The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2021, and projects that DOGE's cuts to USAID will result in 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million deaths of children under 5, by 2030.
The Harvard articfle is just PR for a documentary that focuses on an individual (IE, an anecdote intended to be emotionally manipulative).
As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.
> As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.
How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomised trial of this kind of intervention? Like, the Lancet definitely hop on far too many bandwagons for my taste, but it's almost certain that the withdrawal of USAID will cause ~millions of otherwise avoidable deaths.
And ultimately, it's the choice of the US government and people whether or not to fund these programmes. Personally, I think that they are worthwhile, but others may disagree.
But really, you're holding the evidence required here to a very high standard, one that many things you believe would probably not meet.
Thanks, this is more thoughtful than most of the replies I've seen.
I don't think anybody proposed or considered running a randomized trial.
I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded. Otherwise it's just emotional manipulation- "fight the change by making up numbers that sound bad".
> I feel like the evidence standard has to be extremely high if you're claiming that tens of millions of people are going to die in the next few years with the goal of blocking a program from being defunded.
I mean, this is basically the evidence standard that we use for flu/respiratory illness deaths, along with lots of other hard to measure interventions.
Personally, even if there were no deaths due to USAID being removed, it would still have been a strategically bad thing for the US government to do, in terms of soft power.
Additionally, the US are noted in development circles for circular aid, in that they gave a lot, but then required it all to be spent on US goods, so it was more of a subsidy for domestic producers.
I do agree that lots of people just jump on these numbers uncritically, because of prior beliefs about Musk/Trump/DOGE, but it would be very very surprising if there weren't lots of avoidable deaths due to the cutting off of aid. Like, the same thing could have been accomplished in a much better way by tapering off the aid as programmes expired.
Also: nagging about the specifics of the README's tone of voice, while the 600-1000MB RAM usage drops to 100-250MB seems a little childish to me.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
I don't see you publishing something which further reduces the memory footprint?
Given the project is open source, have at it! See if you can help improve it instead of complaining. This is a significant improvement and a cool project!
I run actual Winamp for my music streaming, and windows task manager claims it's using 4.1 MB.
Even that seems pretty high, but whatever, but given y'all are spending hundreds of mbs, I think I'm ok. Yes, spotify has features my subscription music service doesn't have... but the one I use lets me stream with Winamp.
I'm not complaining and it is a cool project (from what I can tell). But I think it's fair to say 200 MB memory usage is a lot without providing source code as a proof. Just by feel when you recall what were computers capable of when they did not have 100s of MB to spare.
I like the direction, but stewarded feels just a little too awkward to type or say to catch on. Perhaps "guide coded"? But it will be really hard to dislodge vibe coded from being generally applied to this concept, I think, in part because it is a catchy little term.
Could you explain the first step, "Manually Labeling Colors ? What did you manually label? I didn't quite follow.
From the way the article is written, it sounds like you presented yourself with a bunch of faces of completely random colours and then manually sorted them into two categories, "plausible skin colour" and "implausible skin colour".
But I feel like I must be misunderstanding, because I don't see why you would do that. Why wouldn't you gather photographs of actual faces and sample colours directly from the photos?
So now there are two mutually incompatible versions of YAML that silently apply different semantics: both do implicit coercion but _different kinds_ of implicit coercion. YAML 1.2 still coerces an arbitrary set of ways to spell "true" and that's exactly the insanity that created this disaster in the first place. The YAML spec writers just couldn't let go of their bad habits.
Honestly, this seems like an even worse situation than before. If you're making a new tool and choosing a configuration format, stay away from YAML.
Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.
Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.
I've heard the arguments for approval voting, and I'm sure it's all the things you mention and more, but people don't get it. I don't get it. I don't want to vote for both Hillary and Bernie. I want to vote for Bernie, and then only if Bernie can't win, would I let my vote go to Hillary. You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
I know, it sucks. Politics is terrible. But we have some momentum behind RC/IRV so we should use it and stop the single-vote FPTP system that's plagued us for centuries. Anything is better than that. So let's join forces and get behind whatever has momentum even if it's not technically the best.
Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance of winning.
A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
>It sounds like the local ranked-choice implementation is unnecessarily complex and constrained. A simple "rank all candidates from 1 (most preferred) to n (least preferred)" for n candidates seems like the better solution.
I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.
Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!
For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]
Thank you for your expert opinion. Unlike yourself and your colleague[0], I am not an expert on voting systems and infrastructure.
I am just a consumer of such things and have exactly zero say in my town's approach to voting.
I do know that RCV is better than FPTP, even more so if we don't, at least, require a majority, and am glad my town is at least making a start at such things.
That said, I'd love to make it even better.
As I suggested[1] to your colleague, it would be terrific if your expertise could be used to improve the voting system where I live.
I'd expect that the folks[2] who make such decisions could be convinced to re-frame things in another referendum based upon the recommendations of you and your organization. I know I'd certainly appreciate it!
> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".
bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.
> Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit.
Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?
That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.
There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.
That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.
I agree with this. Ranked choice is easy to explain to a naive voter: everyone understands how a preference order works, and the result is "the candidate more people like the most". Counting the votes is (a bit) complicated, but I think the (minority of) people who get excited by implementation details out-smart themselves, by worrying that most people won't understand the details. Of course most people won't understand the details, because they don't care about the details. They don't know how votes are tallied now!
My position admittedly breaks down when people lie to low-information voters about the fairness of the process - but, in my defence, people will lie about any system that doesn't produce the results they want. I'd prefer they lodge their objections to a better system than first-past-the-post.
That's fair. RCV does break down with a large number of candidates. Though doesn't star voting have some odd corner cases? Regardless, every alternative scheme I've seen seriously proposed would be a massive improvement over FPTP.
Whether they are sentient isn't even relevant. I agree with you that they aren't, but sentience is the wrong thing to focus on. It's also the sort of hairy, sensational question that will easily lead people down rabbit holes (and unfortunately that includes journalists).
Children are sentient, but we still hold their parents accountable. Adults are sentient, but in some coercive situations we hold the party in power accountable. The fact that they are sentient is not determinative.
What matters is that we have _no accountability mechanism_ for them. There is no effective way to hold AIs accountable, therefore we must hold their operators accountable, full stop.
Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.
Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.
When you generate real-time video of realistic-looking talking characters, the definition of success is fooling people into believing they are talking to a real person when they aren't.
If you pursue this, your explicit goal is deception, and it's a massively harmful kind of deception. I don't see how you can claim to be operating ethically here if that's your goal.
Do you think the same about text that is indistinguishable from human-written text (LLM chatbots)? Or voice that is indistinguishable from a human talking?
Illegal things, like fraud and impersonation, are illegal. There's a difference between the tool and the actions people do with the tool.
There are tons of useful applications of interactive avatars - from corporate training to kids education to language learning and more. Plus, why would you want to stop this little guy from existing in the world? :) https://lemonslice.com/try/alien
I don't think the same of them because they are not the same thing. Can you not see that the potential for harm is far greater? You can't simply ignore the potential uses of the technology you create. You have the choice to design your technology so it retains its usefulness while limiting the harm; have you given any time to thinking about how you could do that?
The alien is a diversion from the concern; I'm talking about realistic human avatars. Let's stay focused on that.
Let me suggest a worthwhile exercise. Just take ten minutes. What are some of the ways that realistic human avatars would make deception more effective or more scalable than previously possible?
Come up with three scenarios, and let's talk about them, honestly and thoughtfully.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
It cites this study, published in The Lancet (open access full text):
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Summary:
The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2021, and projects that DOGE's cuts to USAID will result in 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million deaths of children under 5, by 2030.
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