John Salter's Quick takes

I've never been able to find a heuristic for this exactly. We have made many decisions which we don't love to call sacrifice, in fact many of them brought deep satisfaction and connection. These were made to live in better solidarity and community with those around us. For example for us this involved cooking on a charcoal stove, not having running water inside and eating a lot of local food which is often great but I don't always love.

Almost all of these were made at the cost of efficiency in our work to some extent. Life without a gas stove and running water just takes longer and is a bit more tiring. Not nearly as big a deal as most people would think tho...

The closest we had to a "heuristic" was asking ourselvesevery 6 months, is this lifestyle...

1) Satisfying to me
2) Appropriate lifestyle that matched our community around us. We've always chosen to live among less well-off communities because I think it grounds our work in reality, keeps it real and helps us learn what actually makes people tick. (which I personally think is often critical to designing effective GHD interventions)
3) Allowing me to do my work well

As OneDay Health and my Wife's work grew, I needed more time. No. 3 started to take precedence. We became more "bougie". A water tap outside, more eating out (still local food). Now after having a kid we have a gas stove. It doesn't feel great to move further away from our community lifestyle, but I think its worth it for the impact - as long as we don't feel too disconnected from those around us.

I opened your profile and website and couldn't tell what this referred to? I'm intrigued, even if it's no longer accepting sign ups! 

Are the services available to founders (or other EAs that might be interested) for a fee?

This is a really interesting idea and would obviously need a relatively uncorrupt country that is on board with the project. 

To some extent this kind of thing already happens, with aid organisations focusing their funding on countries which use it well. Rwanda is an interesting example of this over the last 20 years as they have attracted huge foreign funding after their dictator basically fixed low level corruption and organized the country surprisingly well. This has led to dis proportionate improvements in healthcare and education compared with surrounding countries, although economically the jury is still out.

The big problem in my eyes then is how do you know it's your interventions baking the difference, rather than just really good governance - very hard to tease apart.

Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.

So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.

My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.

Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.

Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.

Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.

Natural Readers has changed my life over the last 2 years. 

Claude is amazing.

ChatGPT-4 and Claude. I use them for help drafting administrative paperwork like grants and they massively help with pre-existing executive functioning issues.

I find them most helpful for giving me ideas or a template I can work with, rather than just using their vanilla output.

I've strongly had this experience. I have written 5 NYT bestsellers a cold email, and 3 replied. I get good rates with C-levels and I get the poorest rates at lower levels. 

But it strongly does depend on your story or organisation in my experience. Your org has a strong story so it warrants a reply. But I did a lot of marketing and some PR for dime in a dozen companies and if you lack a strong story, you can expect reply rates of senior people to be close to zero. 

Yes, though use this power wisely. I think it's good to imagine how much you'd pay to talk to said person and scale my effort as the number gets bigger. 

If I waste this person's time, they may become less willing to be open and hence I'll have damaged the commons. 

Hi John - can you email me? [email protected]

Bit the bullet and paid them $200. So far, it's astonishingly good. If you're in the UK/EU, you can get a refund no questions asked within 14 days so if you're on the fence I'd definitely suggest giving it a go