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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
I would be interested to know what cause your friend hopes to donate to? There are slightly different considerations for established fields like global health compared to newer fields like AI safety
I'd refer your friend to information about "patient philanthropy" that cover some of the arguments for waiting https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/patient-altruism
Thank you kindly, this was very helpful, and my friend is already studying the subject too! :)
As for the causes - I don't know yet, because we are discussing in metaphors and on quite a high level for now. But he and his wife are vegans, I know animal welfare is crucial to them, so I would risk saying that this area will be his main focus.
However, they might be interested in mitigating poverty/healthcare risk areas too, as they became parents recently, and that changes everything as we know. ;)
AI safety, not sure, we didn't discuss existential risks yet. I'm not pushing, just responding to questions for now.