{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"GiveWell Conversations","title":"Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3177,"description":"In an effort to direct substantially more funding to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find to help people, GiveWell’s research is expanding in two directions at once: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making.\n\nThis episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how this expansion is playing out on GiveWell’s research team, as three researchers each describe a project they have taken on: reassessing how to prevent childhood pneumonia deaths, building a better estimate of how many children die of malaria, and developing an AI tool to check our work for errors.\n\nIn this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera, Senior Researcher James Watson, and Research Analyst Meghna Ray about the projects they’ve worked on and what it’s like to do research at GiveWell.\nElie, Dilhan, James, and Meghna discuss:\nChanging direction as we follow the evidence: Pneumonia causes around 10% to 15% of deaths among children under five globally. Our New Areas research subteam, which investigates cause areas that are newer to GiveWell, first examined community-based treatment options for reducing these deaths by treating children with amoxicillin, an inexpensive antibiotic. That approach initially looked promising, but conversations with researchers and implementers indicated that many pneumonia deaths today are caused by infections that amoxicillin doesn’t treat. We then shifted our attention toward another strategy for reducing pneumonia deaths: providing medical oxygen for severely ill children in hospitals. This costs more per patient but targets the children at greatest risk of dying and can also treat diseases beyond pneumonia. If expanding access to medical oxygen proves cost-effective, it could become a new way for GiveWell to help prevent these deaths.\nImproving our estimates for key cost-effectiveness inputs:...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/-u3xe4YYytsIA-MwiMODoBW-Emt4SwBumSBMmblDbUM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wNTc2/MzVhY2UyNmY0ZTZl/MzYwNmZkOGVlMGU3/NDYyMC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}