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: 7,700
Wow thanks so much this is fantastic.
I’m not an economist but I resonate with this- guilty as charged. I usually assume national figures are kind of the gospel truth and now that I think about it I’m not sure why...
“Strangely, economists pay a great deal of attention to statistical error when it comes to causal inference or survey data they collect themselves—but very little when it comes to national statistics.”
I’ve also been interested in economic growth as global health EA funding looks to increasingly be funneled into ways to improve this. Given that GDP data is so poor how on earth can we figure out what interventions might reliably improve growth in poor countries?
On the positive front, some surprisingly EA adjacent people were part of the movement which did get slavery banned.
I also think the heavy EA bent against activism and politics wouldn’t have helped, as both of those routes were key parts of the pathway to ban slavery in the UK at least (I don’t know much about the US)
I agree we don’t ignore everything with a probability of less than 0.5 of being good.
Can you clarify what you mean y “50% chance of being very good?”
1) Rethink priorities give Shrimp 23% chance of sentience
2) Their non-sentience adjusted welfare range than goes from 0 (at 5th percentile) to 1.095 (at 95% percentile). From zero to more than a human is such a large uncertainty range that I could accept arguments at this point that it might be “unworkable” like Henry says (personally I don’t think its unworkable)
3) Then After adjusting for sentience it looks like this.
Whatever way the cookie crumbles I think that’s a lot smaller than a “50% chance of being very good” and also a high uncertainty range.
Worldpop has taken this a step further and combined census population counts with house counts to estimate population.
We use this for our healthcare mapping tool health AIM to accurately estimate the population in healthcare “black holes” where we launch health centers.
https://health-aim.onedayhealth.cloud/login
The problem is that house counts alone doesn’t get you to an accurate population estimate. You need to know the number of people living in each house, which varies wildly between direct staff. We used to use a world bank estimate of 1.8 per hut or something in our area but that’s far too loose to check population estimates.
An interesting method might be to check world pop’s estimates over specific small sample sizes and then physically visit those places and see whether the online counts were consistently higher, lower or similar to the real life counts. I would imagine with a few hundred samples of 15-30 households that might get close to answering the question (can’t be bothered doing the power calculation). Could probably do that for somewhere between 50k and 100k for what it’s worth.
I agree that there’s a big difference between shrimps and nematodes, although the uncertainty for shrimp sentience remains extremely high, to the point where I think it’s not unreasonable that some people consider it something like a pascals mugging (personally I don’t put it in that category).
Yes shrimp “sentience” or “capacity to suffer” is less uncertain than a mite, but it’s still very uncertain even under models like RPs which I think probably favor animals.
“Reversed stupidity is not intelligence” is a surprisingly insightful wee concept that I hadn’t heard of before. Had a look at the stuff on LessWrong about it and found it helpful thanks!
Write that’s A but confusing for your average punter 😂.
It’s not that they’ve just worked on animal welfare. It’s that they they have been animal rights advocates (which is great). Derek was the Web developer for the humane League for 5 years… Which is fantastic and I love it but towards my point...
Thanks for the clarification. I was indeed trying to say option a—that There’s a “bias towards animals relative to other cause areas,” . Yes I agree it would be ideal to have people on different sides of debates in these kind of teams but that’s often impractical and not my point here.
I still think most independent people who would come in with a more balanced (less “cherry picking”) approach than mine to look at the teams’ work histories are likely to find the teams’ work history to be at least moderately bent towards animals.
I also agree you as the leader aren’t in that category.
Brilliant I love this.
Give Directly driving attention and attitudes towards cash is good for pushing the aid worlds’ thinking in terms of cost effectiveness, normalizing benchmarking, which has positive spillovers to effective altruism in general
Small thing. I think phrasing is the the “meat eating” problem is better here, will continue to plug this.
I might well have overstated it. My argument here though is based on previous work of individual team members, even before they joined RP, not just the nature of the previous work of the team as part of RP. All 5 of the team members worked publicly (googlably) to a greater or lesser extent on animal welfare issues before joining RP, which does seem significant to me when the group undertaking such an important project which involves such important questions assessing impact, prioritisation and funding questions across a variety of causes.
It might be a”cross cause team”, but there does seem a bent here..
1. Animal welfare has been at the center of Derek and Bob’s work for some time.
2. Arvon founded the “Animal welfare library” in 2022 https://www.animalwelfarelibrary.org/about
3. You and Hayley worked (perhaps to a far lesser extent) on animal welfare before joining Rethink too. On Hayley’s faculty profile it says”With her interdisciplinary approach and diverse areas of expertise, she helps us understand both animal minds and our own.”
And yes I agree that you, leading the team seems to have the least work history in this direction.This is just to explain my reasoning above, I don’t think there’s necessarily intent here and I’m sure the team is fantastic—evidenced by all your high quality work. Only that the team does seem quite animal welfar-ey. I’ve realised this might seem a bit stalky and this was just on a super quick google. This may well be misleading and yes I may well be overstating.
This sounds great and I instinctively really like it. My reservation is when im the research will end up being somewhat biased towards animal welfare, considering that has been a major research focus and passion for most of these researchers for a long time.
My weak suggestion (I know probably not practical) would be to try and intentionally hire some animal welfare skeptic philosophy people to join the team to provide some balance and perhaps fresh perspectives.
I don’t have a suggestion, but I’ve been encouraged and “heartwarmed” by the diverse range of responses below. Cool to see people with different ways of holding their hope and motivation, whether its enough for us to buy a bed net tomorrow or we do indeed have grander plans and visions, or we’re skeptical abut whether “future designing” is a good idea at all.
Applying my global health knowledge to the animal welfare realm, I’m requesting 1,000,000 dollars to launch this deep net positive (Shr)Impactful charity. I’ll admit the funding opportunity is pretty marginal…
Thanks @Toby Tremlett🔹 for bringing this to life. Even though she doesn’t look so happy I can assure you this intervention nets a 30x welfare range improvement for this shrimp, so she’s now basically a human.
Yeah me too its amazing
Oh yeah that’s super interesting that the mortality effect doesn’t change the cost-effectiveness estimate that much. I wonder why that is excactly? Might look into it later!
Interesting one nice observations. What do you mean when you say that the 23% mortality reduction has “extremely depressing implications”
I love the way you put this
”have you not considered the possibility that people have noticed the outsiders with clipboards asking personal questions seem to be associated in some way with their neighbours getting unexpected windfalls, and started to speculate about what sort of answers the NGOs are looking for...”
I think this is great and a pretty huge development. I have two broad strokes comments here.
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Few other interventions have the research clout to look at such a wide range of outcomes years after what they do, which may favor cash.
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I still think the survey based follow up (nearly all of the follow up) after cash transfers biases towards cash to an extent people underrate, including Interviewer bias (blinding is practically impossible), desirability bias and future hope bias. This is simply because people loooooove getting cash more than any other intervention.
In saying that I still think we should give loads more cash to everyone. Give Directly also becomes even more cost effective as almost all of their money comes from non EA sources.
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I love the insane generosity and personal integrity of the team, donating so much. For me personally this generosity gives me more confidence in the work you do, even if that might be a bit irrational.
I think Practicing what we preach matters both so our lives are integrated and for PR/external confidence reasons.