Don't be inclined to trust my in-the-field experience, Zipline has plenty of that too!

I just had a read of their study but couldn't see how they calculated costing (the most important thing).

One thing to note is that vaccine supply chains currently often unnecessarily use trucks and cars rather than motorcycles because, well, GAVI has funded them so they may well be fairly comparing to status quo rather than other more efficient methods. For the life of me I don't know why so many NGOs use cars for si many things that public transport and motorcycles could do sometimes orders of magnitude cheaper. Comparing to status quo is a fair enough thing to do (probably what I would do) but might not be investigating the most cost effective way of doing things.

Also I doubt they are including R and D and the real drone costs in the costs in of that study, but I'll try and dig and get more detail.

It annoys me that most modeling studies focus so hard on their math method, rather than explaining now about how they estimate their cost input data - which is really what defines the model itself. 

Yep Snakebite is one of the few slamdunk usecases for me here. Until we design a cheap, heat stable antivenom I think drones that can get there in under an hour might be the best option in quite a wide range of places.

Zipline have been around for about 10 years I think - boy do they have the cool factor. One big issue is that they can only carry as really tiny amount of stuff. Also the  places where they can potentially save money have to be super hard to access, because a dirt cheap motorcycle which can go 50km for a dollar of fuel can carry 50x as much weight.

My lukewarm take is that hey have done well, but as with most things haven't quite lived up to their initial hype.

Love this.Has there really not been an RCT on floor replacements yet? That surprises me as it would be a relatively easy RCT to do. EarthEnable from Rwanda just won the 2 million dollar Skoll award doing this at scale. 

GiveWell must have considered it I would have thought? 

"being funny is a virtue, being edgy is not" is pretty darn insightful, I'm going to use that in future as it rings so true with my experience.

 And in my limited experience when humor is combined with epistemic humility (forgive the jargon :D) I have seen some beautiful moments of breakthrough with EA ideas.

Thanks so much man, these are awesome reflections and a great post to wake up to!

I would imagine there are some replicability issues... 

Love the post 🤩

Lead alliance could so go for this

I don't think she's saying that people shouldn't think and plan responses, I think it's more that endless naval gazing about timelines and rapidly shifting responses isn't the most useful response

Thanks what's the core difference between this and forecasting?

I wouldn't consider car company CEOs a serious data point here for the same reasons. I agree it seems a reasonable move but I don't think it actually is. 

Asking workers and technicians within companies, especially off the record though I would consider a useful data point, although still biased of course.

I would have thought there might even be data on the accuracy of industry head predictions, because there would be a lot of news sources to look back on which could now be checked for accuracy. Might have a look.