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 24
Comments1527
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 thought her main point was pretty good,.
"We should be extremely suspicious of people who decide the most important thing to do is what they would have the most fun doing anyway". (regarding AI safety).
I also am also suspicious about this, and suspect it to be a source of bias towards AI safety at the expense of other cause areas, regardless of the "true" importance of AI safety (FWIW I think its important),
Also I think she's broadly right that EA is spending millions hosting AI safety conferences. I would imagine EAG Bay Area is over 50% AI safety focused, and millions is spent on that.
I also think saying AI safety is "particularly well funded" is a subjective call and I wouldn't even say "basically untrue". Its not an unreasonable take given all the jobs in AI companies plus EA funded AI safety jobs out of labs. As a comparison I'm not sure what animal welfare spend vs. AI safety spend is but I imagine it wouldn't be an order of magnitude higher?
Despite all this, I disagreed with much of what she said, but I would put this in the top 30% of EA criticism I've seen (not hard given how much dross there is out there).
I think Athiests might be as diverse as religious folk (or more) in their underlying beliefs, but yes even those who do have altruism as a big part of those find it hard to back that up with action. Its pretty unusual for either athiests or religious folk to live out more than a little of what we claim to believe. The surrounding culture and norms usually beat out turning beliefs into action and integrating our minds with our lives. Unfortunately.
"It seems hard to find a better use of my money" hits hard for sure, and given this reality I would posit that most of us have big gaps in "irrational" spending - so I'm slow to judge others on this front.
You might me missing the positivity herd immunity effect on others, which is a factor even with the low 40%ish of the population that is immunised. But yes its debatable whether its worth it for someone your age to get the flu vaccines, which is why most governments don't fund it for young people.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(17)30004-X/fulltext
Year of AGI
First i have zero expertise here and am rubbish at prediction
I don't think LLMs will get there, but something else probably will after that but maybe not in the very near future. I have a strong (perhaps too strong) feeling that the complexities of the human brain in forward planning/ task stacking and truly creative thought might be further away than we think.
i also think there's likely to be a warning shot and then the kind of political backlash that could even slow things down 10 years or so.
I generally agree with this, and would like to reemphasize "I think this is a direction that it would be valuable for more people to move in, on the margin."
i think less people fall into the trap of trading inefficiency for frugality (although plenty do including me) than giving as much as they would actually like to if deeply considered.
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!