HH

Henry Howard🔸

1049 karmaJoined Melbourne VIC, Australia
henryach.com

Bio

Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.

Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever

Comments
143

I can’t see where you’ve mentioned the case numbers, which seem to be quite low.

Wikipedia says:

2008, more than 50 cases/year were reported from only 4 countries: Turkey, Iran, Russia and Uzbekistan

From 1995 to 2013, 228 cases of CCHF were reported in the Republic of Kosovo, with a case-fatality rate of 25.5%.[24]

Between 2002–2008 the Ministry of Health of Turkey reported 3,128 CCHF cases, with a 5% death rate

Understanding that there are a few hundred rather than thousand or million cases of the disease around the world annually is important context because it makes it more difficult to fight cost-effectively

Haven’t heard of this one before though, thank you

A big fear that drives concern about euthanasia is that we’ll end up in a world where people who don’t really want to die will feel pressured to kill themselves because they don’t want to be a burden on the health system or their loved ones.

Moral arguments like this one are the exact sort of thing that’s stopping euthanasia from being accessible in the cases where it would be clearly good (e.g. end stage terminal cancer causing severe pain)

Disappointing

Ambitious Impact, which runs Charity Entrepreneurship, also runs Founding To Give, which is very much focused on earning to give.

The post suggests that 4 person-years of “careful analysis” will find “promising funding opportunities in this space”.

Development economics does that careful analysis already, why would we make breakthroughs reinventing it?

Development Economics
One of the forum's highest rated posts is about how we should simply improve  economic growth in poor  countries

I believe that Seva and the Fred Hollows Foundation (Both in The Life You Can Save's top charities list) both do distribution of eyeglasses.

On this page Fred Hollows says they distributed 154,476 pairs of glasses in 2023: https://www.hollows.org/what-we-do/our-impact/

Seva distributed 59,005 pairs of glasses in 2023 according to their annual report. The first page of the report is a picture of a 10 year-old who got a new pair of glasses!: https://www.seva.org/site/DocServer/Seva_annual_report_2023.pdf 

That assumes that “further research” will reduce these confidence intervals significantly, which I am skeptical of.

You could fund 1000 PostDocs for 1000 years each to study “why is there something rather than nothing” or “is one person’s perception of blue the same as another’s” and it’s no given that you’ll get closer to an answer.

You can’t bake-in something as unpredictable as how movements and counter-movements evolve and interact.

We need to be more open to uncertainty and consider unexpected ways in which our best laid plans may go astray. Animal Welfare is rife with these uncertainties.

This seems very ungenerous to the global health space:

  • Malaria nets are based on RCTs. Here's a Cochrane review of 22 RCTs:
  • Against Malaria Foundation does quite intensive monitoring of uptake (not perfect, but you're implying none)
  • New Incentives is based on an RCT and also monitors many metrics
  • Malaria consortium is also based on RCTs and does monitoring
  • Seva and Fred Hollows track and publish their cataract surgery numbers
  • Innovations for Poverty Action's main purpose is to trial interventions and measure them

studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context

That is how RCTs work. You can't have a separate RCT for every situation unfortunately.

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