Kestrel🔸
Bio
I work as a researcher in statistical anomaly detection in live data streams. I work at Lancaster University and my research is funded by the Detection of Anomalous Structure in Streaming Settings group, which is funded by a combination of industrial funding and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ultimately the UK Government).
There's a very critical research problem that's surprisingly open - if you are monitoring a noisy system for a change of state, how do you ensure that you find any change as soon as possible, while keeping your monitoring costs as low as possible?
By "low", I really do mean low - I am interested in methods that take far less power than (for example) modern AI tools. If the computational cost of monitoring is high, the monitoring just won't get done, and then something will go wrong and cause a lot of problems before we realise and try to fix things.
This has applications in a lot of areas and is valued by a lot of people. I work with a large number of industrial, scientific and government partners.
Improving the underlying mathematical tooling behind figuring out when complex systems start to show problems reduces existential risk. If for some reason we all die, it'll be because something somewhere started going very wrong and we didn't do anything about it in time. If my research has anything to say about it, "the monitoring system cost us too much power so we turned it off" won't be on the list of reasons why that happened.
I also donate to effective global health and development interventions and support growth of the effective giving movement. I believe that a better world is eminently possible, free from things like lead pollution and neglected tropical diseases, and that everyone should be doing at least something to try to genuinely build a better world.
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GiveWell has lots of research on evaluating programs. Check out their website and podcast, and their grant recipients.
Happier Lives Institute does a similar thing to GiveWell, but with a different moral prioritisation (and a substantially smaller budget).
Giving Green and Power for Democracies do similarly, and I think Peace Per Dollar might be starting up.
Giving What We Can has its "other supported charities" list.
Ambitious Impact has lists of EA-incubated charities (but again, this is a different thing from effective giving opportunities, as they're often targeting other funding sources).
The EA Forum itself runs a donation election every December - you can look up last year's.
Coefficient Giving's website has problem area descriptions and grant dispersals.
Happier lives Institute: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/
EA also does democracy charity evaluation which you might want to look into https://www.powerfordemocracies.org/
Hi James! There's actually a variety of EA-aligned charities in those areas. Some that come to mind:
- Teaching at the Right Level (Education)
- NOVAH No Violence At Home (women's domestic abuse prevention)
- ACTRA (reducing criminality in Central America)
- Africa Jobs Fund (economic growth)
- Lafiyah Nigeria (contraceptives provision, so women's empowerment)
They all have their own theories as to why they might be unusually effective.
As for why:
- The differing moral priorities about saving a life versus improving a life. You sound like you'd be more on board with the moral prioritisation of the Happier Lives Institute rather than GiveWell, so do check them and their recommendations out.
- Global health really has a huge funding gap. So it's quite easily to find something that works effectively - you take a working preventative (e.g. malaria nets, chemoprevention, vaccines, vitamin supplements) and you put cash towards incentivising it / tackle supply-side issues. There's just a lot that can be done in this space in ways that replicate. It's quite easy to get into. A lot of other intervention types are just a lot fiddlier.
- The richer a country is, the more arguments there are that effective interventions helping citizens within it should be funded by its government. To be clear, EAs still definitely work on this stuff! But they tend to bid for government funding pots, not for effective giving money, so you hear about them less.
Great job! Wonderful to see effective giving being so very back.
Also good to see 🔷 catching better metrics. I'd seen quite a lot of prior anecdotal evidence of it appearing significantly undervalued - many of the most engaged effective givers I know were 🔷 initially, which really didn't track with the very low value attributions given previously.
To think on this more. There are basically 4 ways to be "successful" as a local EA community that has had £X worth of an EA infrastructure grant put into it.
- Career transitions with an expected value worth a £X investment.
- Inspire >£5X worth of counterfactual effective giving to the GiveWell All Grants Fund or other external effective charity. (Giving multipliers of good effective giving infrastructure opportunities are roughly 5x)
- Inspire >£X worth of counterfactual giving to EA infrastructure, or other meta opportunities that would otherwise be in receipt of EA infrastructure spending.
- Some combination of the above.
By far the easiest thing to meaningfully achieve here is actually the EA infrastructure giving target, assuming your community members aren't cash strapped. Just keep £X low by not overspending and raise it yourself by providing your community with things of value worth paying for: a huge amount of EA content is actually quite personally valuable, be that tools for working more productively, truth seeking discipline and scout mindset development, personal satisfaction and well-being from giving effectively, learning to cook healthy vegan food as a young adult, or just a place to go to make interesting friends. On top of that, more relational altruists (e.g. people who run the church building you meet up in) may not care about supporting what you care about (e.g. malaria), but they may well end up caring a lot about supporting you, assuming you're a bunch of nice people. This helps with cost minimisation.
In actuality you probably should be doing a combination of all these things depending on who's turning up and why they're engaging. Career transitions are still important! But if you don't neglect either the opportunities for effective giving or the infrastructure fundraising/cost minimisation, you can keep your local group unambiguously "worth it" while shifting focus towards something that looks like a more genuine expression of community than something endlessly focused on career transitions that ends up being somewhat soulless.
Hi S!
It's great to see you're so dedicated, and also that you're taking good care of your health. Learning to cook is one of the best things you can do as a teenager and young adult to set yourself up for a better life (that also costs you, animals and the planet less).
I recommend a site like Nutritionfacts ( https://nutritionfacts.org/ ) for accessible details of plant-based nutrition.
Thank you, it means a lot to me that people value my work.