What organizations can be donated to to help people in Sudan effectively? Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/world/africa/sudan-usaid-famine.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE8.fw2L.Dmtssc-UI93V&smid=url-share
I used to feel so strongly about effective altruism. But my heart isn't in it anymore.
I still care about the same old stuff I used to care about, like donating what I can to important charities and trying to pick the charities that are the most cost-effective. Or caring about animals and trying to figure out how to do right by them, even though I haven't been able to sustain a vegan diet for more than a short time. And so on.
But there isn't a community or a movement anymore where I want to talk about these sorts of things with people. That community and mo...
On cause prioritization, is there a more recent breakdown of how more and less engaged EAs prioritize? Like an update of this? I looked for this from the 2024 survey but could not find it easily: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sK5TDD8sCBsga5XYg/ea-survey-cause-prioritization
I'd be excited to see 1-2 opportunistic EA-rationalist types looking into where marginal deregulation is a bottleneck to progress on x-risk/GHW, circulating 1-pagers among experts in these areas, and then pushing the ideas to DOGE/Mercatus/Executive Branch. I'm thinking things like clinical trials requirements for vaccines, UV light, anti-trust issues facing companies collaborating on safety and security, maybe housing (though I'm not sure which are bottlenecked by federal action). For most of these there's downside risk of the message is low fidelity, the...
The key objection I always have to starting new charities, as Charity Entrepreneurship used to focus on is that I feel is money usually not the bottleneck? I mean, we already have a ton of amazing ideas of how to use more funds, and if we found new ones, it may be very hard to reduce the uncertainty sufficiently to be able to make productive decisions. What do you think Ambitious Impact ?
In ~2014, one major topic among effective altruists was "how to live for cheap."
There wasn't much funding, so it was understood that a major task for doing good work was finding a way to live with little money.
Money gradually increased, peaking with FTX in 2022.
Now I think it might be time to bring back some of the discussions about living cheaply.
Hot take, but political violence is bad and will continue to be bad in the foreseeable near-term future. That's all I came here to say folks, have a great rest of your day.
I'm not sure how to word this properly, and I'm uncertain about the best approach to this issue, but I feel it's important to get this take out there.
Yesterday, Mechanize was announced, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to fully automate the economy. The founders include Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, and Ege Erdil, who are leaving (or have left) Epoch AI to start this company.
I'm very concerned we might be witnessing another situation like Anthropic, where people with EA connections start a company...
Back in October 2024, I tried to test various LLM Chatbots with the question:
"Is there a way to convert a correlation to a probability while preserving the relationship 0 = 1/n?"
Years ago, I came up with an unpublished formula that does just that:
p(r) = (n^r * (r + 1)) / (2^r * n)
So I was curious if they could figure it out. Alas, back in October 2024, they all made up formulas that didn't work.
Yesterday, I tried the same question on ChatGPT and, while it didn't get it quite right, it came, very, very close. So, I modified the question to be more specific:...
Per Bloomberg, the Trump administration is considering restricting the equivalency determination for 501(c)3s as early as Tuesday. The equivalency determination allows for 501(c)3s to regrant money to foreign, non-tax-exempt organisations while maintaining tax-exempt status, so long as an attorney or tax practitioner claims the organisation is equivalent to a local tax-exempt one.
I’m not an expert on this, but it sounds really bad. I guess it remains to be seen if they go through with it.
Regardless, the administration is allegedly also preparing to directl...
I guess orgs need to be more careful about who they hire as forecasting/evals researchers in light of a recently announced startup.
Sometimes things happen, but three people at the same org...
This is also a massive burning of the commons. It is valuable for forecasting/evals orgs to be able to hire people with a diversity of viewpoints in order to counter bias. It is valuable for folks to be able to share information freely with folks at such forecasting orgs without having to worry about them going off and doing something like this.
However, this only works...
Update for anyone else who may find it useful:
You need to fill out Form 8283: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8283.pdf
You can calculate the "Fair Market Value" of the stock(s) you donated by averaging the highest and lowest price of that stock on the day you donated it. I used this page to find that, but you can replace "MSFT" in the URL with whatever stock it is you sold.
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/MSFT/historical-prices
I'm currently reviewing Wild Animal Initiative's strategy in light of the US political situation. The rough idea is that things aren't great here for wild animal welfare or for science, we're at a critical time in the discipline when things could grow a lot faster relatively soon, and the UK and the EU might generally look quite a bit better for this work in light of those changes. We do already support a lot of scientist in Europe, so this wouldn't be a huge shift in strategy. It’s more about how much weight to put toward what locations for community and ...
Is there a good list of the highest leverage things a random US citizen (probably in a blue state) can do to cause Trump to either be removed from office or seriously constrained in some way? Anyone care to brainstorm?
Like the safe state/swing state vote swapping thing during the election was brilliant - what analogues are there for the current moment, if any?
This post (especially this section) explores this. There are also some ideas on this website. I've copied and pasted the ideas from that site below. I think it's written with a more international perspective, but likely has some overlap with actions which could be taken by Americans.
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Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? 🤔 Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe there's some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?
I just learned about Zipline, the world's largest autonomous drone delivery system, from YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee's recent video, so I was surprised to see Zipline pop up in a GiveWell grant writeup of all places. I admittedly had the intuition that if you're optimising for cost-effectiveness as hard as GW do, and that your prior is as skeptical as theirs is, then the "coolness factor" would've been stripped clean off whatever interventions pass the bar, and Brownlee's demo both blew my mind with its coolness (he placed an order on mobile for...
The modelling study has a "costs" section (quoted below), but for what it's worth GiveWell said they "were unable to quickly assess how key parameters like program costs... were being estimated" so I don't think this quote will satisfy you:
...Given the Ghana Health Service (GHS)'s dominant role, the government perspective in this analysis included healthcare treatment costs and incremental last mile delivery (LMD) costs. The societal perspective also accounted for externalities such as caregivers’ wage loss and transport costs.
To calculate the total cost for
Some AI research projects that (afaik) haven't had much work done on them and would be pretty interesting:
I didn't articulate myself clearly enough — first-time poster blues! I'd argue these co-builds are a destabilising force for the same reason I mentioned Pine Gap (without explaining myself, whoops).
The benefits allies receive from these facilities are often at the expense of sovereignty over the site or technical oversight by local regulatory bodies.
Now, this tradeoff might be worth it for the intelligence agencies, but the US presence is often conspicuous and jarring to the local population, even in a remote area like Alice Springs, where PG is loca...
I've been reading AI As Normal Technology by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology. You may know them as the people behind the AI Snake Oil blog.
I wanted to open up a discussion about their concept-cutting of AI as "normal" technology, because I think it's really interesting, but also gets a lot of stuff wrong.
Was sent a resource in response to this quick take on effectively opposing Trump that at a glance seems promising enough to share on its own:
From A short to-do list by the Substack Make Trump Lose Again:
...
- Friends in CA, AZ, or NM: Ask your governor to activate the national guard (...)
- Friends in NC: Check to see if your vote in the NC Supreme Court race is being challenged (...)
- Friends everywhere: Call your senators and tell them to vote no on HR 22 (...)
- Friends everywhere: If you’d like to receive personalized guidance on what opportunities are best su
In case this is useful to anyone in the future: LTFF does not provide funding for for-profit organizations. I wasn't able to find mentions of this online, so I figured I should share.
I was made aware of this after being rejected today for applying to LTFF as a for-profit. We updated them 2 weeks ago on our transition into a non-profit, but it was unfortunately too late, and we'll need to send a new non-profit application in the next funding round.