Merry Christmas, everyone! This year, I’m feeling grateful to be me. Recently, I gave some information about myself to Claude, and asked how I compared to other 38-yr-old men in the world. I thought I understood global inequality well, but I still found the results quite moving. The usual AI sycophancy and reassurance was gone: I’d appreciated my privilege in income, but hadn’t thought as much about the nature of my work, my health, or my leisure time. I recommend you try it, too (I’ve put a prompt below). You can also try Giving What We Can’s new Birth Lottery tool — find out what your life would be like if you were born as a random person in the world. When I tried it, I was born in India. On average my life would be around 9 years shorter, with 13 years of schooling instead of 18, and income around 10× lower—even after adjusting for local prices. I asked Claude to give me a day in the life of a typical 38-year old Indian man:   If you’re feeling privileged this year, consider making a donation to an effective charity - we give gifts to our friends and family at Christmas, so why not give a gift to the world, too. I’m doing a matching scheme, with a list of great charities, on Substack here and Twitter here, and pasted below, too. Thanks so much to everyone who’s donated so far - currently GiveDirectly and the EA Animal Welfare Fund are in the lead!  And if you want to turn that giving into a regular commitment, consider taking the 10% Pledge — it’s among the single highest-impact, and most personally fulfilling, choices you can make.  My matching scheme: I’m matching donations up to £100,000 (details below), across 10 charities and 6 cause areas. If you want to join, say how much you’re donating and where, as a reply! I’ll run this up until 31st December. Details of the match: I’ll give this money whatever happens, so this isn’t increasing the total amount I’m giving to charity. However, your donations will change *where* I’m giving. I’ll allocate m

In October, I wrote a post encouraging AI safety donors to donate to the Alex Bores campaign. Since then, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about the best donations for making the long-term future go well, and I still think that the Alex Bores campaign is the best donation opportunity for U.S. citizens/permanent residents. Under my views, donations to his campaign made this month are about 25x better than donations to standard AI safety 501(c)(3) organizations like LTFF.[1] I also think that donations made after December 31st are substantially almost 2 times less effective than donations made this month, because a lot of the value of donations to Bores comes from the value of signaling campaign strength and consolidating support, rather than from spending money on ads, and donations made in January won't become public until April. (See more discussion in my post.) Some things has happened since then. The RAISE Act, Bores' AI safety legislation, was signed by the governor![2] Also, the big tech super PAC announced that Alex Bores would be their first target. I've been really impressed with how Bores has handled the situation -- see here for an interview with him about that. Bores also just went on Bloomberg's odd lots podcast; I haven't listened to it myself, but I heard that it was a good episode. I have generally been consistently impressed with Bores since the launch of his campaign. If you're thinking about end-of-year donations, I strongly encourage you to consider donating to Bores. Here's a link to donate, though I recommend thinking about career considerations of political donations before deciding to donate. The maximum legal donation is $7,000. (I think the second best donation opportunity is the Scott Wiener campaign -- here's a link to donate. Make sure to use this link rather than going to his website, because that'll let his team know that you're donating for AI safety reasons.) 1. ^ In part, this is because of my bullishness on making t

New interview with Will MacAskill by @MHR🔸 Almost a year after the 2024 holiday season Twitter fundraiser, we managed to score a very exciting "Mystery EA Guest" to interview: Will MacAskill himself. * @MHR🔸 was the very talented interviewer and shrimptastic fashion icon * Thanks to @AbsurdlyMax🔹 for help behind the scenes * And of course huge thanks to Will for agreeing to do this Summary, highlights, and transcript below video!     Summary and Highlights (summary AI-generated)  Effective Altruism has changed significantly since its inception. With the arrival of "mega donors" and major institutional changes, does individual effective giving still matter in 2025? Will MacAskill—co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Giving What We Can, and currently a senior research fellow at the Forethought Institute—says the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he argues that despite the resources currently available, individuals are "systematically not ambitious enough" relative to the scale of the problems the world faces. In this special interview for the 2025 EA Twitter Fundraiser, Will joins host Matt to discuss the evolution of the movement’s focus. They discuss why animal welfare—specifically the fight against factory farming—has risen in prominence relative to global health, and why Will believes those working on it are "on the right side of history." Will also shares updates from his current work at the Forethought Institute, where he is moving beyond standard AI safety concerns to focus on "model character"—the idea that as AI agents become more autonomous, their embedded ethics and personality will determine how our economy and society function. Matt and Will discuss: * Why "mega donors" haven't made individual giving obsolete * The "founder effect" that initially prioritized global health over animal welfare * The funniest moment from the What We Owe the Future media tour (involving Tyler Cowen) * Why Forethought is focused on th

Hey folks! I wanted to share a quick update on fundraising for the Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW), as the year draws to a close, and as people consider finalising their end-of-year giving.  Our original forum post, announcing the launch of the Center and setting out the giving opportunity, is here.  We’ve had a great response, and have successfully raised our core Year 1 budget - whoop! The $60,000 1:1 donor match has been fully used up, so further donations to CWAW won’t be matched.  We are still gladly accepting donations, which will be used for ‘stretch’ items in CWAW’s budget - things such as public polling and focus groups to inform comms and policy development, contracting experts for advice on specific policy areas, subscriptions for parliamentary and media monitoring, joining professional and policy networks, running events such as policy report launches, improving our website, and expanding our capacity for ‘mainstream’ fundraising. We think that these items offer substantial value for money at the margin.   If you’d like to support our mission, it’s super easy to donate, and there are a variety of tax-efficient giving options (for various countries). Please see the original forum post for full details.  If you’re considering making an end-of-year gift, and have any questions - whether to help you weigh up the strength of CWAW as a giving opportunity, or on logistics - please feel free to reach out to Ben and I at team@wildanimalwelfare.org.  I’m also delighted to share that we will be launching a newsletter to keep people up to date about CWAW’s work. Whether you’re a donor or not, if you’d like to receive this, please do sign up here.  Cheers, and happy new year! 

Reread Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s inspirational oral history of VaccinateCA and thought to pull out a few quotes for my own edification. (Patrick posted about this on the forum awhile back, that's worth reading too.) ---------------------------------------- The following is what it looks like to bake in triage into org decision-making from the top down: I think in absolute terms plenty of orgs do this, Patrick just so happens to be a good writer. But in relative terms it's quite rare, and very meaningful to see, especially for folks like me with a bit of mission orientation. Also this: ---------------------------------------- On entrepreneurship: This is somewhat reminiscent of what Scott Alexander wrote about a very different person, although what Patrick calls "carefully titrating the amount of truth to various parties" Scott outright labeled "blatant lies"; my takeaway is that it's possible to do a more ethical version of the description below:  But I digress. Relatedly: ---------------------------------------- On do-gooder precocity: ---------------------------------------- On ownership and accountability, a case study: ---------------------------------------- On how much of Patrick's job in the early days as CEO was bringing in funding: ---------------------------------------- On the advantages private individuals and organizations have over official initiatives: (It's hard to convey how much I like and appreciate that last paragraph.) ---------------------------------------- On funder-nonprofit misalignment: (I'll be upfront that despite having spent a couple of my formative years in California, my bias leans so far in Patrick's direction that it'd probably be useful for me to hear out the strongest counterargument, especially in the context of triage.)