All of egastfriend's Comments + Replies

Any update on how the project is going?

Sorry I am just seeing this comment now, 4 years after you posted it!
In the full version of the report ( http://www.harvardea.org/s/Final-Presentation-PAF-LJAF-Report-on-Opioid-Epidemic-clean.pdf ), we point out that the evidence for these interventions is shoddy.
However, even if they are only providing placebo effect, they can still have a great positive value in substituting for opioids as a treatment for chronic pain. Opioids also don't work, but they cause much more damage than chiropractic or acupuncture could ever do.

I love it!

Two suggestions:

1. Some books are more important than others. E.g., Thinking Fast and Slow is much more foundational to the EA mindset than the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn (IMHO but hopefully that's not very controversial). I think the visualization would benefit from showing some of the books as larger and others as smaller.
2. It would be cool if you could mouseover/click on books to get more info about them. Some of the titles are too small to read, even when zoomed in.

Thanks for doing this!

For #6, what is your source that temperature increases are proportional to log(CO2 ppm)? This paper indicates that it's a simple proportional relationship, no log: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/5/055006#erlaa23b8f1

Medical marijuana fell outside the scope of our consulting project, but I think the evidence is weak for medical marijuana as a promising intervention: "When researchers extended their analysis through 2013, they found that the association between having any medical marijuana law and lower rates of opioid deaths completely disappeared. Moreover, the association between states with medical marijuana dispensaries and opioid mortality fell substantially as well." https://www.rand.org/news/press/2018/02/06.html

It's definitely an interesting/intriguing idea, but it also carries risks of increasing some of the harms associated with marijuana use. Curious to see more evidence come out about it.

Hi, I'm the Founder of the Philanthropy Advisory Fellowship. We've published a bunch of our reports on our website: http://harvardea.org/philanthropy-advisory-fellowship/
We often post them in the EA forum as well. Sorry it was hard to find.

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for writing up this review of Mental Health as an EA cause area! As you know this is an issue near and dear to my heart. You've done a great job summarizing many of the most interesting and important issues in this space.

I wanted to point out a few areas where I think this report could be improved:

DALY count: This article provides good reasons why mental health really repferents 13% rather than 7% of global DALY burden: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26851330

Trace Lithium: I think it is important to distinguish between "Lithiu... (read more)

Great analysis! Very fair and balanced.

As you point out, increasing the prescriptions of opioids in the US lead to an enormous disaster -- drug overdoses now kill more Americans each year than car crashes. The regulatory environment in the US isn't great, but it's decades ahead of what most developing countries have. The fact that the US still hasn't figured out a sensible policy to managing prescription opioids makes me very skeptical that developing countries could pull it off safely.

E.g., look at these two articles. This one points out that there are al... (read more)

Re: DALY's for physical vs. mental health, in our full report we cite Vigo 2016 ( http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00505-2/abstract ) which lays out a strong argument for using a 2x adjustment for mental health DALY's. That's the approach we take in the paper.

Re: Propranolol, I spoke with Dr. Alain Brunet at McGill University, who conducted some of the studies you're referring to and was very helpful in explaining the science behind it and the potential.

I agree that helplines could have a very high impact. It's not mentioned in the paper, but we did look into it -- we weren't able to find an organization that we had enough confidence in to recommend. Could be an interesting challenge for an EA social entrepreneur or philanthropist to take on, though!

Thanks! We only presented this report to Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation about a month ago, but we do plan to do a long-term follow-up to see if/how they act on our recommendations. The foundation has substantial (>$100M) resources at its disposal.

As for the behavior change aspect, that's definitely a problem. I recommend GiveWell's report on Development Media International, which is one of the leading organizations working on the behavior-change aspect of this problem: http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/DMI So far, the evidence is mi... (read more)

This is definitely something I'm interested in learning more about, and haven't seen a thorough analysis from an EA perspective anywhere. I respect both Bjorn Lomborg and Martin Rees on this subject, even though they have opposing views. Bjorn Lomborg thinks that cost-benefit analysis shows reducing carbon emissions to be a bad investment compared to global health spending, and that we should instead just try to accept climate change and adapt to it. Martin Rees thinks Bjorn Lomborg is using the wrong discount rate in his calculations, and that the tail risk of catastrophic climate change alone makes its prevention a worthwhile investment. I haven't dug any further than that yet.

We could definitely use more human-to-human connection in the EA community!

I think some of the posts here assume that people who are new to EA will reach out to local EA groups or ask to be connected to people. I think that most people are kind of shy.

It's better if we can create a system that pulls people in, rather than waiting for them to reach out. 80,000 Hours used to have this kind of setup -- you reached out for career advice, and then we would try to get you on Skype to connect socially and introduce you to other EA’s (even if they didn't have ... (read more)

As everyone who has posted so far has mentioned Bill's article in the Harvard Law Record, I just wanted to respond in this one comment.

His article is definitely fiery, and probably overstates the case for earning-to-give. When Bill and I gave a presentation at the law school last semester, we included advice on how public interest/government lawyers can maximize impact by choosing high-priority causes and gaining leverage by changing policy.

There are a few comments on his article that were positive. I think people who already wanted to go into BigLaw w... (read more)

Thanks Zack. The grad student group I co-founded, Harvard University Effective Altruism, is going well. We have a leadership team in place for next year that covers the Law School, Business School, School of Public Health, and School of Arts & Sciences. Our events with Cass Sunstein and Derek Parfit each drew over 100 people.

Interestingly, my article did generate some interest outside of HBS, as a number of people emailed me about it, but it didn't provoke any discussion within HBS. I think it's because my article wasn't controversial enough; if I had to do it again, I would have pushed harder.

This sounds awesome! Is the idea that policy comments would get regulators to: consider a new policy they weren't previously considering; change their mind about a proposed policy; help back them up politically for something they already want to do; or a combination of these? I'm not sure which type of impact policy comments are best for.