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 35 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 15
Comments931
I'm not the archbishop of Canterbury ;). But I can't resist sharing my 2 cents here. After this happened Jesus both praised the woman who broke the jar then quoted from this passage in Deuteronomy "the poor you will always have with you"
"Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.'
Sure, but it still required a joint decision and international cooperation.
AI is also a heavily concentrated industry with only has a handful of labs with frontier models all in the same country. You could fairly easily largely pause them for a little while at least if you wanted to. I'm not saying this is a good idea or that itwould solve alignment, but it wouldn't actually be that hard.
I think it's helpful to look at successes even if there's aren't so many parallels with current big problems. We can underrate how doable big problems are if the political will is there.
Thanks David yes I think I understand this now!
I understand why the international community doesn't see it this way because they meld the two together, but I would distinguish between safe space, and safe people on earth. Space governance vs. earth governance
You've said that space is a commons, and space law is international treaty - what does a re-entry have to do with this that doesn't affect space? From my perspective safety of people on earth has nothing much to do with the governance and safety of space, so shouldn't necessarily be part of the political discussion about responsible space debris.
But 100% I can see how those 2 things get connected politically, like "if you are willing to be loose with your huge space station, why should we pay more to stop our satellites becoming space debris?" Even though one of those things is about Earth governance and the other space.
"I care very little about 'theories of change'. You can put together a narrative showing how anything can achieve anything so they just don’t update me much. To me, a concise story with a concrete datum or two is worth a thousand nodes on a flow chart. (I haven’t spoken to anyone else who seems to feel this way, and the community seems to be moving in a theory-of-changeward direction, so I’m curious if anyone reading this feels the same?"
I completely agree with this - in the GHD, social Enterprise work a lot of weight seems to be put on theoru of change and I don't buy it. It just favors the best storytellers. Of course you HAVE to have a solid understanding of how what you are doing will work, but for me it's a little more of a binary thing, like it has to make sense rather than "oh wow this incredible theory of change convinces me this org is amazing"
Thanks Sanjay - I'm going off NASA's public facing materials, where they don't mention space debris as a potential consideration in controlled vs. Uncontrolled descent. They mention that as a reason why they don't destroy it in situ or try and take the ISS to higher orbit.
I completely agree, if space debris was a serious consideration then it would be a while different equation.
I love your framing of this cost and agree with your central thesis, that cash transfers to families with sickle cell might be more cost effective than general cash transfers, while not necessarily being the most cost-effective option. It may well be the most cost-effective of the projects you reviewed as well, so kudos for getting in behind this.
My criticism is more that if the NGO has a great database and connection with families with sickle cell, why not use that infrastructure and the money to help the kids medically in ways more effective than a cash transfer? Buying mosquito nets, deworming and I would argue giving proper medical treatment for sickle cell are more cost-effective than cash transfers.
In this case I would boldly predict you could do more good by actually providing the best medical care you could with that money rather than giving it to the family. Also in sickle cell where medical catastrophes are basically guaranteed, cash transfers might well get used up BEFORE catastrophes happen which would be tragic.
I'm assuming this stuff below is not readily publicly available in Cameroon - some of it might well be then you didn't
If I had 47 dollars a month to help kids with sickle cell I would set up accounts with local health facilities to provide these services for each kid.
1) Pay for the basic monthly meds for sickle cell (pen-V, folate, malaria prevention, pain relief) ($8 a month)
2) Most of these kids would benefit from hydroxyurea ($10 a month)
3) Send a motorbike to pick the kid to take to hte health center AS SOON as they get sick - fast access to healthcare is critical in sickle cell ($5 per month)
4) Administrating the project ($15 a month assuming something like one/two people administrating 20 families)
5) A pool of money which pays for catatrophic hospital admissions when needed ($9)
I might be missing something or overstepping with this suggestion but that's my hottish take ;) For background I'm a doctor here in Uganda with a decent amount of experience with Sickle cell.