GiveWell did their first "lookbacks" (reviews of past grants) to see if they've met initial expectations and what they could learn from them:
...Lookbacks compare what we thought would happen before making a grant to what we think happened after at least some of the grant’s activities have been completed and we’ve conducted follow-up research. While we can’t know everything about a grant’s true impact, we can learn a lot by talking to grantees and external stakeholders, reviewing program data, and updating our research. We then create a new cost-effectiveness
I suspect there is a confusion of terminology here, and also perhaps some loss of institutional knowledge. Givewell did post-hoc analyses starting in 2011 of their 2009 and 2010 recommendations to donate to VillageReach, but these were not technically "grants", but rather "charity recommendations", so I guess wouldn't be considered a "grant lookback".
In recent years GiveWell shifted from a charity recommendation model to a more direct grantmaking model, so this could be the first reviews of grants under that new model.
I notice a pattern in my conversations where someone is making a career decision: the most helpful parts are often prompted by "what are your strengths and weaknesses?" and "what kinds of work have you historically enjoyed or not enjoyed?"
I can think of a couple cases (one where I was the recipient of career decision advice, another where I was the advice-giver) where we were kinda spinning our wheels, going over the same considerations, and then we brought up those topics >20 minutes into the conversation and immediately made more progress than the res...
An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from "Days of Fire" by Peter Baker. I found this moving.
...Another major initiative was shaping up around the same time. Since taking office, Bush had developed an interest in fighting AIDS in Africa. He had agreed to contribute to an international fund battling the disease and later started a program aimed at providing drugs to HIV-infected pregnant women to reduce the chances of transmitting the virus to their babies. But it had only whetted his appetite to do more. “When we did it, it revealed how unbelievably pathe
The book "Careless People" starts as a critique of Facebook — a key EA funding source — and unexpectedly lands on AI safety, x-risk, and global institutional failure.
I just finished Sarah Wynn-Williams' recently published book. I had planned to post earlier — mainly about EA’s funding sources — but after reading the surprising epilogue, I now think both the book and the author might deserve even broader attention within EA and longtermist circles.
The early chapters examine the psychology and incentives...
I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of "a fish rots from the head." Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bi...
When is it acceptable to cite an LLM?
I couldn't find any discussion or consensus about this, so I'll ask.
I am surprised to find seemingly well-thought-out articles openly citing LLMs as research. For contrast, no one (who knows how to use Wikipedia) would cite Wikipedia: you are supposed to go to its sources. That's why [citation needed] is a thing: you don't want to build on unsubstantiated BS. So I find it hard to believe that people would cite infamously hallucination/BS-prone LLMs instead, expecting some reasoning built on that to be accepted.
If ...
GiveWell's cost to save a life has gone from $4,500 to a range between $3,000 and $5,500:
https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life
From at least as early as December 2023 (possibly as early as December 2021 when the page says it was first published) until February 2024, that page highlighted a $7.2 million 2020 grant to the Against Malaria Foundation at an estimated cost per life saved of $4,500.
The page now highlights a $6.4 million 2023 grant to the Malaria Consortium at an estimated cost per life saved of $3,000.
You can see all the es...
Am i the only one who finds the X% disagree UX confusing? It's hard not to read it and intuitively think to myself that it's an alternative weighting/aggregation/expression of the Agree/Disagree votes.
Note sure how to change the UX to be clearer, perhaps "X% disagree with question" would make it clearer to me.
This is one of the first times I have seen lead poisoning make front page news!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4n7wn8l58o
Could this be an opportunity for the new lead alliance, or even just one of the lead orgs to help China do better on lead? Maybe there will be a window where they are more open to external help? It seems China has new "maximum" lead levels regulations in paint from 2020 but there are obviously still issues...
Could well still not be worth it though if there are other "lower hanging fruit" on the lead front.
I think suicide prevention might be an underrated cause (need to firmly fact check before my confidence in this is high)
(1) if you delay someone from commiting suicide for just 30 minutes they will almost always change their mind
(2) suicidal people usually spend years inbetween attempts
(3) after someone "fails" a suicide attempt via changing their mind they usually feel a lot better emotionally (excluding failed attempts, only failure via changing your mind)
a charity in the UK places 1 hour of phone time is £44, if we assume 10% of people who call th...
Hey! You might be interested in this forum post on suicide hotlines from a while back. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xh5oyGkngGjCmNhcP/how-impactful-is-being-a-suicide-hotline-volunteer
Unfortunately, I think the comments in the post (including one from a former volunteer) make a really compelling case that it takes a lot more than 5 hours to prevent a suicide. I think it takes at least hundreds and probably thousands of hours of calls.
POLL: Is it OK to eat honey[1]?
I've appreciated the Honey wars. We've seen the kind of earnest inquiry that makes EA pretty great.
I'm interested to see where the community stands here. I have so much uncertainty that I'm close to the neutral point, but I've been updated towards it maybe not being OK - I previously slurped the honey without a thought. What do you think[2]?
This is a non-specific question. "OK" could mean a number of things (you choose). It could mean you think eating net honey is "net positive" (My pleasure/health > sma
It's OK to eat honey
I am quite uncertain because I am unsure to what extend a consumption boycott affects production; however, I lean slightly on the disagree side because boycotting animal-based foods is important for:
There seems to be a pattern where I get excited about some potential projects and ideas during an EA Global, fill EA Global survey suggesting that the conference was extremely useful for me, but then those projects never materialise for various reasons. If others relate, I worry that EA conferences are not as useful as feedback surveys suggest.
Marginal returns to work (probably) go up with funding cuts, not down.
It can be demoralizing when a field you’re working in gets funding cuts. Job security goes down, less stuff is happening in your area, and people may pay you less attention since they believe others are doing more important work. But assuming you have job security and mostly make career decisions on inside views (meaning you’re not updating too heavily on funders de-prioritizing your cause area), then your skills are more valuable than they were previously.
Lots of caveats apply of course...
Good point. In a toy model, it'd depend on relative cuts to labor versus non-labor inputs. Now that I think about it, it probably points towards exiting being better in mission-driven fields. People are more attached to their careers so the non-labor resources get cut deeply while all the staff try to hold onto their jobs.
Maybe I'd amend it to... if you're willing to switch jobs, then you can benefit from increasing marginal returns in some sub-cause areas. Because maybe there's a sub-cause area where lots of staff are quitting (out of fear the cause area ...
I’m in a WeChat group initiated by Plant Future and Good Food Fund. It is meant to connect young Chinese students who are interested in promoting vegetarianism. We have a weekly discussion (in English) every Wednesday morning 7:30AM. If you’re interested in joining, please send me a message.
Note that you do need a WeChat account.
Recently I got curious about the situation of animal farming in China. So I asked the popular AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) to do some research on this topic. I have put the result into a NotebookLM note here: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/071bb8ac-1745-4965-904a-d0afb9437682
If you have resources that you think I should include, please let me know.
The original reports can be found here: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZiW1f5Zf9YhpJUeHqfPVbuv9Afhozu1XSgy
I have also written a short summary.