One thing which may be newly possible in the last few years is getting satellite imagery of the country and using AI to count houses. With appropriate methodology, this is far more likely to be accurate than relying on bureaucratic reporting and/or projections, although there are the obvious pitfalls and probably some non-obvious ones too in backing this out to population. I believe MSF used to do something like this for their deployment areas but I haven't heard of it attempted at a countrywide scale.

Yep... this stuff is simultaneously fairly obvious and surprisingly neglected. I have been looking at TB programs in various developing countries and the best policy proposals all include these components - although the details differ in some places. Implementation is a challenge.

I've been paying special attention to household contacts screening for TB and preventative treatment (TPT; your policy #2). While TPT for household contacts is extraordinarily cost-effective, it is quite frustrating to make progress on this, because of the reasons the report cites: general lack of awareness of TB dangers, as well as that it is quite hard to convince people who are not visibly sick to travel with their family, possibly long distances, to hospitals to get screened and take 3-month courses (or longer!) of preventative antibiotics with sometimes-severe side effects.

Glad to see more people working on this.

Hmm, I'll take another stab at this point, which has some mathematical basis but in the end is a fairly intuitive point:

Consider the per-person utility of society X which has a generous margin of slack for each person. Compare it to the per-person utility of society Z which has no margin of slack for each person.

My claim is something like, the per-person utility curves (of actual societies, that could exist, given reasonable assumptions about resources) most likely look like a steep drop from "quite positive" to "quite negative" between X and Z, because of what Zvi describes in the slack post I linked -- as you take up slack, this first results in lack of individual potential, and then in the extreme, great suffering due to lack of choice. Let's call society Y the point where per-person utility hits zero.

Society Y has a total utility of zero (and adding more people beyond that is negative!) so the utility-maximizing optimal population lands somewhere between X and Y. Where exactly depends on how many people you can "fit" into the per-person slack, before it binds too severely.

My claim is that the (total-utilitarian) optimal population is closer to X than Y, still leaving a fairly generous margin for each person.

One of the things that seems intuitively repugnant is the idea of "lives barely worth living". The word barely is doing a lot of work in driving my intuition of repugnancy, since a life "barely" worth living seems to imply some level of fragility -- "if something goes even slightly wrong, then that life is no longer worth living".

I think this may simply be a marketing problem though. Could we use some variation of "middle class"? This is essentially the standard of living that developed-world politics accepts as both sustainable and achievable, and sounds a lot nicer than "lives barely worth living". In reality, even lives "barely worth living" will build in a margin of individual slack to avoid the problem of individual fragility which has huge negative societal consequences, so it will probably seem much closer to middle-class than our current impression of poverty anyway.

(My personal opinion, not EV's:)

EV is winding down and being on this board is quite a lot of work. This makes it very hard to recruit for! The positive flip side though of the fact of the wind-down means that the cultural leadership we are doing is a bit less impactful than it was say a year or two ago.

When we faced the decision of whether to keep searching or accept the candidates in front of us, I considered many factors but eventually agreed that it was ok to prioritize allowing the existing board members to leave (which they couldn't do until we found replacements), even if the new folks were not ideal in every conceivable way. I wished we had a better gender balance too, but ultimately since projects are spinning out, it's going to be much more on those individual projects and less on EV central to figure that out!

(I'm very excited about our new trustees despite this!)

I would like to point out that this is one of those things where n=1 is enough to improve people's lives (e.g., the placebo effect works in your favor), in the same way that I can improve my life by taking a weird supplement that isn't scientifically known to work but helps me when I take it.

For what it's worth, my life did seem to start going better (I started to feel more in touch with my emotional side) after becoming vegan.

While I broadly agree with Rocky's list I want to push back a little vs. your points:

Re your (2): I've found that small entities are in a constant struggle for survival, and must move fast and focus on the most important problems unique to their ability to make a difference in the world. Small-seeming requirements like "new hires have to find their own housing" can easily make the difference between being able to move quickly vs. slowly on some project that makes or breaks the company. I think for new entities the risks of incurring large costs before you have 'proven yourself' are quite high.

My experience also disagrees with your (1): As my company has grown, we have had many forces naturally pushing in the direction of "more professional": new hires tend to be much more worried about blame about doing things too quick-and-dirty rather than incurring costs on the business in order to do things the buttoned-up way; I've stepped in more often to accept a risk rather than to prevent one although I certainly do both!

(Side note: as a potential counterpoint to the above, I do note that Alameda/FTX was clearly well below professional standards at >200 employees - my assumption is that Sam/execs were constantly stepping in to keep the culture the way they wanted it. If I learned that somehow most of the 200 employees were pushing in the direction of less professionalism on their own, I would update to agree with you on (1).)