This is a special post for quick takes by Emma Richter🔸. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
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This is a nudge to leave questions for Darren Margolias, Executive Director of @Beast Philanthropy, in the AMA post here! I'll be recording a video AMA with Darren based on the questions left in the post, and we'll try to get through as many of them as possible.
For extra context, Beast Philanthropy is a charity founded by YouTuber MrBeast. They recently collaborated with GiveDirectly on this video; you can read more about it on GiveDirectly's blog and the Beast Philanthropy LinkedIn.
Frances' quick take here made me think about what skills are particularly important in my own line of work, communications. 80,000 Hours has a skill profile for communicating ideas that covers some crucial considerations when assessing fit for communications work; these are additional skills or aptitudes that I often think about when considering fit for communications work in the EA ecosystem in particular:
- Translating between groups: Especially in an EA context, communications work can entail the translation of complex, nuanced ideas from one group of people into something more legible for a different group or audience. Being able to speak the language of different niche groups—like researchers or philosophers—and then being able to translate that into a different kind of language or format proves useful, especially when communicating with audiences that are less familiar with EA. This is when having a background or understanding of different audiences or groups can come in handy for communications work.
- Stewardship mentality: As a communicator, you don’t always represent your own ideas or original work. Often you’re representing the work or ideas of others, which requires a sense of stewardship in service of representing that work or those ideas accurately and with nuance. This can look like double-checking stats or numbers before sharing a social media post or doing further research to make sure you understand a claim or piece of research you’re discussing.
- Excitement about being in a support role: Some communicators, like social media personalities or popular bloggers, don’t necessarily require this aptitude; but full-time communications roles at many organizations in the EA ecosystem require this, in my opinion. Similar to having a stewardship mentality, I find it helps if you have excitement about supporting the object-level work of others. Feeling jazzed about the message or impact of a particular organization or cause area probably means you’ll do a better job communicating about it or supporting the communication efforts of others. Many types of communications work don’t receive direct, public credit—editing, ghostwriting, coordinating, filming, etc.—but they can be just as rewarding depending on your personality.
Curated and popular this week
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
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“I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism's CEO. Oscar is CEA’s Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed insightful input and feedback (directly and indirectly) during the development of our strategy and over many years. Mistakes are of course our own.
Exec summary
As one CEA, we are taking a principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community.
During the search for a new CEO, the board and search committee were open to alternative strategic directions, but from the beginning of my tenure, we’ve committed to a strategy under which we will:
* Operate as one CEA, rather than winding down, breaking up or renaming the organization. Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.
* Take a principles-first approach to EA, rather than becoming an AI org or otherwise re-orienting ourselves to specific causes.
* Take greater responsibility for stewardship of the EA community, rather than restricting ourselves to passively providing infrastructure and support. This post explores stewardship in greater detail.
Stewardship is about actors taking more responsibility for reaching and raising EA’s ceiling, and we believe CEA should play a leading role in steering, supporting and coordinating the community. Importantly, however, stewardship of EA is not ownership of EA: we don’t want to be the only leaders, and we do want a close collaboration with the community.
During 2024 we focussed on building strong foundations that CEA will require to succeed at stewarding the community, including making over 20 hires (having started the year with 34 staff) while cutting a quarter of our costs, and developing our strategy for 2025 and 2026, including by listening to and learning from members of the EA community during visits I made to over half a dozen countries and in more than 200 one-on-one meetings. I feel good about the foundations we built and having priori
This is a nudge to leave questions for Darren Margolias, Executive Director of @Beast Philanthropy, in the AMA post here! I'll be recording a video AMA with Darren based on the questions left in the post, and we'll try to get through as many of them as possible.
For extra context, Beast Philanthropy is a charity founded by YouTuber MrBeast. They recently collaborated with GiveDirectly on this video; you can read more about it on GiveDirectly's blog and the Beast Philanthropy LinkedIn.