All of salonium's Comments + Replies

Yeah, these are great!

As head of the WHO for a day, what is the first concrete action you would take?

I feel like it would be a cop out to say that my first concrete action would be to spend a lot of time working out what's actually happening on the inside at different levels and how the teams are working together.

But maybe one idea would be to have some independent organisation evaluate some of the WHO's recent & historical programs — e.g. How did they manage to eradicate smallpox? Why did their other eradication programs fail? and similarly for t... (read more)

To me, the big thing that feels missing is a clear sense of what, concretely, individuals can do about global health and foreign aid. There’s so much (often depressing) news right now, and I think journalism tends to cover global health and foreign aid as distant problems that feel hard to relate to. From my experience, what motivates people is the sense of connection: knowing that their actions can actually make a real difference to people. I think it helps to frame this more as a shared societal problem — things that anyone could face if they were in tha... (read more)

Thanks for the question!

In a way, it's quite to really understand and imagine - my life would probably be very different if that was the case, and I doubt that I'd have the same education, qualifications, and sometimes also skills if that was the case. 

But I'd probably still be interested in something quantitative - maybe I'd apply to work at Data For India (which feels like a very close alternative to OWID), or try to work as an economist, data journalist or researcher in some way.

Maybe the most helpful thing to do, though, would be to explain some o... (read more)

I've often thought that innovation and policy were underrated.

With innovation I'm often thinking: rather than choosing from existing tools that are already cost-effective, can we make new tools that are cheaper, more effective, or easier to scale up? And if that's the case, we should be investing more in them.

With global health policy as well, market-shaping, regulation, and other incentives often seem like they can make a much larger impact than traditional EA targets. I think about this less often these days though, after knowing more EAs. Maybe I just didn't know people who were already thinking about these issues? Or they've shifted focus?

Answering Seb's question: 'Is AI for science underrated or overrated?'

Can I cheat by saying both?

Say we’re thinking about AI and protein structure prediction for drug discovery, for example. I’m quite excited about what that could make possible - it could help narrow down potential drug targets, improve our understanding of protein structure and function, and also give us a better sense of which drugs might fit particular protein structures. Protein design is also really exciting, including improving proteins or enzymes that are used as drugs or in industr... (read more)

Great question! I think there are two ways to answer this — one is whether we can predict completed cohort fertility rates in advance, and the other is whether we should rely on other metrics instead.

On predicting cohort fertility rates:

To some degree, I think we can. One way is with tempo-adjusted fertility rates, where you look at the average age of mothers giving birth in a given year and how that has changed over time, then adjust the total fertility rates accordingly. I’m slightly skeptical of this though, because the average age isn’t always that inf... (read more)

I think the biggest ones are being able to put studies into context and convey accurately how much confidence people should have in them. 

I often see people hype up early-stage drug candidates as breakthroughs without conveying that they'll go through much more testing to confirm their efficacy & safety. 

I think that's a shame because it gives people a misleading picture of what's actually likely to work, might lead to disappointment later on & pessimism in science more broadly, and also means hearing about the wrong things - there often ... (read more)

Great question!

There are currently three or four areas I'm really looking out for at the moment:

1. The Demographic and Health Surveys, which were collecting various types of data from many lower- and middle-income countries on population sizes, maternal and child health, urban living, income, water & sanitation, etc. and were terminated earlier this year. It costs around $40M per year. I think that's modest for such a large program, but also because it feeds into a very wide range of datasets used by researchers on many topics. Some of the data it collect

Nice question!

Oh I started responding to this with a list of three but then re-read the question and you only asked for one. But here are two of my favourites:

• What was the Golden Age of Antibiotics, and how can we spark a new one? - I really enjoyed doing the data visualizations for this one, and learning about the history of some of the breakthroughs in antibiotic drug development.
• Trachoma: how a common cause of blindness can be prevented worldwide - I knew very little about trachoma before working on this piece. I was very surprised by how much progress

Thanks so much!

Great questions. Just for context, the Demographic and Health Surveys were primarily funded by USAID but that funding was terminated by the Trump administration in February. It involved surveys roughly every five years per country, for over 90 low- and middle-income countries worldwide since it started in 1985.

I think there are two parts to this: one is about the surveys that had started and were meant to be completed this year or next (that was in ~23 countries) and the other is about the longer-term future of the program.

I'm hopeful that t... (read more)

Very tough question... perhaps the toughest one here. Pistachio, honeycomb, and dulce de leche are probably my favourites, but maybe there are other exotic flavours out there I haven't tried yet. (I did try 'beer flavoured gelato' once and it was terrible.)

Re: Bad Data Takes's question:

This takes me back! I guess I've always enjoyed writing and explaining things I was learning about, but I started writing freelance pieces during my masters degree and PhD, including writing about the Covid response in the UK. 

Roughly then, Sam Bowman and I had the idea to start a magazine together for long-form writing on science and economics, which turned into Works in Progress magazine. 

For one of our early issues, I reached out to Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data to ask if she was interested in writing a piec... (read more)

I think that's a fair point, but I had already found several other reasons to pledge persuasive and this tipped the case over the edge.

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)