Global healthGlobal health & development

Humans have actively worked against promoting the welfare of wild city rats throughout history. Aside from primates, they are some of the most closely related non-human animals to H. sapiens, yet we know very little about how they live outside of laboratory settings (i.e., often dystopian, prison-like conditions). In order to enhance their welfare in the wild and in laboratories, there is a huge need to develop and deploy technologies to study their behavior. Such studies would also benefit global human health and biosecurity efforts because rats can serve as vectors of disease, sources of infrastructural damage, and pose a threat to stored foods. 

There are very few researchers working in this space across the globe, and I am one of the few (pre-PhD, looking for programs where I can complete my doctorate) who has the experience with + concern for rats and software/hardware/IoT development & design skills necessary to push this area of research further in a manner that embraces total harm-reduction (as opposed to eliminationist) thinking/strategies.  Am I in the right place for starting conversation(s) on this topic? Should I repost this some other way?

Hopefully I'm posting this in the correct context + idea development status, it's my first post on the site. I found out about the potential for research funding opportunities last weekend while attending a conference at GWU Law School and figured it is worth a shot, given the sad state of affairs with research funding lately. 

I've started a living literature review on the relationship between wealth and wellbeing.

Things I've done some work on that I plan to publish more on that seem relevant to some EA conversations in global health and wellbeing :

• Does each doubling have the same return to wellbeing? The convention (outside of time discounts) is to assume that going from $500 to $1000 is the same return on wellbeing as $500k to $1,000k. I think that's probably not true. This affects how we think about improving incomes in high versus low income countries.
• How effective are cash transfers in high income countries? So far, it seems like cash transfers that improve annual income by 10-30% in the USA have pretty much no effect on wellbeing. Weird. Not sure why yet. Seems bearish for UBI, but I'm not quite sure what's a better idea yet.
• Does economic growth make countries happier? Richer countries are happier, richer people are happier, and people getting richer are happier, but countries getting richer has reportedly been a more mixed blessing for people. I expect to find something like growth is probably good but less good than you would expect based on looking at country cross sections. However, it's possible there's some weird scale use stuff that'd make growth look growth look like a miracle for human wellbeing.
• If not growth in incomes, then what? I'll look at what if any reliable predictors there are of increases to national wellbeing -- an area I feel like we know surprisingly little about. There's some work suggesting that increases to social capital and social spending are better predictors than economic growth. Something like social capital seems plausible but social spending seems likelier to be confounded by the requirement that you need to make money to spend money (on welfare systems). But there's some evidence that trust and social capital is increased in societies that experience high growth, so it's all a bit messy. 

Some less relevant things I'll work on: what does the causal evidence say about social media and mental wellbeing? -- it's somewhat bad, probably. How happy were our ancestors? -- Either about as happy as we are or, or as happy as people are in Afghanistan -- Which is to say teetering on the cusp of having negative wellbeing on average. Not sure which yet. Is it the psychology, stupid? I'm also curious to understand the psychology of populism, and if a non-material lens gives us a better sense of how to predict and maybe prevent populist driven destablization to the institutions we'll need to preserve to have any chance at governing during these wacky next few decades. 

Guys, I thought it would be a good idea for me to analyse public data from Our World in Data (e.g. find correlations, etc) in my free time. Are there any correlations you want tested?

With the large expected inflow of philanthropic capital, there has been a surge in interest in entrepreneurship among those who otherwise might not have pursued it. As we pursue promising new ideas, many ventures will fail. Some of these failures will be because the idea was not as good as it seemed, but many will fail because the entrepreneurs executed it poorly.

I'm concerned we will abandon good ideas due to poor execution.

Founders new and old should strive to make their successes and failures publicly visible (though these stories should be read critically given founder biases). More importantly, we should be skeptical of claims that an idea is bad based solely on the failure of one attempt, and we should be willing to pursue ideas more than once if we have a strong account for why the previous attempt(s) failed.

As someone who hires people (I am hiring right now, see bottom of the post), I often get emails asking whether someone should apply for a role I've listed.
If you're considering contacting a hiring manager to ask if you're a good fit for the role, you should just apply.

Why?

• Job descriptions are wish lists.
  Everyone wants someone who checks all the boxes. If the dream candidate applies, you'll probably get rejected. In reality, everyone has weaknesses, and an 80% match candidate is highly competitive.
• Self-skepticism correlates with candidate quality.
  Applicant pools are filled with people who can't do the job but don't understand their abilities well enough to realize it. Conversely, many highly competent professionals self-select out. If you are humble and self-reflective enough to consider your chances honestly, you are probably more competitive than you think.
• You probably won't get a response.
  Hiring is always a busy time, and hiring managers don't have time to review every email. Often, you'll receive nothing, leaving you with wasted effort. I try to reply as much as I can, but there's only so much that can be done.
• Any response you get is biased toward yes.
  If an org has a good filtering process, the biggest determinant in hire quality is whether good candidates apply. More "bad fit" candidates pose little strain, while one more "great fit" candidate could double the success of the hiring round. The incentive is always to get more people to apply.
  It's unclear whether a seeming good fit is a great fit who is overly worried about their weaknesses or a bad fit exaggerating their strengths, but it doesn't matter. Hiring managers are better off if both apply so they encourage them to do so. As a result, you spend some time writing an email, the hiring manager spends some time reviewing your email, they take time to send a response, and you receive the answer that you probably should apply, so all that effort led to nothing. Skipping the email saves you (and me) time in the long run.
• The information transmitted in an email is not always in your favor.
  The fact that someone sent an email can suggest self-reflectiveness (good), but it can also be a sign of a lack of confidence (bad). It can suggest thoughtfulness about time management (good), but it can also signal a lack of agency and autonomy (bad). These signals are very small in magnitude, so I don't, and I hope others don't, read into this too much. However, it's worth realizing what you might be accidentally communicating.

Notable exceptions, where you should email:

• You require something from the job that the description doesn't specify.
  If you need to know whether a job will meet your needs, that's fully worth checking before applying. That's very different from asking a hiring manager to evaluate your fit for the role over email.
• You are fully confident that you do not fit a logistical requirement of the role but you have a creative work around that you want to propose to the organization.
  Hiring is always trying to solve a problem. A good hiring manager will recognize that hiring for the specific role isn't the only solution. If you can solve the problem (e.g. you are unable to work full-time but believe you could still own the key components of the role as a part-time worker), you should consider reaching out.
• You find the job just after the deadline has passed and you need the form re-opened for you.
  Expect a no, but there's very little harm in asking. Note that this is different from if you found the job before the deadline and forgot to apply in time.
• The first stage of the application process is particularly onerous.
  We try to keep our first stage applications at 30 minutes or less, and that's where I'm basing my conclusions. If an application takes multiple hours, you're still likely to receive a yes, but a tiny chance of saving 3 hours of work might be worth a few minutes.

To be clear, the urge to send an email to check if you should apply is totally normal (I have done it before), and anyone who has done this has nothing to worry about. However, I would strongly recommend applying despite your reservations. You can just do things!

Also, if you want to apply to become Access to Medicines Initiative's Head of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Data, JOB DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATION HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nqOz2a5bTQs5W361G5gpJ3brLEf6xuG0

USAID took down its archive of evaluation reports, but a high school student happened to have downloaded them for a ML project, and they are now available online again:

https://www.aiddata.org/blog/before-reimagining-development-data-remember-what-weve-learned

Looking for medical reviewers (paid) and translators (volunteers) for ClusterInfo.org

A couple of months ago, my team launched ClusterInfo.org, a website hosting high-quality guides on how to treat cluster headaches. We're hoping to help thousands of patients around the world find treatments (and get a diagnosis) as quickly and easily as possible.

I'm looking for medical doctors willing to appear as medical reviewers for any of the guides (similar to here). Reviewers would be paid $300 per guide.

Also, the website is available in 8 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Finnish. Some of the guides still need to be reviewed by native speakers. Get in touch if you'd be excited to volunteer for this task, and help us reach more patients.

You can contact me via email.

Thank you!

Mental health is one of the most widespread, impactable, yet neglected global health issues of our time. Even knowing mental health conditions are generally under-reported and/ or misrepresented, evidence still shows widespread effects of mental wellbeing on physical health, life satisfaction, and productivity, however it has still not taken off as a major cause area in many EA organizations I have talked to. Why is this?