Update: we sent out decisions to everyone who applied to the upcoming program, which is now Jan 6-8!
The fact that these decisions were so delayed and communication was poor and the program got postponed is all my fault and I would like to apologize. I understand that my being unresponsive created costs for you and makes planning harder. It also eats into a valuable resource of trust that makes people more suspicious of other events and generally makes coordination difficult.
This happened because I didn’t set firm enough deadlines or loop my collaborators in enough on the project, and then once I fell a little bit behind because we got more applications than I expected, I grew very averse to evaluating them. That’s not to say this was excusable—this is the kind of mistake that should cause people to trust me less. This is a fairly unprecedented error for me and I wrote down some reflections on why this happened, which I’ve shared with everyone who applied. I don’t think I’ll make another mistake of this flavor any time soon.
One thing I’d like to emphasize is this was entirely my mistake—Jonas and the rest of the people working on the Lurkshop and at Atlas and LessWrong tried to help but I didn’t communicate with them well or keep them in the loop.
Again, thank you everyone for your patience and I’m sorry for the hassle I’ve caused.
I’m excited to see some of you in person soon!
Humanity has only ever eradicated two diseases (and one of those, rinderpest, is only in cattle not humans). The next disease on the list is probably Guinea worm (though polio is also tantalizingly close).
At its peak Guinea worm infected ~900k people a year. In 2024 we so far only know of 7 cases. The disease isn’t deadly, but it causes significant pain for 1-3 weeks (as a worm burrows out of your skin!) and in ~30% of cases that pain persists afterwards for about a year. In .5% of cases the worm burrows through important ligaments and leaves you permanently disabled. Eradication efforts have already saved about 2 million DALYs.[1]
I don’t think this outcome was overdetermined; there’s no recent medical breakthrough behind this progress. It just took a herculean act of international coordination and logistics. It took distributing millions of water filters, establishing village-based surveillance systems in thousands of villages across multiple countries, and meticulously tracking every single case of Guinea worm in humans or livestock around the world. It took brokering a six-month ceasefire in Sudan (the longest humanitarian ceasefire in history!) to allow healthcare workers to access the region. I’ve only skimmed the history, and I’m generally skeptical of historical heroes getting all the credit, but I tentatively think it took Jimmy Carter for all of this to happen.
Rest in peace, Jimmy Carter.
I’m compelled to caveat that top GiveWell charities are probably in the ballpark of $50/DALY, and the Carter Center has an annual budget of ~$150 million a year, so they “should” be able to buy 2 million DALYs every single year by donating to more cost-effective charities. But c’mon this worm is super squicky and nearly eradicating it is an amazing act of agency.