I agree that the value of many interventions is sensitive to specific moral weights, but I disagree with "therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work".

The increase in subjective wellbeing from GiveWell-funded work seems really high, and it could be competitive with mental health types of work. (or not, as different kinds of wellbeing can be reasonably valued in very different ways)

E.g. HLI "higher risk, higher reward" "Promising Charities" at https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/charities/ are both also funded/recommended by GiveWell.

Worth noting that besides HLI focusing on happiness, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship just incubated https://www.betterfuturesguide.org/ which seems to focus entirely on poverty reduction, and GiveWell is expanding their work on "Livelihoods Programs", which weigh income gains 2x higher than they normally would.

(I'm sure you know all the above, just writing it out for people with less context)

That's not clear to me: all GiveWell interventions have lots of life-improving benefits besides life-saving.

E.g. for the AMF, 33% of the estimated value comes from long-term income increases, and for each life saved there's ~200 malaria cases averted, which likely significantly increases subjective wellbeing

Thank you! Here's a link from web.archive.org of the EA Forum citation https://web.archive.org/web/20230715000000*/https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0255/4986/5032/files/DC-CASE-STUDY_NEW-BRAND_WEB2.pdf?v=1653689936 

But yeah if we can't trust that there was a real significant population reduction it doesn't mean much

I haven't read the whole post, but "519 g of fertility bait prevents one rodent birth" seemed implausibly high. I asked Gemini to review it, and it came out with this:

This 519g figure assumes wild rats will drink 10% of their body weight in bait every day as their exclusive hydration source. But real-world data shows intermittent grazing is enough to cause cumulative infertility.

For example, in the Washington D.C. ContraPest pilot trial (Nov 2019–Oct 2020):

• Site A had a starting colony of 391 rats.
• Over 12 months, the population crashed by 88% (the juvenile count specifically dropped from 121 to just 2).
• The entire colony consumed only 1.8L of bait all year.

If it truly took 519g to prevent one birth, 1,800g would have only prevented ~3.5 births for the whole colony.

Was it correct? I'm mostly curious about whether current LLMs can already help improving these estimates, or their reviews have too much noise

orgs like GiveWell are still getting a lot of funding

It's not just that these orgs are still getting a lot of funding:

1. their funding is significantly increasing
2. there's many more of them
3. many of them are making more and more varied grants themselves, e.g. GiveWell making 2 <$100k grants in 2026 which they didn't use to do 5 years ago, Founders Pledge brand new Catalytic Impact Fund

there were more fellowship and grant and award opportunities than I could possibly apply to. It does not feel like that today.

I'm surprised by this, I think there's a ton today. I'm not following this space actively but, besides the >100 job openings and >3 AIM programs mentioned above, here's some off the top of my head:

1. High Impact Professionals Impact Accelerator Program
2. CEA bootcamp (which as far as I know is not mainly about AI)
3. School for Moral Ambition fellowships and circles
4. Magnify Mentoring mentee applications (I think it now accepts more people than WANBAM did five years ago, but can't quickly find numbers. I see it got $371k from Coefficient Giving in August 2025, and their revenue seems to be increasing)
5. Animal Advocacy Careers course and career advising
   1. Their Job Board has 21 job openings from last week

You can also have a look at the most recent posts tagged "opportunities to take action" and the EA opportunities board, there's lots of non-AI stuff, enough to overwhelm newcomers as much as EA in 2021, and likely way more than EA in 2017.

Also in general if Coefficient Giving and others are making more grants to more things, it likely means that there are more opportunities.

funding for non-AI projects has dried up

What are you basing this on? I think the opposite is going on. Some datapoints that come to mind:

1. Coefficient Giving more than doubled their funding for GiveWell for 2026, adding $175M on top of the existing $100M. They also started two new funds
2. GiveWell's funding from non-Coefficient Giving donors is also increasing
3. Founders Pledge went from $25M money moved in 2022 → $80M in 2023 → $140M in 2024, and other major funders are emerging
4. Giving Green influences >$17M/year in climate donations, and recently started research into biodiversity projects
5. The EA Animal Welfare fund raised >$10M/y last year and is now targeting $20M/y
6. https://jobs.probablygood.org/ has 148 roles published in the last 4 days, only 10 of which are explicitly categorized as AI safety (although a few more involve AI)
7. Charity Entrepreneurship is launching more and more charities per year, and AIM as a whole has more programs

Thanks for sharing! I'd have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.

Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.

As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!

my first post on LessWrong was scrapped because they identified it as AI written

I'm surprised to read this, can you check your post on https://www.pangram.com/ ?

The link seems to be broken

https://benefficienza.it/ (spelled with two Fs) has a lot of material on effective giving in Italian, in case it's useful, although nothing on catholicism as far as I'm aware.

Some EA articles were translated here: https://altruismoefficace.it/blog 

And the EA handbook a few years ago was translated here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/ea-italy (I don't know if it changed much since then)

There was also this article in the major Italian Catholic newspaper after the FTX scandals, which was not entirely negative, but still mostly skeptical.