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Rob Wiblin

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
552 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So just to have a picture in the head of the magnitude of the benefit, you're saying it increases vaccination rates by 10 percentage points, and that's about 27%.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So huge magnitude.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

How large is the SMS reminder effect again, separately?

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Three and seven percent.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Okay.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So I'm guessing the SMS reminders are a bunch cheaper because you're just sending texts.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And I guess they're probably easier to scale as well because you just have to get a bunch of phone numbers and then stick them in some piece of software that sends out text messages.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

On the other hand, it seems like the ambassadors have a larger effect size, maybe a more robust result in the RCT.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

How are you going to trade off this like easiness of scalability and low cost?

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

In the original version, people would go to the village.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Exactly.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Maybe I've got the wrong picture in my head here.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So the SMS is pretty easy to scale, but I guess you have to get the numbers, you've got to get permission to do it, and you've got to put them through the software, clean up the data and so on.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

But it sounds like, in fact, getting some ambassadors from these villages is not that hard at all because you're making a bunch of phone calls, getting some names, and then you call them up and you're not putting them through some difficult training process.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

You're kind of just asking them, could they do this?

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And it might be a relatively fast conversation.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And then potentially you've covered a whole village, right?

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Maybe I was kind of asking this earlier, but I kind of want to ask again because I think it's just kind of important.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

It seems like parents don't want their kids to die and the benefits of vaccinations are really big and the parents don't object to vaccinations.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 โ€“ Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

What's going on that's causing the parents not to really prioritize as a really high priority, making sure that their kids get the later vaccinations?