Ben Millwood

2379 karmaJoined Dec 2015

Comments
281

While I see what you're saying here, I prefer evil to be done inconsistently rather than consistently, and every time someone merely gets what they deserve instead of what some unhinged penal system (whether in the US or elsewhere) thinks they deserve seems like a good thing to me.

(I don't personally have an opinion on what SBF actually deserves.)

I think if there's no credible reason to assign responsibility to the intervention, there's no need to include it in the model. I think assigning the charity responsibility for the consequences of a crime they were the victim of is just not (by default) a reasonable thing to do.

It is included in the detailed write-up (the article even links to it). But without any reason to believe this level of crime is atypical for the context or specifically motivated by e.g. anger against the charity, I don't think anything else needs to be made of it.

I've been linked to The benefits of Novavax explained which is optimistic about the strengths of Novavax, suggesting it has the potential to offer longer-term protection, and protection against variants as well.

I think the things the article says or implies about pushback from mRNA vaccine supporters seem unlikely to me -- my guess is that in aggregate Wall Street benefits much more from eliminating COVID than it does from selling COVID treatments, though individual pharma companies might feel differently -- but they seem like the sort of unlikely thing that someone who had reasonable beliefs about the science but spent too much time arguing on Twitter might end up believing. Regardless, I'm left unsure how to feel about its overall reliability, and would welcome thoughts one way or the other.

I tend to think there's an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is

This isn't relevant if you think GiveWell charities mostly act to prevent suffering. I think this is certainly true for the health stuff, and arguably still plausible for the economic stuff.

'Cause here' is an example of an ineffective cause, with an estimated cost of 'cost here' to save one life.

You might find it tricky to fill these in. In general cost estimates for less effective charities are, when they exist at all, much less developed and much lower quality, because it's laborious to develop an accurate estimate and there's not much demand for precision once something is unlikely to be a top charity.

The nature of the effective altruist project is mostly to distinguish between "known to be effective" and "not known to be effective", and there's rarely any appetite for going the extra mile to "known not to be effective".

(I do expect there will be something you can use here, with at least a rough estimate, but don't expect the same rigour as you'll see with the effective charities.)

  • Crypto prices in general also turned out in their favour, and without having looked into it closely I'd guess both of those bets paying off were necessary for people to get paid back,
  • If the bankruptcy hadn't forced dollarization all of FTX's customer deposits, I'm guessing they still wouldn't be able to pay everyone back today,
  • Customer money wasn't supposed to be going into bets with any variance. Having a diversified portfolio reduces variance but doesn't eliminate it (and anyway I suspect FTX's portfolio wasn't in reality very diversified, given that tech stocks and crypto have historically been pretty correlated)

Gathering some notes on private COVID vaccine availability in the UK.

News coverage:

It sounds like there's been a licensing change allowing provision of the vaccine outside the NHS as of March 2024 (ish). Pharmadoctor is a company that supplies pharmacies and has been putting about the word that they'll soon be able to supply them with vaccine doses for private sale -- most media coverage I found names them specifically. However, the pharmacies themselves are responsible for setting the price and managing bookings or whatever. All Pharmadoctor does for the end user is tell you which pharmacies they are supplying and give you the following pricing guidance:

Comirnaty Omicron XBB.1.5 (Pfizer/BioNTech) £75-£85

Nuvaxovid XBB.1.5 (Novavax) £45-£55 (update: estimated availability from w/c 22/04/2024)

Some places offering bookings:

  • Rose Pharmacy (Deptford, London) replied to my e-mail on 21st March saying they would offer Pfizer for £80 in the next week or so, but didn't have a price for Novavax yet, which they expected to order towards the end of April.
  • JP Pharmacy (Camden High St, London) offers Pfizer for £85
  • Fleet Street Clinic (London), £95 "initial price" for the updated Pfizer vaccine.
  • Doctorcall (at-home service), which vaccine not specified, £90 "in addition to the cost of the visit" which seem to be from £195.
  • I've found that most pharmacies on Pharmadoctor's FInd a Pharmacy button have little or no web presence and often don't explicitly own up to offering private COVID jabs. I've e-mailed a couple to see what they say. Here's a list of pharmacies I've tried but not heard from, mostly for my own records:
  • will edit as I find more, especially any offering £45 jabs

Yeah I think this is quite sensible -- I feel like I noticed one thing missing from the normal doom scenario and didn't notice all of the implications of missing that thing, in particular that the reason the AI in the normal doom scenario takes over is because it is highly likely to succeed, and if it isn't, takeover seems much less interesting.

oh man, it's altruistically-good and selfishly-sad to see so many of the things I was thinking about pre-empted there, thanks for the link!

deworming seems to be beneficial for education (even if the magnitude might have been overstated)

Maybe a nitpick, but idk if this is suspicious convergence -- I thought the impact on economic outcomes (presumably via educational outcomes) was the main driver for it being considered an effective intervention?

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