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Media that is not about EA but could be I may start a running list of fun, silly, biting, earnest and/or unexpected ways to convey EA ideas. I'll add what I think it could be useful for. YMMV.
First entry:
- Possible (sarcastic) response to someone who thinks it's offensive to say that some things are better than others: Posit Guy, by JrEg Summary: A guy posits something; others are offended that positing anything is arrogant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKe1m3aqsmw
== I may also start a running list of EA quotes in the media that I like:
- Here's a better way to explain "earning to give" in the 2020s: "give-what-you-earn style of effective altruism” (from https://fortune.com/2021/07/29/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-billionaire-ftx/)
Changing up the name of a thing over time is a good way to keep the concept fresh, so people pay attention to the meaning, not just the meme they've heard or read a million times before (IMO). I really like how this journalist turned this phrase around.
- A good resource for people who care about climate change and are new to x-risk or think x-risk is weird. Possibly a good resource for policymakers, who the author addresses directly at the end.
Summary: Yglesias takes climate change seriously as a risk to humanity, and then quite smoothly pivots to x-risks from The Precipice. There's no mention of AI; he focuses on biosecurity and uses COVID as an example. Excerpt:
"So I commend the film and despite my quibbles with the McKay-Sirota theory of climate politics, I endorse McKay’s policy prescription. Let’s do it. But I think that art can sometimes get away from artists, and in this case the message is much bigger than climate change.
There is a range of often goofy-sounding threats to humanity that don’t track well onto our partisan cleavages or culture war battles other than that addressing them invariably involves some form of concerted action of the sort that conservatives tend to disparage. And this isn’t a coincidence. If existential threats were materializing all the time, we’d be dead and not streaming satirical films on Netflix. So the threats tend to sound “weird,” and if you talk a lot about them you’ll be “weird.” They don’t fit well into the grooves of ordinary political conflict because ordinary political conflict is about stuff that happens all the time.
So read Ord’s book “The Precipice” and find out all about it. Did you know that the Biological Weapons Convention has just four employees? I do because it’s in the book. Let’s maybe give them six?
For all that, though, I am genuinely shocked that the actual real-world emergence of SARS-Cov-2 has not caused more people to care about pandemic risk...
And we’re doing very little about this. ... If you went on TV to talk about comets, people would laugh at you. But people on TV are talking about the pandemic all the time. So why can’t we talk about forward-looking pandemic policy?
There are rumors in D.C. of an effort to put together an Omicron-focused supplemental appropriation.
That’s a perfectly reasonable idea. But it’s crucial for policymakers to see that the Omicron problem isn’t just — or even necessarily primarily — about Omicron. It’s about variants and mutation in general. We have a variant right now that pairs breakthrough capability with high transmissibility, but doesn’t seem to attack the lungs nearly as aggressively as Delta did. There’s no guarantee we’ll get so lucky with the next variant, and we need to be improving our capabilities and tackling the pandemic issue in a much more serious way."
Resource for Recruiters and Hiring Managers: Stellarworx is a non-EA database of skilled job seekers without traditional degrees
EAs orgs are looking for top talent. EA Recruiters I talk with often acknowledge that university credentials are a useful proxy for employability, but obviously not the only available path for skilled, altruistic people. Recruiters would prefer to be able to easily identify strong candidates who have not gone to college as well, but this is harder to do.
FYI: I just came across a database* and a network outside EA which might serve as a useful model or node for finding such people.
Opportunities@Work is a US non-profit working to help people overcome credentialist barriers to employment. They estimate that the US labor force includes 70M underemployed “STARs”— people who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes such as community college, on the job training, partial college, self-teaching etc.
They offer a talent matching database*: https://stellarworx.org
Employers can search for specific skills among candidates, post jobs, and be matched with candidates via a matching algorithm.
I don’t expect this database to have many EAs in it (yet!). However, it could be worth a look when you have a role that doesn’t require pre-existing EA knowledge and when you’re specifically looking to diversify a candidate pool. (STAR candidates are disproportionately rural, veterans, and/or people of color).
Someone may also want to replicate this database idea for EA talent in the future.
*Disclaimer: I haven’t tested this database yet. It seems a bit new and potentially buggy, hence my posting in Shortform.
Curated and popular this week
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TL;DR
Exactly one year after receiving our seed funding upon completion of the Charity Entrepreneurship program, we (Miri and Evan) look back on our first year of operations, discuss our plans for the future, and launch our fundraising for our Year 2 budget.
Family Planning could be one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available. Reducing unintended pregnancies lowers maternal mortality, decreases rates of unsafe abortions, and reduces maternal morbidity. Increasing the interval between births lowers under-five mortality. Allowing women to control their reproductive health leads to improved education and a significant increase in their income. Many excellent organisations have laid out the case for Family Planning, most recently GiveWell.[1]
In many low and middle income countries, many women who want to delay or prevent their next pregnancy can not access contraceptives due to poor supply chains and high costs. Access to Medicines Initiative (AMI) was incubated by Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2024 with the goal of increasing the availability of contraceptives and other essential medicines.[2]
The Problem
Maternal mortality is a serious problem in Nigeria. Globally, almost 28.5% of all maternal deaths occur in Nigeria. This is driven by Nigeria’s staggeringly high maternal mortality rate of 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, the third highest in the world. To illustrate the magnitude, for the U.K., this number is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births.
While there are many contributing factors, 29% of pregnancies in Nigeria are unintended. 6 out of 10 women of reproductive age in Nigeria have an unmet need for contraception, and fulfilling these needs would likely prevent almost 11,000 maternal deaths per year.
Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that every dollar spent on contraceptive services beyond the current level would reduce the cost of pregnancy-related and newborn care by three do
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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Need help planning your career? Probably Good’s 1-1 advising service is back! After refining our approach and expanding our capacity, we’re excited to once again offer personal advising sessions to help people figure out how to build careers that are good for them and for the world.
Our advising is open to people at all career stages who want to have a positive impact across a range of cause areas—whether you're early in your career, looking to make a transition, or facing uncertainty about your next steps. Some applicants come in with specific plans they want feedback on, while others are just beginning to explore what impactful careers could look like for them. Either way, we aim to provide useful guidance tailored to your situation.
Learn more about our advising program and apply here.
Also, if you know someone who might benefit from an advising call, we’d really appreciate you passing this along. Looking forward to hearing from those interested. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Finally, we wanted to say a big thank you to 80,000 Hours for their help! The input that they gave us, both now and earlier in the process, was instrumental in shaping what our advising program will look like, and we really appreciate their support.
Does the Forum have an auto-save feature for drafts?
Could it?
I made the foolish mistake of drafting a post recently, within the Forum. My computer died and I lost the draft :(