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 30
Comments1811
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 :).
This is incredible, the best Global Health vid I've seen in ages so stoked! I know a vid is good when I feel comfortable imediately recommending it to non-EA friends.
I'm surprised it has so few hits, is there any marketing for this? Also is there a reason it isn't on an official GWWC channel rather than a personal one?
I see you as a founder regardless @huw. It's a weird word but it's well accepted in the social enterprise works at least that people who come in 2-3 years down the line and creatively grow an org are founders. I suppose it's just semantics though.
I've been mulling over this quote from Naomi Klein over the last couple of days. I think its a strong summary of one of the best ethical arguments against the top AI labs.
My argument against this might be that the actual purpose of commercial application is to improve human wellbeing and prosperity overall, not to eliminate jobs. Jobs may or may not be eliminated, but either option could be fine if the prosperity is shared (at least somewhat) throughout humanity.
Then there are orgs like Mechanize, which are explicitly trying to eliminate jobs...
Besides that on the "theft" of creativity front, I think this is broadly true but I'm not sure what can be done at this point. To generalise (even with coding) AI feeds of the best that humanity has to offer then produces worse-than-the-best output much faster, at a fraction of the cost. Without the best of human IP, AI wouldn't be very good. Newer models may be starting to be better than the best humans in niche areas, but this isn't the norm.
I talk a lot about how AI helps us provide healthcare to some of the poorest people, but I still don't have the greatest response to these kind of criticisms from many of my friends. I wonder how others respond to people when they bring arguments like this?
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!