I just learned about Zipline, the world's largest autonomous drone delivery system, from YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee's recent video, so I was surprised to see Zipline pop up in a GiveWell grant writeup of all places. I admittedly had the intuition that if you're optimising for cost-effectiveness as hard as GW do, and that your prior is as skeptical as theirs is, then the "coolness factor" would've been stripped clean off whatever interventions pass the bar, and Brownlee's demo both blew my mind with its coolness (he placed an order on mobile for a power bank and it arrived by air in thirty seconds flat, yeesh) and also seemed the complete opposite of cost-effective (caveating that I know nothing about drone delivery economics). Quoting their "in a nutshell" section: Okay, but what about cost-effectiveness? Their "main reservations" section says Is there any evidence of cost-effectiveness at all then? According to Zipline, yes — e.g. quoting the abstract from their own 2025 modelling study: That's super cost-effective. For context, the standard willingness-to-pay to avert a DALY is 1x per capita GDP or $2,100 in Ghana, so 35-50x higher. Also: (GW notes that they'd given Zipline's study a look and "were unable to quickly assess how key parameters like program costs and the impact of the program on vaccination uptake and disease were being estimated". Neither can I. Still pretty exciting)

I recently came across Santi Ruiz from the Institute for Progress's podcast and substack, Statecraft. I enjoyed going back through the archives and thought I'd share some of my favorites here. Particularly Forum relevant 1. How to Save Twenty Million Lives 2. How to Secure Weapons-Grade Uranium 3. How to Hide the Manhattan Project 4. How to Salvage a Nuclear Waste Facility 5. How to Ban Biological Weapons 6. How to Catch a Lab Leak Other standouts 1. How to Stage a Coup 2. How to Fix Crime in New York City 3. 50 Thoughts on DOGE 4. How to Win an Election Against the Communists

Some AI research projects that (afaik) haven't had much work done on them and would be pretty interesting: * If the US were to co-build secure data centres in allied countries, would that be geopolitically stabilising or destabilising? * What AI safety research agendas could be massively sped up by AI agents? What properties do they have (e.g. easily checkable, engineering > conceptual ...)? * What will the first non-AI R&D uses of powerful and general AI systems be? * Are there ways to leverage cheap (e.g. 100x lower than present-day cost) intelligence or manual labour to massively increase the US's electricity supply? * What kinds of regulation might make it easier to navigate an intelligence explosion (e.g. establishing quick pathways to implement policy informed by AI experts, or establishing zones where compute facilities can be quickly built without navigating a load of red tape)? 

Is there a good list of the highest leverage things a random US citizen (probably in a blue state) can do to cause Trump to either be removed from office or seriously constrained in some way? Anyone care to brainstorm? Like the safe state/swing state vote swapping thing during the election was brilliant - what analogues are there for the current moment, if any?

Was sent a resource in response to this quick take on effectively opposing Trump that at a glance seems promising enough to share on its own:  From A short to-do list by the Substack Make Trump Lose Again: Bolding is mine to highlight the 80k-like opportunity. I'm abusing the block quote a bit by taking out most of the text, so check out the actual post if interested!  There's also a volunteering opportunities page advertising "A short list of high-impact election opportunities, continuously updated" which links to a notion page that's currently down.