On paper the absolute perfect people to do this are the diaspora: people who are both sufficiently familiar with local languages and cultural norms and challenges and sufficiently Westernized to be good at dealing with Western consumers and importers and funders. 

Obviously some are doing this, just wondering if there's much [Western] support infrastructure to help people trying to get into it?

The vaccine acceleration has some nuance as well. It's definitely not as simple as "people could have produced enough vaccines to end malaria if the silly people slowing things down didn't get in the way". RTS'S, whilst moderately effective at reducing deaths in infants until the effects wear off never had the potential to get remotely close to ending malaria, and has been estimated to be less cost-effective at saving lives than plain old bednets.^[1]  Ideally, of course, kids in the most affected areas would have both and probably seasonal chemoprevention too, but we haven't even funded comprehensive enough bednet distribution yet.

Also these particular decisions don't get taken by people who are sceptical of the potential of science or who lack skill in number crunching - quite the opposite. The Phase III trials had a further followup very large trial rather than instant mass distribution as soon as it was declared efficacious and probably safe because spending large fractions of developing countries' healthcare budget on a promising intervention that appeared to work well in some groups but not others is a difficult thing to do.^[2] It's not like adopting the opposite approach doesn't have its drawbacks: the COVID vaccines were about as effective and safe as could be possibly have been hoped for in the accelerated timescale they were released on, but still ended up with the indirect result of US medicine being coopted by radical antivaxxers^[3] which seems bad, as does more parents withdrawing their kids from once routine vaccination schedules. Could have been a lot worse if those rare myocarditis side effects people spotted late on weren't rarer than myocarditis side effects from the COVID everyone was getting anyway.  It's easier to say more, bigger, faster without considering second order effects.

 

1. ^{^}

   see for example https://www.1daysooner.org/how-cost-effective-is-the-new-r21-vaccine-compared-to-existing-malaria-interventions/ and note that these have wide error bars due to the differences in costs of vaccination programs between countries and uncertainty about how consistently bednets are used, and that R21 which got faster regulatory approval is more cost effective because it appears more potent and is cheaper to manufacture and distribute.

2. ^{^}

   it wasn't just the overlapping but probably completely coincidental meningitis, there were quirks in the Phase III trial data probably related to the relatively small sample size like the rare but most-likely-to-be-fatal cerebral malaria actually showing up more in vaccinated older kids which brought recommendations for a very large trial rather than universal incorporation into everyone's vaccine schedule.

3. ^{^}

   Trump moves in mysterious ways, but his decision to appoint RFK Jr to attack vaccine science surely isn't unlinked to how the fact the one Trump achievement he can get booed by his own supporters for mentioning is vaccine rollout, after the narrative everyone was being injected before the scientists even knew what the side effects were took hold.

It's an interesting idea but as expressed feels a little tendentious, particularly if one looks at what is actually formally considered a war crime these days (much of which would not have been recognised as war crimes in the past, including by actors who believed themselves to be unusually chivalrous). Hard to believe it will be impossible to avoid total war if a few civilians are murdered or chemical weapons are used, never mind if a pilot gets shot after ejecting or if a spy is not afforded a fair trial, and hostage taking was once considered a good way to avoid total war. We see peace agreements between prolific war criminals quite often too. Avoiding total war might be a motivation, but it can't be the only one.

On the other hand game theory favours opposing sides agreeing to not shoot ejecting pilots or torture each others' prisoners even if they don't agree on anything else, whereas it is impossible to win a war if you are not permitted to fire at the other side's soldiers, and at least in 1949 artillery and aerial bombardments were also too critical to winning for the Geneva Convention to agree to ban them. It is possible for opposing sides to agree not to shoot at people that don't wear uniform, but only if both sides treat sneaking up on the other side and shooting them whilst not wearing uniform as also a crime.

Also, many people genuinely believe in the idea that people shooting other people in a uniform which indicates they intend to fire back represents some sort of fair play (even if the targets happen to be sleeping conscripts who haven't had a chance to surrender yet) and the sort of people that believe in that sort of thing are disproportionately likely to be military officers. They tend to believe in just wars too...

I do agree that opposing sides are considerably more likely to respect conventions on war crimes (and even reach other bargains like prisoner swaps) whilst the infrastructure that may allow the sides to mutually end the war still exists. But there's plenty of evidence of war crimes committed with impunity in conflicts that never came close to total war, and for that matter of individual military units choosing to abide by conventions despite there being no realistic prospect of a near-term peace agreement and plenty of war crimes being committed by others on their side

I would add that whilst I understand non-native speakers wanting to use LLMs to write more idiomatic English, I would rather read their own thoughts with a few grammar errors and unusual word choices than their own thoughts mixed up with vaguely similar ideas that aren't theirs and pithy summaries that are actually expressing something different...

I like the idea of goodmaxxing but feel like I am wayyy to old to know how seriously the sort of youngster that watches videos with maxxing in the title would take this blog :)

Interesting point, and I suspect that there are lower hanging fruit in gambling too: some of the most addictive forms (e.g. fixed odds betting terminals in the UK) are not some intrinsic part of the culture but relatively new innovations promoted by a mere handful of companies and so regulators are much happier grappling with them (in the case of fixed odds betting terminals, I suspect restrictions on how much could be bet per spin were even more popular with the people who actually use them on a regular basis than the wider public!).

In that respect it's perhaps a lot  like animal rights activism requires campaigns focused on winnable battles to be effective (and it might appeal to some people that already have that lobbying skillset)

I tend to agree with the OP, but think there are a couple of other points about subsidising prediction markets which could have had more emphasis

• Forecasts are a market in which people trade money, which makes it easy for them to function on a for profit model if there is significant interest in participation. Even if prediction markets are objectively highly valuable, it is not clear there is sufficient altruism-relevant benefit in forecasting quality coming from subsidised rather than non-subsidised platforms to justify the subsidy ^[1]
• Forecasting for profit is zero sum,^[2] which means every superforecaster is balanced out by an equal and opposite amount of money collectively lost by others who are less "well calibrated". Many people are perhaps happy to net lose money gambled for entertainment or signalling purposes (though perhaps they could part with their cash in other ways which deliver more positive outcomes...), but others may be developing gambling habits which can be extremely self destructive^[3]. I guess this links to Marcus' "feels like doing something useful where it isn't" point, but it can be much worse than simply a distraction. Negative externalities can be significant, and it is unclear if the positive externalities outweigh them.

1. ^{^}

   I guess without a platform cut/spread you get marginally more precision, but how many forecasts actually need that precision and are sufficiently liquid to get it?

2. ^{^}

   actually worse than zero sum on a for-profit exchange, obviously...

3. ^{^}

   many forms of traditional gambling relies heavily on "whales" with a mixture of non trivial amounts of money to lose and impulse control problems for much of their volume and profit; some of them ruin their lives doing so, even more so the people with the same impulse control problems and less starting money. This may not apply to niche prediction markets, but I'm sure people can become addicted to the idea of winning their money back even if they know casino "betting systems" are -EV and don't like sports or machines with flashing lights 

Presumably CEA did some sort of estimate of utilization and operational costs to justify the funding bar; the decision to shutter it fairly early based on cost benefit analysis suggests that those estimates proved optimistic. It would be interesting to see how much they missed by, and whether they factored alternatives like hosting at the local university into either of the assessments.

The venue selection process between 3 publicly listed and immediately available properties in the range £6-£15m sounds rather trivial as described considering the expense, particularly in a culture which encourages rigorous analysis of the relative effectiveness of much smaller donations.

It's a niche property with very few potential buyers and they probably overpaid. The UK property market has cooled a little and isn't necessarily as attractive to the sort of oligarch or hospitality company most likely to buy it. It will also have a very high annual maintenance bill due to its age; it's possible they found more work which needed doing which hit the value and hanging onto it would have had a non-trivial cost regardless. It's also possible they clawed some money back from selling off some parts separately (there was an apartment in a Wytham Abbey outbuilding for sale last year, though I'm not sure EA ever owned that building).

It's not particularly unusual for buyers of niche high value property to make large losses when under a little pressure to sell, especially if they bought into the property's sentimental appeal rather than its costs. The people that very confidently dismissed the idea that Wytham would be a losing venture because don't you guys know what a capital investment is understood the market dynamics and operational costs less well than many of the critics.

I mean, if you want to buy up a pretty hotel with a bus service to Oxford, you can get more bedrooms for less money than Wytham was sold for, never mind what it was bought for https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/739022765321024#/?channel=COM_BUY  

What's labelled Asimov's Corollary here is actually Parkinson's Law

Asimov's Corollary, which is pretty neat but completely different and not nearly as pithy, is explained here. As a fan of Clarke's laws, I'm sure Peter likes that one too.
 

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I also haven't seen or heard anyone refer to Mandelson's law before? Although the quote is certainly ironic in the context of UK politics (Peter Mandelson is a political figure in the headlines for his third resignation in disgrace having been brought back into the fold 25 years after his last one; the struggling Prime Minister is probably sick of trying to explain his appointment to an unreceptive public by now....)