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.
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!
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 :).
Still though 80,000 hours could have produced these videos directly from the 80,000 hours account without going AI only. It seems to me a strawman that you would have had to make these videos form a separate platform.
I have really felt this specifically with the Anthropic upcoming funding thing. Bunch of good articles, but mostly angling at a funding strategy which would benefit their org. This is fine but makes the posts seem a bit less valuable even if they are sincere.
Quality as always from @Mo Putera . Selling physical things in the physical not tech services traditionally has often produced the highest revenue as well - as the top 5 companies here do. Anthropic would be an outlier here as well.
I would be less surprised with Anthropic having the highest profits at some point (or at least margins) but would be surprised by highest revenue.
"don't feel like I have a sense of where the main GH&W and animal welfare conversations happen, so someone else would need to speak to that."
On the global health front, I'm pretty confident there is no central place to have really good, open logical conversations about global health stuff. There are just places where people write opinion articles on things like devex and Stanford social review which have no critical way of engaging. The center for global development which is a big thought leader had no interest in truth seeking when I pushed back on an inaccurate article there, it took a popular forum post here to force them to engage.
I really like the new magazine InDevelopment - but my attempt to engage the one time I saw genuinely bad content flopped pretty badly although the editor seemed to do their best. The author has all the power in any official published context even if they are blatantly wrong. Academics and thought leaders like to protect themselves behind firewalls and it's hard to break through that publicly at least. That's why you won't see them in the forum here much. I'm impressed when they do wade in. Academia is often more a status game then a search for truth.
An active, moderated forum is the best way to discuss things meaningfully, and I hope we can still do that here.
At least we're fire?
Miss your input bro great to hear from you again :)
This all seems completely reasonable, or even conservative. I'm surprised you've had serious resistance on this front and even need to justify this.
Personally I doubt the internet + phone cost will be as valuable as if you gave the money it cost. I think there's potential there, but here in Uganda at least I'm not convinced that subsistance farmers at least are able to leverage the connectivity in the ways they need to reach new markets, access education or healthcare info in helpful ways. But we shall see and its a great test to do.
This is an passionate reply which makes a lot of sense but to some extent attacks a strawman.
The post wasn't trying to argue over which cause was most important (although he did wade into that). It primarily argues that
1. We lost our best resource to introduce neutral people to EA. Like the OP there are very few people I can now refer to 80,000 hours
2. Diversity of thought about cause-priority is important in EA, and previously seemed to be part of the ethos of 80,000 hours.
Having a ranked list with AI safety clearly at the top is very different from deliberately encouraging everyone to work on AI risk
Again I think you guys are doing amazing work and love the energy of this reply, I just think it argues a different point from the OP. Of course 80,000 hours has every right to do what it wants and may well have made the right decision, despite the cost.