Quick takes

I have the impression that the most effective interventions, especially in global health/poverty, are usually temporary, in the sense that you need to keep reinvesting regularly, usually because the intervention provides a consumable good; for example malaria chemoprevention: it needs to be provided yearly. In contrast, solutions that seem more permanent in the long-term (e.g. a hypothetical malaria vaccination, or building infrastructure), are typically much less cost-effective on the margin because of their high cost. How do we balance pure marginal effectiveness vs eventually moving towards more permanent solutions? Could it be that by overly optimising for marginal cost-effectiveness, we might be missing a better ‘global maximum’ in the utility landscape, but we just need to descend from the current ‘local maximum’ to be able to get there eventually?

EA Connect 2025: Personal Takeaways Background I'm Ondřej Kubů, a postdoctoral researcher in mathematical physics at ICMAT Madrid, working on integrable Hamiltonian systems. I've engaged with EA ideas since around 2020—initially through reading and podcasts, then ACX meetups, and from 2023 more regularly with Prague EA (now EA Madrid after moving here). I took the GWWC 10% pledge during the event. My EA focus is longtermist, primarily AI risk. My mathematical background has led me to take seriously arguments that alignment of superintelligent AI may face fundamental verification problems, and that current trajectories pose serious catastrophic risk. This shapes my donations toward governance and advocacy rather than technical alignment. I'm not ready to pivot careers at this stage—I'm contributing through donations while continuing in mathematics. I attended EA Connect during job search, so sessions on career strategy and donation prioritization were particularly relevant. On donation strategy Joseph Savoie's talk Twice as Good introduced the POWERS framework for improving donation impact: Price Tag (know the cost per outcome), Options (compare alternatives), Who (choose the right evaluator), Evaluate (use concrete benchmarks), Reduce (minimize burden on NGOs), Substance (focus on how charities work, not presentation). The framework is useful but clearly aimed at large donors—"compare 10+ alternatives" and "hire someone to evaluate" aren't realistic for someone donating 10% of a postdoc salary. The "Price Tag" slide was striking: what $1 million buys across cause areas—200 lives saved via malaria nets, 3 million farmed animals helped through advocacy, 6.1 gigatons CO₂ mitigation potential through agrifood reform. But the X-Risk/AI line only specified inputs ("fund 3-4 research projects"), not outcomes. This reflects the illegibility problem I asked about in office hours: how do you evaluate AI governance donations? Savoie acknowledged he doesn't donate much

Consider whether you're comparatively advantaged to give to non-tax-deductible things. (Not financial advice.) I think people -- especially donors who are giving >$100k/year -- often default to thinking that they should stick to tax-deductible giving, because they have an unusually high "501c3 multiplier" due to high marginal income tax rates or low cost basis for capital gains taxes. I claim this is a mistake for some donors, because what matters is whether your 501c3 multiplier is unusually high relative to the average dollar in the donor mix, which is usually coming from other people in very high tax brackets. People who do have unusually high "501c3 multipliers" include those with employer matches to 501c3 donations. For a 1:1 match for cash donations, I think the multiplier is something like 3.5x, and even higher if you're donating appreciated assets like equity.[1] I would guess that you need to have a multiplier at least that good to actually be comparatively advantaged [ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic].[2] The reason this matters is that if too many people think they're comparatively advantaged for tax-deductible giving, then non-tax-deductible opportunities (e.g. 501c4 advocacy, political giving, even future 501c3s awaiting their 501c3 determination) will unduly struggle to fundraise, so the best marginal opportunities are often going to be in that category. 1. ^ If your donation budget is $10,000 (of post-tax income) and you're, say, a single San Franciscan making $500k (and therefore paying a 42.53% marginal tax rate, per SmartAsset), I think this means you could donate ~$17,400 in cash (a 1.74x multiplier) and deduct that from your income, reducing your tax burden by $7,400 = $10,000 from your post-tax income. Then your 1:1 employer match means the charity gets double that, or $34,800 (a 3.48x multiplier). If

Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday. My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign. If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly about my normal longtermist c3 recommendations. Some friends and I have nonpublic recommendations less good than Bores but ~4x as good as the normal longtermist c3s above, according to me.

As one of the largest single donations ever, Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25B to provide 25M American children new investment accounts: https://apnews.com/article/michael-dell-susan-trump-accounts-stock-market-poverty-inequality-7e2615d50a3fc0563109ed0eeb4c41e1

Another Philosophers Against Malaria Fundraiser has begun: https://www.againstmalaria.com/FundraiserGroup.aspx?FundraiserID=9418 In the last years, we got ca $65.000 in donations. Early donations are especially helpful, as they populate the page and give a sense of dynamism!  Any share with philosophers or university patriots that you know would be especially welcome. The fundraiser is a 'competition' between departments that aggregates donations; the winner is announced on the popular philosophy blog 'DailyNous'. Last year, the good folks at Delaware won. Before that, Michigan took the crown. Ohio State and Villanova lie in shambles.   Any help much appreciated! These are easy to run - if you are interested in starting one for your discipline, please reach out.  

The Double Up Drive is now live, with donation matching and the possibility of a tax receipt when donating from a variety of countries. https://doubleupdrive.org/2025-match-drive-preview/

It's mind-blowing to me that AMF's immediate funding gap is $462M for 2027-29. That's 56-154,000 lives (mostly under-5 children) at $3-8k per life saved, maybe fewer going forward due to evolving resistance to insecticides, but it wouldn't change the bottomline that this seems to be a gargantuan ball dropped. Last time AMF's immediate funding gap was over $300M for 2024-26, so it's grown 50%(!) this time round. Both times the main culprit was the same, the Global Fund's funding replenishment shortfall vs target, which affects programmatic planning in countries. I'd like to think we're collectively doing our part (e.g. last year GiveWell directed $150M to AMF, more than to any other charity, which by their reckoning is expected to save ~27k lives over the next 1-2 years), but it's still nuts to me that such a longstanding high-profile "shovel-ready" giving opportunity as AMF can still have such a big and growing gap!