Quick takes

The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines? 

I admire influential orgs that publicly change their mind due to external feedback, and GiveWell is as usual exemplary of this (see also their grant "lookbacks"). From their recently published Progress on Issues We Identified During Top Charities Red Teaming, here's how external feedback changed their bottomline grantmaking: Some self-assessed progress that caught my eye — incomplete list, full one here; these "led to important errors or... worsened the credibility of our research" (0 = no progress made, 10 = completely resolved): (As an aside, I've noticed plenty of claims of GW top charity-beating cost-effectiveness figures both on the forum and elsewhere, and I basically never give them the credence I'd give to GW's own estimates, due to the kind of (usually downward) adjustments mentioned above like receiving interventions from other sources or between-program interventions, and GW's sheer reasoning thoroughness behind those adjustments, seriously, click on any of those "(more)"s) Some other issues they'd "been aware of at the time of red teaming and had deprioritized but that we thought were worth looking into following red teaming" — again incomplete list, full one here: I always had the impression GW engaged outside experts a fair bit, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn they thought they weren't doing enough of it and then actually followed through so seriously, this is an A+ example of organisational commitment to and follow-through on self-improvement so I'd like to quote this section in full: Some quick reactions: * I like that GW thinks they should allocate more time to expert conversations vs desk research in most cases * I like that GW are improving their own red-teaming process by having experts review their work in parallel * I too am keen to see what CGD find out re: why GW top-recommended programs aren't funded by other groups you'd expect to do so * the Zipline exploratory grant is very cool, I raved about it previously * I wouldn't

An excerpt about the creation of PEPFAR, from "Days of Fire" by Peter Baker. I found this moving.

The NPR podcast Planet Money just released an episode on GiveWell.

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!

New anti-malaria treatment clears phase 3 trials. I just found that there is a new anti-malarial alternative to artemisinin, the most common antimalarial chemical, which has successfully completed Phase 3 trials. Its nickname is GanLum and apparently has quite powerful effects: This is an important advance because resistance to artemisinin is one of the growing concerns in the fight against malaria. You may read more in https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/12/g-s1-97487/malaria-drug-new and https://www.mmv.org/newsroom/news-resources-search/phase-3-trial-next-generation-malaria-treatment-ganaplacide-lumefantrine .

A number of podcasts are doing a fundraiser for GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/happinesslab2025/  Podcast about the fundraiser: https://pca.st/bbz3num9

Update (January 28): Marco Rubio has now issued a temporary waiver for "humanitarian programs that provide life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance."[1] PEPFAR's funding was recently paused as a result of the recent executive order on foreign aid.[2] (It was previously reauthorized until March 25, 2025.[3]) If not exempted, this would pause PEPFAR's work for three months, effective immediately. Marco Rubio has issued waivers for some forms of aid, including emergency food aid, and has the authority to issue a similar waiver for PEPFAR, allowing it to resume work immediately.[4] Rubio has previously expressed (relatively generic) positive sentiments about PEPFAR on Twitter,[5] and I don't have specific reason to think he's opposed to PEPFAR, as opposed to simply not caring strongly enough to give it a waiver without anyone encouraging him to. I think it is worth considering calling your representatives to suggest that they encourage Rubio to give PEPFAR a waiver, similarly to the waiver he provided to programs giving emergency food aid. I have a lot of uncertainty here — in particular, I'm not sure whether this is likely to persuade Rubio — but I think it is fairly unlikely to make things actively worse. I think the argument in favor of calling is likely stronger for people who are represented by Republicans in Congress; I expect Rubio would care much more about pressure from his own party than about pressure from the Democrats.   1. ^ https://apnews.com/article/trump-foreign-assistance-freeze-684ff394662986eb38e0c84d3e73350b 2. ^ My primary source for this quick take is Kelsey Piper's Twitter thread, as well as the Tweets it quotes and the articles it and the quoted Tweet link to. For a brief discussion of what PEPFAR is, see my previous Quick Take. 3. ^ https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/pepfars-short-term-reauthorization-sets-an-uncertain-course-for-its-long-term-future/ 4. ^ htt