I love this and would second it. Opportunities are everywhere.

Hey Riley. I think the 10 billion is on average "per disease", in the post they listed 100 billion as the number for malaria which is in the ballpark of your estimates.

Thanks for this interesting stuff! I like that stat about 10% of diseases causing over 50% of the morbidity/mortality, and eradicating those having a much smaller cost. For that reason me that 1.4 trillion number to potentailly eradicate 50% of the might be more important than the 14 trilllion one.

I'll have a look at the lancet paper - I don't really understand the 8.5 billion being needed to "maintain" the situation after malaria is eradicated, I thought the definition of eradication was that it was gone (like smallpox) - so would no longer need money pumped into it. Perhaps they are assuming malaria remains in animals continuing the life cycle?

Whenever I do a sanity checks of GBD it usually make sense for UgAnda here where I live, with the possible exception of diarrhoea which I think is overrated (with moderate confidence).

I'm not sure exactly how GBD would "exaggerate" overall, because the contribution of every condition to the disease burden has to add up to the actual burden - if you were to exaggerate the effect of one condition you would have to intentionally downplay another to compensate, which seems unlikely. I would imagine mistakes on GBD are usually good faith mistakes rather than motivated exaggerations.

Completely agree, I would love humour to be more appreciated on the forum. Rarely does a joke slip through appreciated/unpunished.

Second recommendation due this in a week, definitely going to read thanks so much

Amazing blog about an incredible person thank you!

I'm trying to think of modern day equivalents that might doggedly stick to their socially extreme ethical beliefs even if they are wildly against the status quo. Perhaps Greta Thunburg is one that comes to mind?

Another might be Dr. Edric Baker, a Kiwi catholic doc who spent most of his life living on 300 dollars a month, living in one room while running a hospital in rural Bangladesh

https://www.daily-sun.com/post/710253/Dr.-Edric-Baker--A-modern-day-saint-died-letting-us-to-shed-tears

Perhaps most of us aren't cut out for this kind of life, but I think there's a lot to learn from these people, both to be inspired by their uncompromising lives and even to help us see new ideas and causes on the margins we may have otherwise missed.

Perhaps the large uncertainty around it makes it less likely that people will argue against it publicly as well. I would imagine many people might think with very low confidence that some interventions for non-human animals might not be the most cost-effective, but stay relatively quiet due to that uncertainty.

"Most charities seem much less effective than the most effective for-profit organizations"

This is a big discussion but I would be interested to see you justify this. I would say many of the biggest GHD achievements and much important work is driven by not for profit organizations like charities and government (global vaccine alliance, university research institutions etc) but obviously it's a complicated discussion.

Obviously a market economy drives much of it, but I consider this more the water we swim in rather than the capitalist system doing the good itself.

I would be interested to hear the for profit businesses which you think are counterfactually doing the most good on the margins

The "non-tweet" feels vague and unsubsantiated (at this point anyway). I hope we'll get a full article and explanation as to what he means exactly because obviously he's making HUGE calls.