All of salonium's Comments + Replies

Update – I've written an article for Vox to give more context and numbers on the issue:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24036223/pepfar-aids-hiv-africa-global-health-george-w-bush-republicans-congress

Thank you, that's really helpful – will share it with friends since I'm not American. I wonder if this is something we could coordinate on as a community, with people from different states, if that could be more impactful?

I'm also unsure about how much substance there is to it, but what I've read so far agrees with your impression. From this Foreign Policy article last month:

In a statement, Rep. Chris Smith, chair of the House global health subcommittee, cited a letter signed by 131 African religious leaders and lawmakers in countries with some of the harshest laws around abortion including Nigeria and Uganda. Quoting the letter, he urged that PEPFAR “not cross over into promoting divisive ideas and practices that are not consistent with those of Africa.”

Yet there is no con

Great post!

You gave lots of good examples of low-cost high-impact interventions like water chlorination, vaccines and lead removal. I agree that there are far more examples like that, particularly in health & medicine, which we already know about but where the scale of the benefits is underestimated. Water chlorination is a particularly good example because it's one where the large benefits were expected by experts but were surprising to others.

And thank you for linking to my article on RCTs, the arguments you made above were actually a big part of the reason that I wrote that!

I think my phrasing might have been unclear earlier – I'm Nick's colleague at Works in Progress, but not on the blog prize and don't have any involvement there.

1. I think that blogs fill a different purpose to many other formats you mention, but are also more feasible than writing long-form: for people who have other commitments, for writing short commentaries, for responding to topical events or stories, for publishing independent parts of a series in a way that makes each part more shareable. I'm sure you can think of many examples of each of these. I th... (read more)

This is an interesting critique! I think it misses a lot, though, so would like to push back on it. 
Full disclosure/conflict of interest – I'm one of Nick's colleagues – we're both editors at Works in Progress.

1) Blogs are short content. – I think a lot of your critiques here (that they become outdated quickly, don't provide much long-term value, fall prey to replication crises) actually apply to all forms of published, static content – newspapers, tweet threads, newsletters, books, etc. We've all heard of books and news content that have aged badly –... (read more)

Hey Stephen, thanks very much!

I completely agree with you on the differences between clinical RCTs and development/public policy RCTs. 

Part of the reason for that is that it was originally meant to be a longer piece, with some policy RCT examples, how clustering works, etc. but it was already fairly long, and those were harder to explain concisely. And secondly simply because I have a background in health/medicine, which meant it was easy to draw examples from the field.

Hopefully I signposted this a little by saying that the procedures I mention are t... (read more)

Oh, I remember reading this paper now! It's great, thanks for sharing.

And thank you very much :) I will be here more often for sure.

Thank you very much! 

Is there a paper by him you would recommend reading on the topic? I've seen this one, which I agree with in parts – with good theory and evidence from other research on which policies work, there's less need for RCTs, but I think there's a role for both to answer different questions.

Great post! I thought this was a very clear and useful summary of the literature, and all the links and references are very helpful.

You mention the difficulties in comparing happiness between countries towards the end, do you have a view on how big of a problem these issues are for measuring happiness across the lifespan? Or views on the age-happiness curve more generally?

Also, in case you hadn't seen it already, I found this post by Pew Research Centre a very useful summary of various problems in questionnaire design (some of which you mention, e.g. acquiscence bias), and how they try to get around them.

If you do find it, I'd be interested to read that. 

I would guess that  it's difficult for people to intuitively understand precisely why randomization is so useful, although other aspects of RCTs are probably easier to grasp – particularly, the experimental part of giving treatment A to one group and treatment B to another group and following up their outcomes. But overall I think I would agree with you; people need less understanding of confounders and selection bias to read an RCT than they'd need to read an observational study.

Hey Marius, thank you!

I wish I could answer this better, but I don't know enough to have a good answer to how to scale policy RCTs, especially since they're quite different from clinical RCTs (they often can't administer the treatment in a standardised way, there's usually no way to blind participants to what they're receiving, they usually don't track/measure participants as regularly, etc.) Though those are also factors that make them messier in larger projects. 

I've read this blog post by Michael Clemens, which I found was a useful summary of two b... (read more)