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 28
Comments1692
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 :).
Look I know I'm on the forum too much @Toby Tremlett🔹 , but I don't think its necessary to put "reading limit" controls on me....
Thanks Tom. I'm sure that's true in theory, but in practice RP is at the public forefront of the animal welfare work in the way that they aren't in other work. That's not to diminish other work, more to say that in the public sphere, the moral weights, cause prioritization work and surveys on community preferences point heavily in the direction of animal welfare.
So i might weakly disagree with your "in practice" claim. This might not be intentional or even bad if it's pushing animal welfare work more to the forefront.
Given how specific his predictions were, I think he did pretty darn well really for 2 years ago. Besides perhaps the important China race dynamic @huw bought up which was a central part of his thesis.
Yes Jim that's a good point.
1. Yes I'm in favour of wildlife conservation and have donated towards it. But I'm still extremely uncertain about wild animal welfare, so hardly confident enough to be "all-in" on it
2. I'm not at all sure whether human welfare dominates wild animal welfare. If I were to calculate based on my assumptions I imagine wild animal welfare would dominate. For reference though my welfare ranges might be orders of magnitude below RPs
Thanks that's helpful
From what Daniel said I thought his median was 2028 when he started to write it? But that's perhaps a bit nitpicky.
I think there might be a wider EA/Rationalist Comms issue here when communicating with the general public. Communicating projects like this isn't just about whether it "feels" fine - I think its important to think about how it might come accross and future implications. To the general public, this scenario even in 2030 still feels mega-soon and sci-fi. The problem is if we go past 2027 now, many people will say "those tech-bro idiots they're always wrong" and might miss the point o the thing
If anything I think here picking a more conservative, tail end of the timeline (2028-2030) would have been better, to keep it relevant for longer.
I agree not the biggest deal though.
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!