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TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
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This summer, 27 residents came to Berkeley for the first cohort of the Generator Residency, a three-month program for AI safety generalists run by Kairos and Constellation.
Residents receive mentorship from experienced generalists and researchers and are working on projects like running workshops for professionals entering AI safety, building a cross-org...
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Summary
1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...
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In EA, people use the word "counterfactual" in a non-standard way, but I've never heard this discussed or pointed out. E.g. Jeff writes,Â
But outside of the community, "counterfactual" means "didn't happen". I think the word "causal" is closest in meaning to how we use "counterfactual," though it doesn't work in this case.Â
(In this case, I think the standard English way of communicating the idea is "Say I offer to make a donation of $50 to AMF only if you do a thing...")Â
I think partly this is a reaction to dishonest charity fundraising communications that say things like “Donate today and your gift will be matched 8×”, when in reality either the match limit is virtually guaranteed to met or else the matching donor would offset any unused matching funds with a separate donation.
So consider your last sentence — maybe if I do the thing you will give an extra $100 at the end of the year or if I don’t do the thing you will give an extra $150 at the end of the year. Technically I only gave the $50 gift if you did the thing, but in reality there was no counterfactual difference in total giving.
A counterfactual donation isn't just my act being contingent on your act, it means AMF getting a net extra $50 is contingent on your act. So if part of the $50 were a donation match that would be filled regardless, or some (especially low op cost) funder would make up the difference, it wouldn't fully count.
Counterfactual is also used to mean the second choice opportunity that defines an opportunity cost. "Should I take job A? Well my counterfactual is job B, where I would do X..."
Relevant: David Lewis, "Counterfactuals"