An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from "Days of Fire" by Peter Baker. I found this moving.

GiveWell did their first "lookbacks" (reviews of past grants) to see if they've met initial expectations and what they could learn from them: (While I'm very glad they did so with their usual high quality and rigor, I'm also confused why they hadn't started doing this earlier, given that "okay, but did we really help as much as we think we would've? Let's check?" feels like such a basic M&E / ops-y question. I'm obviously missing something trivial here, but also I find it hard to buy "limited org capacity"-type explanations for GW in particular given total funding moved, how long they've worked, their leading role in the grantmaking ecosystem etc) Their lookbacks led to substantial changes vs original estimates, in New Incentives' case driven by large drops in cost per child enrolled ("we think this is due to economies of scale, efficiency efforts by New Incentives, and the devaluation of the Nigerian naira, but we haven’t prioritized a deep assessment of drivers of cost changes") and in HKI's case driven by vitamin A deficiency rates in Nigeria being lower and counterfactual coverage rates higher than originally estimated:

I notice a pattern in my conversations where someone is making a career decision: the most helpful parts are often prompted by "what are your strengths and weaknesses?" and "what kinds of work have you historically enjoyed or not enjoyed?" I can think of a couple cases (one where I was the recipient of career decision advice, another where I was the advice-giver) where we were kinda spinning our wheels, going over the same considerations, and then we brought up those topics >20 minutes into the conversation and immediately made more progress than the rest of the call to that point. Maybe this is because in EA circles people have already put a ton of thought into considerations like "which of these jobs would be more impactful conditional on me doing a 8/10 job or better in them" and "which of these is generally better for career capital (including skill development, networks, and prestige)," so it's the conversational direction with the most low-hanging fruit. Another frame is that this is another case of people underrating personal fit relative to the more abstract/generally applicable characteristics of a job.

Many people appreciated my Open Asteroid Impact startup/website/launch/joke/satire from last year. People here might also enjoy my self-exegesis of OAI, where I tried my best to unpack every Easter egg or inside-joke you might've spotted, and then some. 

This is one of the first times I have seen lead poisoning make front page news!  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4n7wn8l58o Could this be an opportunity for the new lead alliance, or even just one of the lead orgs to help China do better on lead? Maybe there will be a window where they are more open to external help? It seems China has new "maximum" lead levels regulations in paint from 2020 but there are obviously still issues... Could well still not be worth it though if there are other "lower hanging fruit" on the lead front.