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Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
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With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
Recent opportunities to take action
After a few years of missing the mark, this year I've exceeded my goal of giving 10% of my income away by a substantial margin (I never took the Giving What We Can pledge, but I still aspire at this point in my career to exceed the 10% bar).
It's bittersweet, because I think that the reason I succeeded is that it seems like there's more funding gaps than there were a few years ago - insofar as that's about there being more good giving opportunities (which I think it partly is) that's exciting but I also think it's partly due to there being more promising opportunities that aren't getting funded by large funders or other small funders, for a variety of reasons. And that's unfortunate.
I got into EA more than ten years ago when the focus was more squarely on giving. I think that the relative switch over to careers has been a great thing and to this day I think the overwhelming majority of my impact will come through my choices about my career rather than my giving. But I'd encourage "old school" EAs like me who haven't been as focused on personal giving to re-engage with the question of:
Thanks Claire! Are you able to point to some newer opportunities you think are especially promising?
Thanks for sharing this! @Julia_Wise🔸 and I also decided to give more in 2025 (or early 2026), from a combination of pressing funding gaps and wanting to pull giving forward because of Anthropic donors.