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: 13,494
Oh. My. Goodness, this is the kind of great writing I love to see...
I’m not sure either of those are great analogies. I would say both are not for different reasons.
Democracy only works properly if most people vote. Everyone who votes plays a role in maintaining the system and the norm of all people having real political power, even if their individual vote didn’t change the result. I don’t buy the argument which thinks just about Democracy through the effect of the marginal vote.
As a cancer researcher your have a decent chance of making an actual breakthrough, especially if working at a leading company or institution. Every year there are multiple meaningful breakthroughs which actually reduce cancer DALY burden. It’s hardly like AI safety where is both harder to make a difference and harder to know if you have...
I think this is great and makes sense, but this isn’t where 90 percent of the money is going.
This feels like a mind blowingly large loss on a property in just a couple of years. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of such a big loss. This should be chalked down as gross mismanagement and a blot on our copybook.
But also not the end of the world, be sad and move on.
I agree that it shouldn’t be taboo to argue this, but I also think the idea that insects have negative lives is possibly more dangerous because of the potential second order effects if it is acted on. Logical actions if insects have net negative lives could be
- Wiping out of natural environments
- Reducing biodiversity
If we were fortunate enough that most insects had net positive lives while being sentient, the steps to improve the overall situation for insects might not be as drastic?
This is hard to be confident on either way though
Great first article nice job @Lauren Gilbert !
I think you ran it fine, I think it was just less interesting than other debate topics as there’s just so much uncertainty and so many assumptions made to make progress. It feels more like a topic which one can muse on, rather than a meaningful debate where you can make strong arguments and counterarguments. I read as couple of the articles and found them interesting, but couldn’t really strongly agree or disagree because any article about AI and animals will be based on tenuous assumptions.
That 2 topics were excluded after a vote was also a bit of a downbuzz for me at least. Just didn’t feel like exactly what the community here was keen to get stuck into at that time.
If you are going to run a poll, I think it’s best to run with the top polled topic. Otherwise perhaps just canvas ideas and decide the topics as a forum team
What a beautiful train of thought sorry straight from the heart thank you!
There certainly seem to be a bunch of wide range of practises with cleaning. Cup manufacturers (as I suppose they would) say it certainly doesn’t need soap every single day. My wife doesn’t use soap either daily (for what that’s worth).
I found the diversity on this reddit thread interesting on this front https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jh5A2NXr5Lf9oXLSX/menstrual-cups-a-cost-effective-gem?commentId=w2K7jNQjQmDqoHCwR
I’m sure cups won’t be the solution for every single woman for sure—there will always be a decent number they won’t work out for.
Thanks Kate
My wife has used a cup for 12 years, and her friends have been similar—I wonder if these cups are the highest quality silicone ones or not? Or if there are different norms in different social groups?
2 years would make a big difference to cost-effectiveness, 5 not so much so yes this is a really important factor for sure.
That’s fair. I think it’s probably a bit optimistic too, perhaps 5 years or less would be more realistic. Again I’m surprised we don’t have solid survey data on this too, the issue really is under researched.
This is brilliantly written with simple language and how most EAs I think should default to writing about AI. The last line with the toddler reference just capoed it off.
One of the few articles about AI that o can share with my friends.
100% Agree good point. For the sake of a readable article I simplified and looked at the pad cost benefit rather than focusing on the larger healthcare benefit if it was rags.
100% true. Went for the cardinal sin of ease of understanding over accuracy ;).
Thanks Ian those are great points!
It might seem strange but there are many choices that poor people make that could save tens of dollars a year, that people don’t take advantage of. I would weakly disagree that poor people are good at saving money, especially if it requires a small investment first. The book Poor Economics has a really good section on this. Here are some classic examples where poor people don’t spend a few dollars to save in the future.
1. Prioritising handwashing devices at home. These prevent illness and hospital bills. Here in Uganda people will almost always buy a couch and a TV before they will even buy a 10 dollar handwashing bucket, it’s kind of insane. Along the same lines consider the failure of the Evidence action Chlorine dispenser project (read the great post about this by the way). People could spend a few dollars to improve their family’s hygeine but don’t.
2. People could buy in even moderate bulk rather than buying tiny amounts every day. If people spent $5 vs. the usual 50c buying foodstuffs there are many cases where they could save money by spending just a bit more.
3. Selling crops out of season. People could often wait just two months and sell crops for over 20% more than in peak season. But almost everyone wants all the money right now. Then after selling people put the money in a village saving group which makes zero interest, rather than selling two months later for afar more money. Its quite incredible.
I’ll also note that women are often especially economically disempowered and have even less scope to spend a bit of money to make their lives better.
In terms of the market in general, there is indeed huge market failure when it comes to period products. “Big Period” as it were has zero incentive to advocate for a product which you buy once for $5 and then never again. They sell tampons and pads every month at huge profits, and will do everything that they can to avoid products that will make them less money.
Indeed Living Goods would actually be the perfect kind of organisation to be a distribution network. But for cups to go big it would require a concerted effort across multiple actors, probably needing some kind of serious lobby group and co-ordination. I’m not suggesting that yet as I’m not sure there’s good enough effort to warrant that.
Yes there are a lot of people selling reusable pads in Uganda and other countries. I’m partially challenging whether there should be more of a focus on cups than pads.
Yes that’s correct it is still evidence for sure, just what might be considered “lower level” evidence.
Thanks @Julia_Wise🔸 and @MHR🔸 for the fantastic responses. I talked to a couple of people involved in cup distribution in low income countries, and their take was that if water is good enough to wash clothes and bodies, it should be good enough to wash cups. I’m not sure if this is evidence based though.
So in some very remote places with highly dirty/infected water it could be a problem, but those situations would be rare. Like others say there’s sparse to no evidence that washing cups with unclean water has caused problems with cups.
Thanks Ligea that’s great to hear and and impressive price for sure!
Yes that s great point. I probably should have included a section about reusable pads as that has been the predominant solution tried out so far by NGOs in recent times. Both through local community manufacturing and larger scale commercial operations like Afripads.
Adoption is likely easier than cups but I suspect reusable pads might be inferior on price, comfort and perhaps hygiene depending on washing techniques
Ex Machina a great example of emotional manipulation risk!