywhere I don’t think.
I agree with the direction but not the strength of this comment “I can never tell you with certainty no one who worked on this was not subtly unconsciously biased” and agree with your opening statement more “I think there is not a single EA organization I would consider unbiased on this question, including ourselves” We are all biased, often more than we think. Most of us (myself included) have a cess-pit of opinions and angles, despite our best efforts to the contrary. I think within EA we often overrate how objective we are, and we can only have so much objectivity based on our past experience and worldview built up over time. This is why I think for a cross-cause prioritisation exercise, it is helpful to start with a team with a wide range of prior opinions or perhaps very uncertain ones.
I like the idea of a 5th option “I don’t know”, but adding weights adds too much complexity for a public question stream I think. For the moral parliament or something deeper like that makes more sense to me
It’s an interesting one Vasco. I prefer the current questions to uncertainty questions which I think are more intuitive for most people. I think it’s important to lean towards questions which are easier to understand, rather than the “best theoretical” questions to help differenciate. Not everyone thinks as deeply as you about these things, and I like the accessibility of the current questions.
I think this is important work, but I want to flag my biggest concern about the process—the imbalance of the backgrounds of the research team and therefore potential for bias. I asked Claude to rank their areas of interest and prior work, and it shows a heavy bent towards Animal Welfare and Global Catastrophic risk.
Half of the research team have been strong advocates for Animal Welfare work in the past, while none of the team seems to have a special interest in GHD. Two of the team were deeply involved in the Animal Moral Weights project itself.
I think the work is impressive, and it’s great there is a new fund, however I think a cross-cause research prioritisation team like this ideally would have been more balanced in makeup. Research team balance on prior opinions is especially important when the project relies on many assumptions and requires subjective assessments at many junctures. In addition potential conflicts of interest here should probably be stated on the website and in a post like this. Now that there is donation money directly involved, I feel the stakes are higher than when the situation was purely research (although the research alone is very influential).
A couple of other less important declarations perhaps could have been made as well. Given that Lead Exposure Action Fund was the only specific GHD intervention selected, they perhaps should have mentioned that they have been commissioned to do research on lead exposure before, and also that a previous RP researcher is now a program associate at LEAF. The RP CEO was also previously a fund manager on the EA animal Welfare fund which allocates 13% of this fund’s money.
All think tanks will have bias to some extent (Political think tanks are even rated on a spectrum) and I think its important to consider this and state where there might be potential bias.
I think It wouldn’t cost much at all to make forward a pretty robust cost-effectiveness model for a CHW which rolls out a wide range of interventions. (I think Living Goods +- others might well have decent models already here?). I think you could even build this yourself? Some of the package would be easy to do because data is there (malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia treatment, family planning antenatal care), while screenings and referrals are much harder to quantify and might have to be left out of the analysis pending better data.
I agree the bet argument is pretty good if the goal is government adoption. Regardless of the nuance of cost-effectiveness, CHWs will always be more cost-effective than most health things govt. could do and it would likely displace less cost-effective things. Unfortunately I don’t think EA funders have seriously considered scale through govt. something worth chasing as a bet, but I really like the idea.
I agree it is weak (but it’s something) and I completely agree with your points, I was just adding a data point which seems to refute this quote.
“Anthropic founders haven’t said a word about philanthropy in >3 years or something AFAIK”