All of these sound super exciting. Small note- the website for First Embrace is pretty scrappy-feeling and there's a reasonable number of spelling/grammar issues which, were I not already familiar with AIM's work, would (?unfairly) make me less confident in the charity itself.

Examples:

• "Mother's act as their baby's incubator"
• "KMC saves babies lives and then gives them the a head start on development."
• "We want to help as many people as we can, as much as possible, who wouldn't otherwise have been helped without or work."
• "We're  flexible to the best way of making impact as possible."
• "where he was also learned about research design learned about policy translation"

I appreciate that I might be unusually sensitive to this kind of thing but seems like an easy win to me :) excited to see more of your work!

Second this- as a PGY3 the path from here to there is not super clear! And lots of questions about at what point we become useful to anyone. 

It's not unique to EA -- although EA does tend to be quite elitist (which is reasonable, given that many of its core insights and values require a very high level of intelligence and openness to understand.)

Which parts of EA would you say require "a very high level of intelligence...to understand"? :)

I think this is a lovely framing and one I'm going to apply more widely, both to myself and other people. I think the EA community, given our obvious difficulty productively deploying large numbers of talented people, ought to hold it in higher esteem also. Thanks, James.

Nick, this is one of the best posts I've ever read on the Forum. As you already know, I have huge respect for your commitment to living out your values and I can't wait to read more about your efforts.

Huge thanks to Jack for his work. As a volunteer and (briefly) contractor at OFTW, I always found him to be extremely thoughtful, transparent, and committed to the success and impact of the org. I think he's unusually good at, and committed to, seeking out and receiving critical feedback, more so than anyone I've met in other workplaces. On a more personal level I felt like he was interested in my wellbeing and development even as someone playing a very very minor role in the orgs work, and good fun to hang out with in the pub. 

+1 for this suggestion; it seems promising for someone with a good understanding of different journals' focus areas, submission requirements, and readership to suggest potential destinations to the authors of high-quality posts. Ideally, they would offer some coaching/assistance to the author to help them through the often arduous process of submitting.

I haven't done a BOTEC but it seems potentially good to have more EA thought published in more traditional venues, if only to lend some credibility to the non-published stuff.

Enormous +1 for FocusMate, which transformed my (limited) ability to do cognitive work and improved my mental health a bunch.

DOI: A doctor who sucks at research.

My answer to both of these questions is that doctoring has a fairly low ceiling in terms of how much impact one can have. 

The way that healthcare systems in the developed world work means that "making a diagnosis" is a fairly small part of the day-to-day work of what doctors do. Once a certain level of experience is reached, diagnostic ability probably plateaus; some doctors might be better than others, but even if they are the impact of that discrepancy probably isn't that great. I've never (disclaimer- not been practicing very long) seen a "House MD" type situation where someone is desperately unwell because no one can make a diagnosis until some rogue genius comes along. Ready access to sophisticated investigations and interventions mean that clinical reasoning in that traditional style is probably less important than it was in the past. 

You're quite right that the average biomedical researcher probably doesn't have a massive social impact; the difference is that it is possible to be 10x or 100x (1000x?) better at research than a colleague, in a way that it's not really possible to a 10x better doctor than the average. 

This leads to a much more "long tail" distribution of impact in biomedical research, where a few researchers have massive impact, some have significant impact, and many have little impact. Presumably, when effective altruists suggest that research is more impactful than clinical practice, they mean that a) you might end up in that small group of very impactful researchers and b) given that possibility, and the impact if you did, the "expected value" of becoming a researcher is higher than that of becoming a doctor. 

If you were asking to compare impact between the median researcher (minimal impact) and the median doctor, the impact might be much closer. 

+1 on Rory Stewart- as well as being the President of GD, he was the Secretary of State for International Development in the UK, has started and run his own charity (I believe with his wife) in the developing world, has mentioned EA previously, is known to be an enjoyable person to listen to (judging by the success of his podcast), and has just released a book- and therefore might be more likely than usual to engage with popular media.