Does anyone know about donor-advised funds for UK taxpayers? The only ones I've been able to find seem to charge large management fees, or have a prohibitively large minimum investment.

Authors: John Halstead, Hauke Hillebrandt

Opinions are ours, not those of our employers.

Summary

Randomista development (RD) is a form of development economics which evaluates and promotes interventions that can be tested by randomised controlled trials (RCTs). It is exemplified by GiveWell (which primarily works in health) and the randomista movement in economics (which primarily works in economic development).

Here we argue for the following claims, which we believe to be quite weak:

1. Prominent economists make plausible arguments which suggest that research on and advocacy for economic growth in l

Hi, all!

We are Jon Behar and Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn- we work with The Life You Can Save (TLYCS)- ask us anything!

The Life You Can Save curates some of the most impactful charities in the world and makes it easy to donate to them. Our mission is to help change the culture of giving in affluent countries, and to increase donations to nonprofits that dramatically improve the lives of people in extreme poverty. The Life You Can Save was founded by Peter Singer to advance the ideas in his 2009 book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. In 2019, our team launched the 10th Anniversar... (Read more)

Dear EAs,

I would like to advocate, but also get your feedback, on using already existing/heightened concerns about climate change among many firms/groups, to channel donations to EA-recommended organizations (e.g., Coalition for Rainforest Nations and Clean Air Task Force, as recommended in this Founders Pledge cause area report).

Summary of this post / TL;DR:

• I am not advocating for Climate Change to become a main cause area for EA, although I find this an interesting point of discussion (see this post by Louis_Dixon);
• Nevertheless, I see willingness to act on climate change issues and/or willin

I think there's a lot of great literature that's relevant for EA purposes. Sometimes specific phrases can act as useful keywords.

If we use similar language as other academic fields, then:

1. Other groups can understand Effective Altruist writing easier.
2. Effective Altruists can more easily search for existing literature and discussion.

I've recently been doing some surveying of different fields and finding a lot of terminology I think is both (1) not currently used by many people here, and (2) would be interesting to them.

This can be as simple as an interesting Wikipedia page. I think there are

This is the third in a series of posts on International Relations and Policy. First was the introduction to this sequence, which discusses why this matters, and who should care. Second was defining Policy and International Relations, and talking about the sub-fields of political science. That post deferred discussion of different approaches, and instead looked at subject areas. That leads to the current post, which is a more detailed overview of political science specifially, rather than international relations and policy, which will be discussed in later posts.

This post is primarily going to ... (Read more)

This is the 2019 case for supporting The Center for Election Science. (Here's our intro page.) We need your financial support to succeed in our mission. This outline details what you can look forward to in this post. Also, you can hear in (very) long form about our work from an episode of 80,000 Hours. And there’s our EA Global Presentation.

1. Who we are
2. Why we do what we do
1. Importance
2. Tractability
3. Neglectedness
3. What we will do with sufficient funding
4. Why we’re asking for funding from you
5. Why there is urgency
6. My ask to you
7. FAQ

Who we are

The Center for Election Science (CES) is a 501(c)3 ... (Read more)

Epistemic status: Highly speculative. I know very little about the current state of the field or what EAs in this space think about. I also know about as much about general policy as you’d expect of a random layman who has ever once lived in DC, so everything I say could be wildly off-base.

Who should read this: If you think US politics and policy are not really important for improving the world, or if you’re extremely skeptical that EAs could have any tangible effect on either, you can stop reading this post now.

Introduction

I think it’s plausible that Effective Altruism w... (Read more)

Epistemic status: This is basically meant as a collection and analysis of existing ideas, not as anything brand new. I’m not an expert on the topics covered. I’d appreciate feedback or comments in relation to any mistakes, unclear phrasings, etc. (and just in general!).

In various communities (including the EA and rationalist communities), it’s common to make use of explicit, numerical probabilities.^[1]

At the extreme end, this may involve explicit attempts to calculate what would maximise expected utility, and then do that thing.

It could also involve attempts to create explicit, probabilistic m

Hi readers,

It's great to have you on the forum! If you'd like to, write something below about yourself or how you connect with the philosophy and social movement of effective altruism.

To start us off, I'm a junior doctor from Melbourne, with a particular interest in tweaking the impact of emerging technologies so they better serve humanity.

Ryan

Moloch is a poetic way of describing failures of coordination and coherence inside an agent or between agents and the generation of harmful subcomponents or harmful agents. Perhaps this could be decomposed further, or at least partially covered, by randomly generated accidents, Goodhart’s law failures, and conflicts of optimization. Let’s zoom in on one aspect, conflicts of optimization.

What are conflicts of optimization? They are situations where more than one criterion is being optimized for and in practice improving one criterion causes at least one other criterion to become ... (Read more)