NickLaing
Bio
Participation1
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.
How I can help others
Understanding the NGO industrial complex, and how aid really works (or doesn't) in Northern Uganda
Global health knowledge
Posts 29
Comments1720
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 :).
I'm not sure either of those are great analogies. I would say both are not for different reasons.
Democracy only works properly if most people vote. Everyone who votes plays a role in maintaining the system and the norm of all people having real political power, even if their individual vote didn't change the result. I don't buy the argument which thinks just about Democracy through the effect of the marginal vote.
As a cancer researcher your have a decent chance of making an actual breakthrough, especially if working at a leading company or institution. Every year there are multiple meaningful breakthroughs which actually reduce cancer DALY burden. It's hardly like AI safety where is both harder to make a difference and harder to know if you have...
I agree that it shouldn't be taboo to argue this, but I also think the idea that insects have negative lives is possibly more dangerous because of the potential second order effects if it is acted on. Logical actions if insects have net negative lives could be
- Wiping out of natural environments
- Reducing biodiversity
If we were fortunate enough that most insects had net positive lives while being sentient, the steps to improve the overall situation for insects might not be as drastic?
This is hard to be confident on either way though
I think you ran it fine, I think it was just less interesting than other debate topics as there's just so much uncertainty and so many assumptions made to make progress. It feels more like a topic which one can muse on, rather than a meaningful debate where you can make strong arguments and counterarguments. I read as couple of the articles and found them interesting, but couldn't really strongly agree or disagree because any article about AI and animals will be based on tenuous assumptions.
That 2 topics were excluded after a vote was also a bit of a downbuzz for me at least. Just didn't feel like exactly what the community here was keen to get stuck into at that time.
If you are going to run a poll, I think it's best to run with the top polled topic. Otherwise perhaps just canvas ideas and decide the topics as a forum team
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!