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: 12,837
Thanks @SiobhanBall I’ve definitely learned a bunch too from the other perspectie. Was talking to a French Canadian today and he was telling me how he feels like he can now put a whole bunch of bullet points and ideas down, then AI can draft something that he knows is correct English. After that he modifies it to make sure it is actually making his arguments (because it often adds slightly different arguments) and to add some of his own voice. Makes a lot of sent.
He used to be too nervous because of English being his second language, but AI helped him overcome some of that fear.
Hey there yes that’s a great review. I’m not sure how relevant to this development stuff it is though, because
It only accepts really high quality observational studies
it’s focuses on human health. We’re reasonably good at controlling for confounders with humans, but we have very little clue how to do that with development interventions.
I would love a similar review for development studies but I doubt there would be enough good quality research to do a similar comparison
Wow around 100 million each for Europe and USA is crazy low—really illustrates how important EA money is to this cause. In the global health world this amount could have been spent on 3 fairly useless USAID projects (but no more). 3 GiveWell orgs spend 100million+ each. Crazy levels of success on these small budgets for the last 10 years as well.
This is a big part of why I (and many other global health folks) voted for marginal dollars going to animal welfare, even though I’m hugely skeptical about animal sentience and welfare ranges.
Yeah to be clear i definitely don’t think it can have anywhere near the mass public appeal hor positive effect as something like the civil rights movement. But I think he’s already been partially proved right by the media response in the last week
My LinkedIn is blowing up right now with anti Open AI/pro Anthropic stuff
From the text itself, I think that i find compelling is
Public is already unhappy with MAGA and US military actions right now
Chat GPT are potentially in a slightly dangerous, overleveraged financial situation
700,000 people already signed up is a pretty impressive signal for a start
The positive media storm for Anthropic is bigger than I thought it would be.
Almost every major news network has featured them and almost all of it puts a halo on Amodei (which feels a bit icky but hey).
And every 4th post on my linkedin is along the lines of
“Claude hits no. 1 on App store”
“the idea that no big tech has morals is dead,”
“my 3 year love affair with GPT Is over”
“I made the switch to Claude and I’ll never look back”
As much as refusing the govt. contact might delay their IPO and give their valuation a temporary hit, they could hardly have hoped for a better PR flood. Every new user that switches more only helps them but hurts their biggest competitor. It’s also good timing for them because right now their product is probably better than Open AI’s which wasn’t the case a year ago and might not be the case 6 months from now.
It’s still unclear whether this will be a good business decision as well as a “moral” one but I suspect it will.
Love this SO much. I agree with this mindset completely, and I think that enormous consumption reductions compared to the average Jo(sephine) can be made at very little cost to efficiency and life satisfaction, like you’ve stated. I agree it can be taken too far, but I think very few people do and its easier to course correct up a little in consumption than have to go back down.
Respect.
Where I live in Uganda, there’s a huge amount of giving already—in fact depending on how you define giving, people use far higher percentages of their income on other people than most westerners. But it works very differently. Local giving fits into something like these 3 categories
1. Giving within families (the majority). I estimate 1⁄4 of our nurses’ income goes towards supporting their family members with things like school fees, medical bills and even just cash for their paren Aspects of this system have has been pejoritvely called a “black tax” at times
2. “Patronage” giving. Politicians buy ambulances and put their photo on it, wealthy people sponsor orphans, Rich businesses pay for “health camps”. Most of this giving is directly connected to the
work and life of the “giver” and buys them status and good will in their communities. I put CSR in this category too—A local microfinance company built a maternity unit for us a few years ago which is great. I would rate this giving as more effective than most Western Giving but obviously not EA level.
3. Religious giving. People give to support local poor people, local hospitals or prisoners because they believe its the right thing to do, and a responsibility. For example the local Pentecostal church sponsored sitting benches for one of our health centers, even though they have nothing to do with the health facility at all which was pretty cool.
I know countries like Nigeria do have somewhat of a “philanthropy” system in the western sense, but I imagine a lot of this is heavily connected to patronage too.
I have never heard of a local here giving money to an international NGO. That’s completely off the radar. NGOs are usually seen as often ineffective sources of money for local people, not something that you would spend your own precious money on. How could you justify giving money to an org that pays someone an absurd $3,000 dollars a month when your cousin needs money for school fees? At least that’s how I see the logic working.
I struggle to see how giving to animal welfare could plausibly fit these categories. I would doubt whether there are really any significant number of richer Africans who care about animal welfare enough to give money. But I only know the Ugandna context well.
Is that the argument? I’ve never seen that written on any org website or in an official announcement.
If that is the main argument then I think especially given the current fraught situation, that needs to be made explicit so we can have real discussions about whether that’s a good idea or not. I would feel better if the 80k site said something like.
1.”There’s a good chance that OpenAI creates an ASI, and so it’s important that they have a good safety team.”
2. Open AI have repeatedly proved to be untrustworthy, to so if you work there you will need to have strong moral resistance to much of the rhetoric you will hear from inside the company. Otherwise there’s s high chance you will forget the reason you joined and cease to be an effective worker for AI safety.
3. You’ll need to be eyes wide open that working inside an org which you disagree with many of their objectives and where you can’t share all your intentions will be emotionally and psychologically taxing.
I didn’t do the best job there but you get the idea.
Also my objections aren’t only about trusting the company or their decisions, it’s about them proving themselves repeatedly to be a bad actor and having done a series of bad things! from sacking their EA influence, to dissolving the initial non profit founders intent, to now signing up to operate mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. I think the problem with this company is far bigger than policy and intentions.
I agree, for me personally (I don’t speak for others) this is an important moment for how i perceive EA orgs like 80k. Even if earlier there may have been some decent arguments for working within OpenAI, I think now it’s close to indefensible. I’m hoping for a bunch of public statements and clear position changes in the next week or so.
So sorry about all of this, and I’m impressed by your strength in sharing.
This line rang especially true to me.
“I’m no expert; however, if a prior policy update wasn’t sufficient, perhaps policies aren’t the problem.”
policies are necessary but not sufficient. Fundamentally humans have to choose to do the right thing.
This was my first thought too. This line made my heart leap with joy!
“Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission”
Extended pro plus extra 2.0?
I think you’re being too cynical about activists. I would say the strongest incentive for activists is to actually achieve what they want in the world. Sure there are other competing incentives (pride, justification of action etc.) but many activists (maybe a minority but many) do actually really really want to win and optimise for that....
There are loads of clear cut examples where picking one thing to win has just straight up worked. For example my wife (unbiased example) led a big campaign here in Gulu district Northern Uganda to ban the smallest unit of alcohol—they sold spirits in small plastic bags for only 15 cents. The campaign started through a small group at a church, and they built a coalition of the local government, NGOs, churches, mosques etc. and then got the law through regionally and enforced it successfully. Now the smallest unit of alcohol costs twice as much here—getting the lowest unit price of alcohol higher is basically proven to reduce problematic alcohol use.
There’s just no way that would have happened without the careful, targeted campaign over 3 years, the counterfactual is hard to deny given all the difficult steps needed to get the ban and no other district ever did it.
Then 2 years later the whole country banned the alcohol sachets. Now that one might have happened anyway, or their campaign might have contributed its hard to tell.
This is a smaller scale example but I know of a bunch of other similar ones where the causality is pretty clear.
https://movendi.ngo/blog/2017/04/05/problem-sachet-alcohol-gulu-uganda/
I’ve updated positively hugely on Anthropic after their response to this today
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/anthropic-pentagon-claude
Thanks Elliot yes I love that post! First this is just a Linken snapshot I posted, so we can’t expect him to lay it all out there. I think he uses the historical movement example more as an intro as well, there are other compelling reasons besides that in the text!
Great questions and I’m not sure about these answers at all!
I think at the moment them having less users in general does more damage, than they benefit from the increased resources available. Fundamentally this is a race at the moment and a fight for investors and supremacy—On the free account doing even a little damage to that reputation/investability I would guess would do more than the small benefit from freeing up their compute...
Thanks for being transparent about the use ;). I’ve said this a few times but discussion isn’t just about the ideas and position, its also about your voice and your connection with the person. Words are far more than a delivery mechanism.
I don’t feel much humanity or connection after this message, I feel like its broken that connection we would have had, which makes me a little sad.
It’s not just an efficiency tool. This is what an AI company might tell you. There are negative tradeoffs here, and if you’re happy to lose your individual voice then well, I think your argument might hold but there is a cost to having AI write all the words.
I might be out of line here, but I don’t think you necessarily actually believe the full position of your AI assisted comment. Do you really agree that its “just an efficiency tool” and that words are just “a delivery mechanism”? Has AI (even slightly) warped what you actually believe about this?
I do agree that Ownership and transparency are important, and for me should be more of an absolute basleline.
Makes sense. I encountered it for the first time a handful of times in rationalist articles.
That’s a good point maybe I was going a bit far with “strong”. I’ve changed the title to “Decent” I think it’s pretty well established though in the activist world that is often effective to pick one specific thing to get a”win” on, at the right time. For sure proving casualty in activism is rarely possible.
I agree it’s hardly a comprehensive argument, but it’s not bad for a LinkedIn post ;).
Love this @Molly Archer-Zeff , the kind of lowish effort highish impact comment which reassures people that the Humane League is on it (which I don’t doubt). Nice one.