All of EdMathieu's Comments + Replies

I agree that things could work like this in theory, but I see two significant issues with how you describe it.

First, the process isn't as simple as "charities are created; the ones proven effective easily and regularly get money; the ineffective ones run out of money and disappear". That resembles the perfect competition model in economics: something handy to reason about the world, but that simplifies reality to the point of hiding many complexities. In reality, many ineffective charities survive for decades, while promising ones sometimes struggle to fin... (read more)

Thanks, Lizka!

In an ideal world, we'd be all over these niches ourselves! We're grateful that our articles are well-received, but we know their format (heavy on text and charts) might deter some people.

Videos are a big one. Kurzgesagt and Vox are the ones that come closest in terms of style and quality. (In my dream world, each article we'd publish would have its own Kurzgesagt-style video.) This niche could comfortably accommodate several players if they're ready to meet the high production quality threshold needed.

Regarding books, I'm not so sure about a... (read more)

Within the OWID team, there's a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism about forecasting. Many of us see it as a promising tool for a more evidence-based understanding of the world, while others express reservations. Much of this skepticism stems from the fact that, often, forecasts lack clear justifications. While the raw forecast is presented, many sites and projects fail to thoroughly explain the reasoning behind these projections. To make forecasting more valuable and accessible, we believe this aspect needs significant improvement.

For now, we're not plannin... (read more)

Hi Lizka – thank you for your thoughtful question!

Our direct engagement with policymakers is somewhat limited, but we do have occasional opportunities to present our work to large international organizations like the UN and WHO. And we know from testimonies and occasional public reports that OWID is also considered very helpful by policymakers at the national level. We know that policymakers, or their aides, value the clarity and conciseness of our work. OWID's approach allows them to comprehend the broader picture quickly, which we believe is mainly due t... (read more)

Hey James – great question, thanks!

100% of the content we publish is planned, decided, and created by our team, without direct input from funders or donors.

Generally, we work hard to convince funders to give us unrestricted grants. But some grants we receive are restricted, which means they are tied to a list of deliverables. When we've accepted restricted grants:

• They've only ever been tied to general, non-specific outputs such as "expanding our work on COVID-19", "producing a Global Health Explorer", "maintaining the content in our SDG Tracker", or "impro

Better data publishing practices are probably the number 1 answer. My team spends heaps of time importing data that is hard to access and process, poorly documented, or contains obvious mistakes. This applies to virtually every type of data publisher, whether government, big international organizations, NGOs, companies, research teams…

Better data harmonization between governments would also be tremendously helpful. Across many topics, national agencies tend to record and analyze things differently, making the resulting figures hard to compare. Organization... (read more)

Hey Ollie – thanks for the question!

I've engaged with a few activist and political communities in the past, primarily around environmental issues and Green politics. My overall take is that I would find it hard today to be part of these communities compared to the ones that interest me today. From what I remember, epistemic practices tended to be very bad, with lots of motivated reasoning, cherry-picking, various biases, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean the people I met were wrong, but how they made up their minds about issues seems very flawed in ret... (read more)

Thanks for the question, Kei!

When choosing the topics we would ideally cover on OWID, we aim to be quite broad in our approach. Our tagline is that we publish "research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems" and voluntarily apply a broad definition of the "world's largest problems". We don't try to follow a specific framework or list of questions (compared to how 80,000 Hours defines the highest-priority problems).

But of course, even though we wish we could cover hundreds of important topics, we only have limited resources and must... (read more)

Hi nalthaus, thanks for the question! Calculating a population-weighted global average for Self-reported life satisfaction is on our backlog of issues, so this will be tackled at some point! We'll most likely add continental averages as well.

Your second suggestion touches on a larger issue that we're often considering: how to give more freedom to users to (dis)aggregate data in a way that we don't want to pre-generate ourselves. "Life satisfaction across Scandinavian countries" is a great example of such a request. We have yet to come up with the right ide... (read more)

Thanks for the question, Angelina!

The article on longtermism and our content on AI were published in 2022. They've had great success (6-figure page views in both cases). I was particularly happy that we had no negative reaction to either topic, given that both could have seemed outside of our usual coverage for traditional OWID readers.

On longtermism, the reception was very positive. Max Roser's hourglass chart had a Wait-but-Why vibe that made it particularly popular on social media. My (unsubstantiated) impression is that many people remembered that part... (read more)

Thanks for the question, Vasco!

Animal welfare is an important topic that we want to cover better on OWID. The first step will be to publish more and better content on it. We plan to make significant steps toward this over the summer (stay tuned!).

However, this new content will likely focus on factory farming and related questions. I see the question of wild animal welfare as one on the edge of research, even by EA standards. In other words, more and more people are interested in it, but there's no consensus that it constitutes one of the world's largest pr... (read more)

Thanks for the question!

It depends significantly on how we measure impact, which has always been tricky. As Lizka guessed below, there are multiple ways we can do this, as our impact can consist of influencing the general public (for some of our most viral pieces), "influencers" (journalists, book writers, or anyone with a significant social media presence), teachers, policymakers, etc. These can be very different paths to impact.

Some are pretty easy to measure (the general public can be roughly measured by raw pageviews). In contrast, others are much hard... (read more)

Great question, thank you! :)
Did you mean to ask it as part of the AMA?
If so, could you please repost it as a comment there? It’s easier for coordination.

I'm not surprised that you would strongly disagree with this. Sorry if this is a bit blunt, but given that you very recently launched a public forecast on the love life of a community member, without their permission, to the dismay of many people on Twitter, I wouldn't think you have a particularly calibrated frame of reference as to when we should hold off on bets.

Where did I say anything about "giving up betting as an epistemic practice"? My post specifically listed why I know it's good epistemic practice.

All I said was that during a crisis that involves the potential loss of money of 100,000 people, constantly suggesting 4-digit bets on public online spaces as soon as two people have the slightest disagreement may not be the most empathetic thing to do.

Congrats guys – it's great to see this productive collaboration become a full-fledged organization!

Strong-upvoting this. The way you could decide to invest money into expanding your social media reach would be to properly sponsor your account through ads on IG/Tw/FB. These platforms allow for precise targeting based on demographics and interests – and given the specific scope of HIA, I imagine that designing good targets would be easy enough.

My (unverified) suspicion is that these people wanted to pick something that they considered to be a specific diet but that isn't related to meat-eating and therefore wasn't listed, e.g. 'gluten-free'. That could also explain the correlation with age if younger people tend to adopt these 'alternative' diets in a higher proportion.

Thanks for the feedback Jakub! I've added a clearer mention of the self-reporting aspect in the article & charts.

Thanks for the feedback! I've edited the title.

I love this idea! I've also been thinking a lot about the lack of quick-response capabilities within EA during the pandemic, so I think it could be a very impactful project. Having coordinated Our World in Data's work on COVID for the last two years, I'd be very happy to be in touch and contribute to anything data-science-related once you start to plan things.

The current implementation doesn't include them. I guess it would be possible to do it, but they're quite larger than Grapher charts in terms of interface, so I'm not sure we would manage to find a user-friendly way to make them fit within the width of a forum post.

We also did this for EA France a few days before EAGx Oxford (on Tuesday), and it was indeed very helpful. We answered many questions that people had about 1o1, explained how to use Swapcard (some people hadn't quite realized how important it would be during the conference), the 'etiquette' for contacting people on the app, important physical & mental health tips, etc.

I'd also suggest creating a WhatsApp or Messenger group. It's very useful for practical coordination before (hotels, admin stuff, COVID restrictions, etc.) and during the event, and gives first-timers the feeling of going to the conference as part of a larger group.

Not much yet, but on (5) we now have this world map: Number of biosafety level 4 facilities

We now have a first chart based on their pre-print here: Estimated computation used in large training runs of AI systems

Update: we now have a couple of charts on outer space objects

• Cumulative number of objects launched into outer space (line, bar, map)
• Yearly number of objects launched into outer space (line, bar)

Glad to hear that :)

Thank you! Just FYI, on (6) we have:

• Cost of sequencing a full human genome
• Number of human genome base pairs sequenced per US$
• Cost per Megabase (Mb) of human genome DNA sequencing