Comments from the banner on the frontpage will also be posted below, but you should also feel free to post here any time. You'll only see your comment on the banner if you add it by clicking on the banner- comments added directly to this post will only appear here. The banner will be up all week. 

This thread is for discussing ways the world is getting better. You can interpret this however you like, but if you'd like some pointers: last time we had some Our World In Data-sourced "mortality rates in under 5s have fallen by X%" facts, some recent announcements from the news, and much more.  I’d also love to see examples of ways the EA community is making the world better. To anyone that needs to hear it — it’s not bragging, it’s sharing useful and motivating information.  

Last time we ran this banner, there wasn’t a discussion thread. This meant there was no room for caveats or pushback (horror!). This time, I’d love to see discussions springing out of the comments people make on the banner. However, be aware that these comments will be about things that people find motivating/ exciting, so consider that when you are adding context/ pushing back. 

50

0
0
1

Reactions

0
0
1
Comments25


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

2024 might have been a global breakout year for geothermal energy. Next generation technologies make it possible to drill for heat in places where this was previously impossible.

Our World In Data has amazing daily data insights. This one from a couple of days ago is astonishing to me. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/in-the-last-30-years-almost-everybody-in-bangladesh-gained-access-to-electricity 
 

This is actually crazy and encouraging in Uganda where this feels a long way off, amazing to see!

OWID says that ~45% of the population in Uganda has access to electricity, and that it more than doubled in the past 10 years. Does this match your experience?

Yep that matches perfectly. Much of that though will be  very very tiny solar lamp only though. 98 percent in Bangladesh is completely insane and super cool.

In the past 30 years, HIV has gone from being a lethal disease to an increasingly treatable chronic illness.

The number of nuclear warheads has decreased 82.2 % (= 1 - 12.5*10^3/(70.4*10^3)) in the last 37 years, from 1986 to 2023.

"Why I'm long-term bullish on the Middle East" by Noah Smith has some great good news stories

- Wars in the Middle East are becoming less violent (contrary to many media narratives)
- The Middle East is building a ton of desalination plants to provide fresh drinking water
- Investment in solar energy is booming

"In other words, with solar power rising and oil becoming less important, and with its demographics in a favorable position, the Middle East is primed for an economic and political reinvention."

Games have gotten cheaper over time. Real prices for console video games declined approximately 40% between 1990 and now.

The mean annual deaths per capita from natural disasters from 2010 to 2019 was 2.42 % (= 0.64*10^-5/(26.5*10^-5)) of that from 1920 to 1929.

The age-standardised disease burden per capita from non-optimal temperature has decreased 41.8 % (= 1 - 0.00475/0.00816) in the last 31 years, from 1990 to 2021.

The cost of transfer fees for remittances (specifically money sent back by migrants to their home country) has fallen from around 8% on average in 2011 to around 6% on average today. That means billions more for people on low incomes around the world. Pretty cool. 
A line graph titled "Sending money to the Global South has become cheaper" illustrates the average fees for remittances sent by migrants to various regions from 2011 to 2020. The graph features three colored lines representing Africa (blue), South America (purple), and Asia (orange). 

The y-axis represents the average fee percentage, ranging from 2% to 8%, with horizontal dotted lines indicating 3%, 4%, 6%, and 8% fee levels. The x-axis shows the years from 2011 to 2020. 

The overall trend shows a decline in sending costs over the past decade, yet all regions still exceed the target of a 3% fee set by the United Nations for 2030. The data source is noted as the World Bank (2024).

Global production of primary crop commodities reached 9.6 billion tonnes in 2022, increasing by 56 percent since 2000 and just 0.7 percent since 2021. (FAOSTAT)

We are growing more, and better, and now that we have CRISPR in plant selection, my guess is that we are going to start producing much more nutritious and tasty vegetables without sacrificing the yield rates.

Gapminder has a list of 100 positive news during 2023: https://www.gapminder.org/news/100-positive-news-from-2023/

Five new Effective Giving Initiatives have been created in 2024, augmenting the outreach of effective giving accross countries and linguistic communities, some of them already meeting a fruitful giving season!

Dual-AI bed nets prevented 13 million malaria cases in pilot program in 17 countries. 

https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/17/malaria-prevention-next-generation-insectidal-nets-saved-lives/

It's great to see a bunch of OWID charts here. For those interested, Nick Kristof does an article reflecting on the year gone by nearly every year. Here is his most recent one!

I really liked the way he ended the article:

I’m a backpacker, and sometimes, on a steep slog uphill through pelting rain or snow, it’s good to rest against a tree for a moment and try to remember that hiking is fun — to recharge myself for the next push uphill. That’s likewise the usefulness of a periodic reminder that the arc of human progress is still evident in metrics that matter most, such as the risk of a child dying, and that we truly can get over the next damn hill.

Thanks for this initiative, Toby!

EAs continue to approach new causes (to us) with beginners mind, and I'm continually motivated by it. Some examples:
- ARMoR's great work on anti-microbial resistance.
- This group of volunteers approaching screwworms from an animal welfare point of view.
-  (the last example in the three has now slipped my mind; this list is incomplete, you can help by expanding it)
These ideas are new, and they could always fail, or encounter some roadblock which causes those involved to switch to other paths to impact. But I love that EA continues to inspire people to look at the world's problems afresh, and find new ways to solve them. Keep going!

Even though the Trump presidency denies the consensus on and importance of climate change, there could still be ways to make progress: https://effectiveenvironmentalism.substack.com/p/can-we-make-climate-progress-under 

The internet has massively increased access to art.

Thirty years ago (and prior), if you wanted to hear a song you could hope that it would play on the radio, or you could look for it in your local record store (who may not have it) and buy the record, cassette or CD.  

Now, anyone with an internet connection can listen to any song ever recorded, at any time, at virtually no cost.

[comment deleted]2
0
0
[comment deleted]1
0
0
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 12m read
 · 
Economic growth is a unique field, because it is relevant to both the global development side of EA and the AI side of EA. Global development policy can be informed by models that offer helpful diagnostics into the drivers of growth, while growth models can also inform us about how AI progress will affect society. My friend asked me to create a growth theory reading list for an average EA who is interested in applying growth theory to EA concerns. This is my list. (It's shorter and more balanced between AI/GHD than this list) I hope it helps anyone who wants to dig into growth questions themselves. These papers require a fair amount of mathematical maturity. If you don't feel confident about your math, I encourage you to start with Jones 2016 to get a really strong grounding in the facts of growth, with some explanations in words for how growth economists think about fitting them into theories. Basics of growth These two papers cover the foundations of growth theory. They aren't strictly essential for understanding the other papers, but they're helpful and likely where you should start if you have no background in growth. Jones 2016 Sociologically, growth theory is all about finding facts that beg to be explained. For half a century, growth theory was almost singularly oriented around explaining the "Kaldor facts" of growth. These facts organize what theories are entertained, even though they cannot actually validate a theory – after all, a totally incorrect theory could arrive at the right answer by chance. In this way, growth theorists are engaged in detective work; they try to piece together the stories that make sense given the facts, making leaps when they have to. This places the facts of growth squarely in the center of theorizing, and Jones 2016 is the most comprehensive treatment of those facts, with accessible descriptions of how growth models try to represent those facts. You will notice that I recommend more than a few papers by Chad Jones in this
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
This post summarizes a new meta-analysis from the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab. We analyze the most rigorous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that aim to reduce consumption of meat and animal products (MAP). We conclude that no theoretical approach, delivery mechanism, or persuasive message should be considered a well-validated means of reducing MAP consumption. By contrast, reducing consumption of red and processed meat (RPM) appears to be an easier target. However, if RPM reductions lead to more consumption of chicken and fish, this is likely bad for animal welfare and doesn’t ameliorate zoonotic outbreak or land and water pollution. We also find that many promising approaches await rigorous evaluation. This post updates a post from a year ago. We first summarize the current paper, and then describe how the project and its findings have evolved. What is a rigorous RCT? We operationalize “rigorous RCT” as any study that: * Randomly assigns participants to a treatment and control group * Measures consumption directly -- rather than (or in addition to) attitudes, intentions, or hypothetical choices -- at least a single day after treatment begins * Has at least 25 subjects in both treatment and control, or, in the case of cluster-assigned studies (e.g. university classes that all attend a lecture together or not), at least 10 clusters in total. Additionally, studies needed to intend to reduce MAP consumption, rather than (e.g.) encouraging people to switch from beef to chicken, and be publicly available by December 2023. We found 35 papers, comprising 41 studies and 112 interventions, that met these criteria. 18 of 35 papers have been published since 2020. The main theoretical approaches: Broadly speaking, studies used Persuasion, Choice Architecture, Psychology, and a combination of Persuasion and Psychology to try to change eating behavior. Persuasion studies typically provide arguments about animal welfare, health, and environmental welfare reason
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is 99% automation of fully-remote jobs in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achieve 25% on its Frontier Math dataset (thou