NickLaing
Bio
Participation1
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.
How I can help others
Understanding the NGO industrial complex, and how aid really works (or doesn't) in Northern Uganda
Global health knowledge
Posts 27
Comments1658
Thanks @mal_graham🔸 this is super helpful and makes more sense now. I think it would make your argument far more complete if you put something like your third and fourth paragraphs here in your main article.
And no I'm personally not worried about interventions being ecologically inert.
As a side note its interesting that you aren't putting much effort into making interventions happen yet - my loose advice would be to get started trying some things. I get that you're trying to build a field, but to have real-world proof of this tractability it might be better to try something sooner rather than later? Otherwise it will remain theory. I'm not too fussed about arguing whether an intervention will be difficult or not - in general I think we are likely to underestimate how difficult an intervention might be.
Show me a couple of relatively easy wins (even small-ish ones) an I'll be right on board :).
If they think its overhyped that's OK, they can just join us over here helping boring-old-right-now people in GHD, we can care about different things ;).
Love this @Molly Archer-Zeff , the kind of lowish effort highish impact comment which reassures people that the Humane League is on it (which I don't doubt). Nice one.
Thanks @SiobhanBall I've definitely learned a bunch too from the other perspectie. Was talking to a French Canadian today and he was telling me how he feels like he can now put a whole bunch of bullet points and ideas down, then AI can draft something that he knows is correct English. After that he modifies it to make sure it is actually making his arguments (because it often adds slightly different arguments) and to add some of his own voice. Makes a lot of sent.
He used to be too nervous because of English being his second language, but AI helped him overcome some of that fear.
Hey there yes that's a great review. I'm not sure how relevant to this development stuff it is though, because
- It only accepts really high quality observational studies
- it's focuses on human health. We're reasonably good at controlling for confounders with humans, but we have very little clue how to do that with development interventions.
I would love a similar review for development studies but I doubt there would be enough good quality research to do a similar comparison
Wow around 100 million each for Europe and USA is crazy low - really illustrates how important EA money is to this cause. In the global health world this amount could have been spent on 3 fairly useless USAID projects (but no more). 3 GiveWell orgs spend 100million+ each. Crazy levels of success on these small budgets for the last 10 years as well.
This is a big part of why I (and many other global health folks) voted for marginal dollars going to animal welfare, even though I'm hugely skeptical about animal sentience and welfare ranges.
Yeah to be clear i definitely don't think it can have anywhere near the mass public appeal hor positive effect as something like the civil rights movement. But I think he's already been partially proved right by the media response in the last week
My LinkedIn is blowing up right now with anti Open AI/pro Anthropic stuff
From the text itself, I think that i find compelling is
- Public is already unhappy with MAGA and US military actions right now
- Chat GPT are potentially in a slightly dangerous, overleveraged financial situation
- 700,000 people already signed up is a pretty impressive signal for a start
The positive media storm for Anthropic is bigger than I thought it would be.
Almost every major news network has featured them and almost all of it puts a halo on Amodei (which feels a bit icky but hey).
And every 4th post on my linkedin is along the lines of
"Claude hits no. 1 on App store"
"the idea that no big tech has morals is dead,"
"my 3 year love affair with GPT Is over"
"I made the switch to Claude and I'll never look back"
As much as refusing the govt. contact might delay their IPO and give their valuation a temporary hit, they could hardly have hoped for a better PR flood. Every new user that switches more only helps them but hurts their biggest competitor. It's also good timing for them because right now their product is probably better than Open AI's which wasn't the case a year ago and might not be the case 6 months from now.
It's still unclear whether this will be a good business decision as well as a "moral" one but I suspect it will.
Thanks for the update, and the reasons for the name change make s lot of sense
Instinctively i don't love the new name. The word "coefficient" sounds mathsy/nerdy/complicated, while most people don't know what the word coefficient actually means. The reasoning behind the name does resonate through and i can understand the appeal.
But my instincts are probably wrong though if you've been working with an agency and the team likes it too.
All the best for the future Coefficient Giving!