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: 13,939
Just because you work through government doesn’t make it systems change. Governments are usually happy to implement stuff if someone else is paying, then when the money dries up so does the work. I wouldn’t call their Malawi work systems change really.
What I would call systems change is their work convincing the UNHCR to give cash rather than food a lot of the time to refugees.
Wow I would invest 60-100 hours of time even as a founder for an expected value of 100,000 dollars. That’s crazy that org had that much funding!
Yes in the animal welfare and global health space the situation is nothing like that...
I don’t think it has shifted the scales yet, uncertainty remains huge on the Anthropic question. Not only on the amount, but I’m sure there will be many impactful cause areas which won’t benefit that will still need more money.
And even if 10 billion (or whatever) does end up coming in, It might change the ETG math less than we’d expect? Would be interested to see someone do some play-math with the numbers....
I think you could argue that “open source fades, propreitary moat” is a miss but not a clear miss. Yes there is a proliferation of decent open source models, but they are waaaaaay behind the fronteir and considering the money that’s pouring into the frontier companies, investors clearly think propreitary has a moat.
If the arms race argument is the central argument, I would argue that there is a clear moat. The open source models are not close enough to the frontier to reduce the urgency of an arms race.
Scale Scale Scale, Govt. Govt. Govt: 3 concerns
This is a great idea, although this would be a big call for many of us to do who might hope that our org could get some of that funding. Even someone like myself who fires shots pretty freely might think twice. We wouldn’t want to rule our organisation out by writing too strong a Steelman against this. Any steelman would involve arguing that previous promises from founders and employees don’t carry much weight, which could be seen as a personal slight against someone who could conceivably give you money. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve already said too much!
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸has written a bit on this he might have a comment here?
“but the WiFi was incredibly bad (maximum 1mbps)”.
Not only in Uganda huh..
I love your honesty about the issues with the retreat. I think at least one external speaker is always a boon to increase the excitement/novelty levels.
I remember when we were at Cambridge we combined the retreat with Wawrick university and that was absolutely rocking. Great to have new faces and people running sessions and increased the buzz a bit.
I like how you grounded the retreat in concrete practical thinking about the future. Nice one!
This could be correct but is so speculative and so many steps removed from the present that I give it very little weight. There are so many assumptions at play here. I think most of these assumptions are more likely than not, but with those probabilities multiplied together the whole scenario becomes less likely. Here are just a few potential ones.
1. More humans will always = more productive person-years. There are lots of war / resource shortage /climate change scenarios
2. We will invent cultured meat that everyone switches to.
3. AI just increases progress and doesn’t take the world in weird directions
4. More people reduces X-risk?
I couldn’t disagree more here, I think we need more of these kind of jobs on the jobboard.
Imagine if you are a kitchenhand and you are good at and like your job. Perhaps you don’t have any tertiary education but you’d love to be more impactful then your current work at Starbucks.
What a rare and great opportunity.
Yep I 100 percent agree.
First I wasn’t making any big claims about what’s most important, I’m just responding to Lewis’s comment there which confused me a bit, and suggesting that perhaps more research in that in particular might not be so useful.
On your comment I would though expect mortality to not be a direct, ideal measure of suffering but still be important as one of the few objective measures we have. If chickens are dying early that could indicate health issues which might also cause suffering Some of the same things that would kill a chicken would be heavily correlated with what makes them suffer I imagine?
I agree it’s not going to be the most important metric but it is objective at least.
“How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?”
This seems a weird, potentially epistemiclally dangerous situation. If a cage free system is mostly better for chickens just because it is more expensive and drives down demand, then that’s a dishonest play on our end. If we’re going for better hen welfare, I don’t think this should be part of our calculation.
A few comments here coming from a global health background.
“I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don’t have a clear answer on it.
If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn’t have a clear answer and needed more research. I would imagine this situation is more nuanced but I would like to understand that nuance.
Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure? All the hens are in a barn in one place with a 3 month lifespan. Compared to mortality in humans this measurement situation seems very easy. I would imagine farmers will be collecting this data for profitability reasons as well. I’m naive here so might be missing something important.
“But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive—as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don’t have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it.”
The specifics are the crux for me. Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a “high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive”. This is a post with specifics, so I think it’s important to refute specifics as well as outline general principles. You’re right there are some good comments on these specifics though, thanks especially @Vasco Grilo🔸.
I think it would be worth it if someone in your kind of position (if not you) did take the time to disagree on the specifics here.
Thanks @mvolz I had a read. Your article seems to be directionally similar to the OP is that the case? What’s different?
While reading this I felt quite confused and even a bit discombobulated. The cage free campaign institutions tell me how many hens can be saved from cages for a dollar. I always interpreted that as just straightforwardly good, even if we weren’t sure how much good. For animal Welfare debate weeks and cross-cause priortisation models we assume that these interventions hugely move the needle—we debate other things like moral weights and the importance of uncertainty...
But the best research institutions like @Rethink Priorities and @Ambitious Impact have models which calculate huge reductions in suffering per dollar directed towards these very interventions. They must have good evidence based models for this.
It seems to me very unlikely to be that these big, thoughtful orgs are directionally wrong but the data presented here seems reasonable at a glance so what’s up?
I would love to read a detailed data—based refutation / counter piece to this, which lays out the best argument that uncaging hens and stunning shrimp really do make a clear, huge difference. Or even just direct me to the best stuff already written. I donate (small amounts) to cage-free and this article more than any other has made me rethink that.
Also looking forward to seeing some more detailed pushback on this in the thread too!
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”
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/
I was excited to hear about this “Claude Corps” initiative for NGOs, which helps orgs supercharge their benefits from AI then gutted to hear that its only going to be in the USA. Apparently they want to extend it overseas later, but the impact an intern li this could have right now for orgnisations like us at OneDay Health in Uganda would be mind-blowing. I hope they can expand the program overseas sooner rather than later!
- 150 million dollar program
- Intern works for 12 months with the NGO to supercharge AI use
- $85,000 payment to intern for the year
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-corps