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: 14,137
Never born, then maybe died twice
Hey AI,vbiosec and American democracy makes sense but why a 10 year windowreproductive tech and emergingg farming tech?
I really don’t think things need to be seen as “canonical” to get widespread attention or adoption. I think you’re right though that its unlikely to be seen as a permanent/long term ranking that people refer to periodically. I can more see this kind of thing going vival or getting traction from time to timeif done in the right way.
Thanks for this great article, which leaves me with less hope than before I started reading it.
Like the author points out, none of these options have a lot of evidence that they have worked in the past, and the past often predicts the future. In fact things like Agriculture and Tourism have been tried as development routes by many governments without huge sucess.
Of all these, I think for many African countries, value added agriculutre as an export focused business has decent potential. Uganda produces Cocoa, Milk and Sugar in abundance, yet still basically doesn’t make any chocolate and loses out from that big time ass this great graph shows.
A huge problem is that the protectionism of the West still severely limits this possibility. Tarriffs and import controls force poor countries to export these raw products to rich countries so they can make the chocolate and coffee themselves and make most of the money from it. The EUs agriculture import policy might have been one of the biggest constraints to African countries’ development for some time now.I think it can be easy to forget about the importance of educatoin deelopment too. As much as Taiwan’s chip boom was seeded by Taiwanese coming home, they had a world class education system (at least for the upper middle class) before that that took those engineers to the point that they were. The same can be said to some extent for the India’s IT growth. Without great education there isn’t a knowledge economy—you can’t export average knowledge services.
On Labour Migration, I still struggle to see how this can be a major driver of development. As a supplementary income source to help drive growth I think it is great, but how will just bringing in extra money (mostly to rich families) develop the country in the long term? Looking to the Phllipines again which is the darling of labor migration theory, they have a strong services export economy which was developed even while they were exporting all the labour. And both of those were built on a decent education system too.
I like the idea and I think its a great list. Given the failure and sort-of scandal around Dispensers for Safe Water, you might want to consider whether its a bit of a risk on a big portfolio like this. Nice job :)
After the World Cup result I think “lesser” suffices at this point ;)
I think the main point of the article is pretty clearly true and I appreciate the way it is written.
Part of the controversy might be because this is now the second article written here on the forum by a Fund Manager, which on an uncharitable reading could seem like they are saying that that Anthropic money will mostly go through us fund managers. We are the middle men with the power. So either appeal to fund managers like us or don’t bother. @SiobhanBall makes a similar point above.
Even if the advice is true, useful and given with a great heart (which I’m sure is the case here) it has a “gatekeepy” vibe for orgs not close to the “inner ring”.I have mixed feelings. On one hand this I agree that the advice is good and pretty common sense like you say (I certainly won’t be cold calling Anthropic staff and wouldn’t regardless). On the other hand when I read things like these...
”In the past year, donors working inside frontier AI labs have started routing large global health gifts to me to place.”and
”the most credible way to demonstrate this is to be highly rated by EA-aligned evaluators and grantmakers, already trusted by AI staff: Coefficient Giving, GiveWell....”
It feels like power over this money is likely to be heavily concentrated people in the “inner ring” who are already highly connected to Anthropic Staff and the current EA power structures. Power concentration combined with money concentration could be fine, but makes me nervous given both FTX, and that (Along with established funds) we are already seeing a bunch of new funds, led by people with not much experience, which might give out tens of millions of dollars without masses of accountability around them.
I love both of your ideas “Perhaps one aspect that could be valuable is to provide a list of more independent advisors?”. Sounds great, keeping in mind we would have to accept that if these advisors were truly “independent” from the EA circles, then they will be a bit less “EA” in their advice, and will more heavily weight less-EA considerations like orgs’ track record, local grounding and non DIY scale pathways.
I also like your other idea about talking with other big donors, and there are plenty of donors who give in the tens to hundreds of millions although not quite at GiveWell/Gates scale. Again the advice will be a little less EA aligned if moving outside the few core EA orgs for advice.
In addition to @huw’s great comment, there’s a branch of EA which focuses on well-being, and with that focus mental health interventions often look really effective. Check out the happier lives institute Huw mentioned, times the “WELLBY” and @MichaelPlant
Why would that be the case? I could work from my hut in Uganda on trying to shoot down Russian drones over Ukraine and it would not achieve anything. Obviously that’s a dumb strawmanb but just because people work on something doesn’t mean they will achieve anything.
Too late, but I would ask her to make the best case against immigration haha (much like you did with me and BINGOs 😅)
This is incredible, the best Global Health vid I’ve seen in ages so stoked! I know a vid is good when I feel comfortable imediately recommending it to non-EA friends.
I’m surprised it has so few hits, is there any marketing for this? Also is there a reason it isn’t on an official GWWC channel rather than a personal one?
Whoever disagreed with this should take a good hard look at themselves...
I see you as a founder regardless @huw. It’s a weird word but it’s well accepted in the social enterprise works at least that people who come in 2-3 years down the line and creatively grow an org are founders. I suppose it’s just semantics though.
I’ve been mulling over this quote from Naomi Klein over the last couple of days. I think its a strong summary of one of the best ethical arguments against the top AI labs.
My argument against this might be that the actual purpose of commercial application is to improve human wellbeing and prosperity overall, not to eliminate jobs. Jobs may or may not be eliminated, but either option could be fine if the prosperity is shared (at least somewhat) throughout humanity.
Then there are orgs like Mechanize, which are explicitly trying to eliminate jobs...
Besides that on the “theft” of creativity front, I think this is broadly true but I’m not sure what can be done at this point. To generalise (even with coding) AI feeds of the best that humanity has to offer then produces worse-than-the-best output much faster, at a fraction of the cost. Without the best of human IP, AI wouldn’t be very good. Newer models may be starting to be better than the best humans in niche areas, but this isn’t the norm.
I talk a lot about how AI helps us provide healthcare to some of the poorest people, but I still don’t have the greatest response to these kind of criticisms from many of my friends. I wonder how others respond to people when they bring arguments like this?
Love the curating good posts from years ago approach. This one was great, keep it up.
Want to add that the writer Abi has been great and responded really well to feedback.
This is a super important cause, but I think these numbers are hugely overblown.
That 125,000 to 250,000 deaths following blindness an old figure from the 90s, deaths from vitamin A deficiency have hugely dropped since then.
I think also from 2010 to 2015 golden rice was also a little lower yielding which contributed to the lack of uptake along with the GMO vitriol? So uptake was never going to be overwhelming until well after 2015 I don’t think bans nonwithstanding
GBD estimated around 17,000 deaths from VAD in 2021
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2025.1689903/full
Its a nice idea for a counter, but might be like 3-10x off or something? Have messaged the author directly.
Quick question—how bent towards AI safety work is the book? I’m keen to recommend it but I’m not interested in recommending or buying it for a general audience if it pushes AI safety harder than other cause areas (even if not much more strongly). Mainly because this would just turn many people I might recommend it to off. Like most people, they just would never be interested in working in AI safety.
From the blurb this looked positive “The overall structure of the book remains the same – it’s still a cause-agnostic introduction to what makes for a satisfying job, with classic EA advice on how to have an impact, how to build skills, and how to make a career plan. AI is discussed where it’s relevant to these questions (see the table of contents in the FAQ below).”
But then this made me think again
The book covers the possibility of short AI timelines and what they mean for your career, but we don’t think they’re certain, and the book is about careers first, rather than short AI timelines (80k has a bunch of separate material on career advice for mitigating AI risk).
And I wonder what the conclusion of this chapter “What’s the World’s Most Pressing Problem?” is.
I’m definitely not saying its bad if it has a clear AI bent, but was wondering what people’s thoughts on this is in reference to my target audience of mid 20s to early 30s people who I know won’t be interested in working on AI risk.
One thing I really like about founding to give programs, is that we have very clear metrics for success. We’ll know over 2-5 years if these programs were successful or not.
I haven’t seen the success metrics, but I’m guessing It probably only takes 1 or 2 successful companies to make the whole thing worth it and I’m hoping the cohorts can do even better than this!
When the aliens come, they will wonder why we gave up our world so easily when there were so many warning shots.