Pineapples on Mars, why you should stop looking at orgs for cause prio, and how we compare: an INT dissection for beginners BACKGROUND: Impact Research Groups fellowship This is a short blogpost written on the day about my experience during day 1 of the IRG fellowship. I then mulled over whether to post but haven't changed anything (aside from one org name mispell pointed out to me), but decided to post as I've been doing lots of cause prio work myself. Impact Research Groups is a London based high-impact program in collaboration with Arcadia Impact and London EA Uni groups. Alicia Pollard is head of groups and started off our morning with some amazing introductory talks, which led to some amazing discussions with the other wonderfully smart, curious and epistemically-driven participants. My cohort involved 35 individuals with 3 in my biosecurity stream (other streams included AI governance, AI technical alignment, animal welfare etc). I applied h...
Is Big Pharma hiding the cure for cancer? No but someone else is* The rise of antiscience and why Big Wellness is hiding cures Many times, I see the statement ‘’Big Pharma wants you sick’’ Which is probably quite inflammatory, and maybe has a smidge of truth, but a statement I used to semi-believe when I first heard it was ‘’Big Pharma is incentivised to keep you dependant on medications such as cancer treatment or insulin rather than with a one off cure’’ Aside from the very biased notion of ‘Big Pharma’ wording, on the surface, the idea that a one and done cure for conditions such as type 1 diabetes or complex cancer is less profitable than multiple lifelong medications seems true in a for profit industry. The idea that they ‘hide’ a cure is unlikely, but the idea they may divert funds away from or not spend resources researching a cure ov...