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
Comments1647
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 :).
I agree, for me personally (I don't speak for others) this is an important moment for how i perceive EA orgs like 80k. Even if earlier there may have been some decent arguments for working within OpenAI, I think now it's indefensible. I'm hoping for a bunch of public statements and clear position changes in the next week or so.
So sorry about all of this, and I'm impressed by your strength in sharing.
This line rang especially true to me.
"I’m no expert; however, if a prior policy update wasn’t sufficient, perhaps policies aren’t the problem."
policies are necessary but not sufficient. Fundamentally humans have to choose to do the right thing.
This was my first thought too. This line made my heart leap with joy!
"Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission"
I think you're being too cynical about activists. I would say the strongest incentive for activists is to actually achieve what they want in the world. Sure there are other competing incentives (pride, justification of action etc.) but many activists (maybe a minority but many) do actually really really want to win and optimise for that....
There are loads of clear cut examples where picking one thing to win has just straight up worked. For example my wife (unbiased example) led a big campaign here in Gulu district Northern Uganda to ban the smallest unit of alcohol - they sold spirits in small plastic bags for only 15 cents. The campaign started through a small group at a church, and they built a coalition of the local government, NGOs, churches, mosques etc. and then got the law through regionally and enforced it successfully. Now the smallest unit of alcohol costs twice as much here - getting the lowest unit price of alcohol higher is basically proven to reduce problematic alcohol use.
There's just no way that would have happened without the careful, targeted campaign over 3 years, the counterfactual is hard to deny given all the difficult steps needed to get the ban and no other district ever did it.
Then 2 years later the whole country banned the alcohol sachets. Now that one might have happened anyway, or their campaign might have contributed its hard to tell.
This is a smaller scale example but I know of a bunch of other similar ones where the causality is pretty clear.
https://movendi.ngo/blog/2017/04/05/problem-sachet-alcohol-gulu-uganda/
I've updated positively hugely on Anthropic after their response to this today
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/anthropic-pentagon-claude
Great questions and I'm not sure about these answers at all!
I think at the moment them having less users in general does more damage, than they benefit from the increased resources available. Fundamentally this is a race at the moment and a fight for investors and supremacy - On the free account doing even a little damage to that reputation/investability I would guess would do more than the small benefit from freeing up their compute...
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!