Hear This Idea #54 – Edouard Mathieu on Our World in Data
00:00
Introducing AI to a Broad Audience
- Edouard Mathieu discusses the challenge of introducing AI to a broad audience.
- He emphasizes the need for clear explanations, avoiding jargon and assumptions.
Manual Data Collection During COVID
- During COVID, Our World in Data (OWID) collected vaccination data manually.
- They extracted numbers from tweets, press releases, and even Facebook posts.
Lack of Data Standardization Incentives
- There's little incentive for governments to standardize data formats, hindering cross-country comparisons.
- OWID's efforts create a disincentive by filling the gap, although they've leveraged their position to encourage better practices.
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Introduction
00:00 • 2min
Is There a Problem That You're Stuck On?
02:00 • 2min
The Curse of Knowledge
04:07 • 2min
What's the Pipeline Like for COVID?
06:32 • 5min
Vaccines - Why Isn't It Standardized?
11:54 • 2min
Did You Ever Get Insights of This?
14:20 • 2min
Is There a Dynamic Incentive to Collect and Report Diseases?
16:03 • 2min
Is the WHO Really Trying to Fix the WHO Pandemic?
17:48 • 2min
Is There a Coordination of Reporting for Pandemics?
20:08 • 3min
What Institutions Did Really Well in Collecting Data?
23:28 • 4min
How Did Governments Deal With COVID?
27:29 • 3min
The Role of Data Visualization in COVID
30:04 • 4min
How Country Comparisons Made Vaccination Faster
33:51 • 3min
Is There a Pandemic Like That?
37:12 • 2min
The Intermediate Stage of Epidemiology
39:40 • 2min
Do You Need a Dashboard?
42:00 • 2min
Is There a Difference Between Government and Government?
43:38 • 2min
Is There a Pandemic?
45:57 • 3min
What Do You Think We Can Learn From COVID?
49:12 • 3min
Is There a Global Crisis Response Team That Can React Quickly?
52:37 • 2min
Is the UN Calling the Shots?
55:05 • 2min
Pandemics
57:03 • 4min
Pandemic Preparedness
01:01:04 • 4min
The Role of Data Collection and Data Standardization When It Comes to Existential Risks
01:05:26 • 3min
Is COVID a Theory of Change?
01:08:28 • 4min
Is There a Crisis Management Approach to Data Collection?
01:12:31 • 3min
The Challenge of Maintaining a Good Website for World Data
01:15:31 • 2min
Is There a Core Team of Maintainers?
01:17:43 • 2min
Is There a Way to Do a Coordination Project?
01:20:11 • 2min
Is There a Space for Data Collection?
01:22:38 • 5min
The Value of Making the World a Little More Sane
01:27:46 • 3min
Is the New York Times Making the World More Sane?
01:31:09 • 2min
Is Everyone a Card Carrying EA?
01:33:34 • 2min
The Value of Comparing Data on Problems
01:35:08 • 2min
The Impact of Climate Change on the World
01:37:09 • 2min
I Think It's a Good Idea to Have Good Charts About Education
01:39:06 • 1min
Is There a Pandemic?
01:40:34 • 3min
How Do I Show a Line Chart Which Is Probabilistic?
01:43:57 • 2min
Is There a Like Reasoning Transparency in Forecasting?
01:45:45 • 2min
Climate Change Forecasts - Is the UN Estimation Right?
01:47:57 • 3min
Is There a World Dashboard for Probabilistic Forecasting?
01:50:41 • 4min
Doomsday Clock
01:54:45 • 4min
Is There a Benchmark for Image Net for Classifying Images?
01:58:57 • 2min
Using Surveys to Track Attitudes to Various Big Issues
02:00:36 • 3min
How Much of This Is Data Tracking?
02:03:41 • 2min
How Do We Decouple GDP Growth and CO2 Emissions?
02:05:44 • 2min
Climate Change and the Global Button of Disease Study
02:07:59 • 2min
Are There Any Ideas for Data Visualizations?
02:09:47 • 4min
Is This a Good Idea?
02:13:59 • 2min
How Log Scales Translate to Linear Scale
02:16:24 • 2min
The Value of Transparency
02:18:15 • 5min
Is There a Problem With COVID Estimates?
02:23:13 • 2min
Is Open Source Software a Good Thing?
02:25:43 • 2min
Code Is Much Better Than Code
02:27:50 • 4min
Getting to the Point Where You Can Publish Reports in Jupiter Notebooks
02:32:16 • 2min
How to Use Github to Improve Your Code
02:34:03 • 2min
EA Specific Objections to Making Everything Transparent
02:36:15 • 2min
Is There a Space for Data Journalism?
02:38:06 • 4min
FT Data Team
02:41:40 • 2min
What Do You Think About Your Early Career?
02:43:22 • 4min
Online Data Science Courses
02:47:50 • 3min
What Makes for a Data Scientist?
02:50:56 • 4min
What's Underrated in a Data Science Career?
02:54:47 • 2min
When Should You Use an Area Chart Versus a Line Graph?
02:57:15 • 3min
What's Your Favorite OHS Chart?
03:00:00 • 3min
Is There Any Data Visualization That You Want to Flag or Highlight?
03:02:47 • 2min
The Most Underrated Chart on the Hour of Data Website
03:04:26 • 2min
Is There a Graph With Like Fish and Chicken Yeah Yeah Yeah
03:06:16 • 4min
How to Use an Opportunity to Have Impact at OAID
03:09:49 • 3min
Covid and the Data Team
03:12:42 • 3min
What Are Your Top 3 Recommendations for a Data Scientist?
03:15:18 • 5min
Philanthropy Giving Over Time
03:20:26 • 2min
Philanthropy Scores - Where Can People Find You Online Most Twitter
03:22:32 • 3min
A full writeup of this episode, including references and a transcript, is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/mathieu
Edouard Mathieu is the Head of Data at Our World in Data (OWID), a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.
We discuss:
- What Ed learned from working with governments and the WHO
- A simple change the WHO could make to radically improve how countries share data for the next pandemic
- The idea of 'experimental longtermism'
- How Ed is thinking about collecting data on transformative artificial intelligence and other potential existential risks
- Figuring out the impact of making everyone slightly better-informed
- Lessons for starting a career in impact-oriented data science
- And finally... Ed's favourite OWID chart
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