All of Sanjay's Comments + Replies

The person I spoke to at the party said that he knew somebody who had a fungal infection and was likely to die from it.

I don't know much about antifungals, but I infer from his comment that we don't have enough antifungals to cover all of the potential fungal infections.

According to someone I chatted to at a party (not normally the optimal way to identify top new cause areas!) fungi might be a worrying new source of pandemics because of climate change.

Apparently this is because thermal barriers prevented fungi from infecting humans, but because fungi are adapting to higher temperatures, they are now better able to overcome those barriers. This article has a bit more on this:

https://theecologist.org/2026/jan/06/age-fungi

Purportedly, this is even more scary than a pathogen you can catch from people, because you can catch th... (read more)

For anyone who got excited about the title, it may well be the case that you cannot just buy far UVC. I had a look at https://aerolamp.net/products/devkit and it doesn't seem to ship to countries outside the US, so if you're one of the 95% of the world's population that isn't American, this doesn't seem to be an option.

Great to see you thinking about this, good work.

I would have expected to see more on India.

• In particular, Indian companies above a certain size are required by law to donate 2% of profits
• Given the enormous wealth disparity, companies can make a lot of money, donate locally within India, and still find extremely poor people and relatively good giving opportunities

This post has plenty on "how to make EA cool", but the title promised "Why make EA cool" as well. I think the post is a bit light on the why.

Maybe you don’t think being cool matters. That’s a fine opinion if you’re ok with EA being a group of 10,000 people, ~70% male and ~75% white, circularly spending Dustin Moskovitz’s money. 

But imagine a movement of a million people. A million people donating a percentage of their income to create a community fund as large as Open Phil’s. A million people working at high-impact organizations. 

There's been ple... (read more)

I feel like this is a first step on the road to something that might be quite powerful at communicating chicken/hen welfare.

The thing that was missing for me was that when I was "playing" at being a chicken in the different environments, I didn't see the point. I did various things, but found them boring.

The easiest way to better gamify this is to explain upfront that the user will be asked to guess what sort of environment the chicken is in, so the user can better orient themselves to what they are trying to achieve.

A better way to gamify is to add a welf... (read more)

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.

• Promoting free and fair elections, especially at the midterms
  • Several NGOs are well established as working on this, eg Common Cause works to reduce needless barriers to voting and stop gerrymandering, etc. Verified voting advocates for secure voting systems, and the Brennan Cent

For people who haven't clicked through, it might be worth mentioning that this is about insects being used as livestock for other animals.

This matters because you might consider insect farming for human consumption to be more morally ambiguous. (If insects turn out not to be sentient, and insect consumptions displaces consumption of larger, actually-sentient animals, this could be a positive for the world).

However, insects being used as livestock is more clearly negative.

I think this is the same consultation flagged by James here, right? If so, might be worth flagging that.

I really appreciate having these flagged on the forum, so thank you, I think it's a valuable public service

Glad to see you raising this. I raised a related question here (has a slightly more US-centric angle to it). In that post I do suggest some interventions, but there's not a lot of careful research behind it.

I've upvoted this comment and disagree-voted it. I was initially prone to be dubious of the suggestion. I think lots of us are motivated by important outcomes like children not dying, and linking aid to national self-interest seemed problematic, because children not dying (or other good outcomes) are not the same as national self-interest. Optimising for one is likely to lead to different aid interventions than optimising for the other. 

However I've warmed somewhat to the suggestion.

• Nick rightly pointed out that politics risks toggling the supply up a

Good question, I'm sorry nobody has replied yet. I don't feel like I'm much of an expert on this, so others may be better positioned than me.

My sense is that yes, this may well be impactful, especially if it is clearly communicated. This is a meaningful move, and one that the party will feel -- all parties need financing.

To maximise effectiveness, you likely need to inform the right people. By all means, do tell your MP (assuming your MP is a Labour MP). Saying that you're willing to leave the Labour party makes you less likely to vote for them in future, ... (read more)

Good point here:

Another lever to consider, rather than ‘punish government for cutting aid’, is ‘telling the government that effectiveness matters to me when they decide what to cut’. Don’t know how to compare those.

If I'd given more thought to the draft letter, I might have said more on this.

I'm conscious that Jenny Chapman (who is taking over from Anneliese Dodds as Development minister) doesn't seem to have much background in development. 

If someone wrote an email which conveyed acceptance of the reality (cuts are going to happen, whether I like it ... (read more)

Sorry I didn't see this sooner. Yes, I do believe that an email will be more likely to be effective if it looks like it's not copied and pasted. My basis for this is that when I supported a group of people to campaign on ODA about 4 years ago, I asked several people, including veteran campaigners and people who have worked for an MP replying to emails for them. Those people explained that if the email looks like a copy-and-paste/boilerplate email, they will assume that it was driven by a campaign group, which carries less weight than if you do it yourself.... (read more)

Strong upvoted. I'm definitely among the people who saw the headlines, thought that it was a simple case of Musk losing, and didn't appreciate that it's potentially much less favourable to OpenAI that it appears from the headlines.

Thanks for the question. Happy to set out how I think about this, but note that I haven't researched this deeply, and for several parts of this argument, I could imagine myself changing my mind with a bit more research.

• Firstly, we’re not considering the aid spend in isolation. Rather, the impact of our actions may be to redirect spend from one usage to another, so we're comparing to some counterfactual spend, which is typically likely to be some sort of spend which leads to (probably) some sort of economic activity in a developed economy.
• Secondly, I think

Thanks Larks. Agree, both of those ideas are already in the template

This seems superficially like a great idea, but I think it works better for, say, the centre for effective aid policy (if it still existed).

• It's easier to decide which things to prioritise if you've gone through the things that UK aid actually does and worked out which are better and which are less good.
• Your ask will be more effective if you have a good handle on which deprioritisation are a no-go politically (eg are you suggesting deprioritising work in Gaza or Ukraine? Would the politics of that work? Does any of your suggestions bump up against anythin

I haven't thought about this in great depth, so I'm very open to the possibility that this topic should be deprioritised. I haven't understood your rationale, so I hope you don't mind if I probe further. 

Firstly, a lot of the concerns expressed here I think are extremely unlikely. I do not think there is any serious risk that Trump will send the military after, or otherwise seriously harass, former government employees.

I guess I'd be somewhat interested to know why serious harassment is so unlikely. The sources that I cited seemed to be quite worrying... (read more)

It does sound sort of interesting, but I don't think I have a clear picture of the theory of change. How does the dashboard lead to better outcomes? If the theory of change depends on certain key people (media? Civil servants? Someone else?) making use of the dashboard, would it make sense to check with those people and see if they would find it useful? Should we check if they're willing to be involved in the creation process to provide the feedback which helps ensure it's worth their while to use it?

Shortly after I wrote this, the news reported nationwide protests on topics pretty aligned you what in talking about here. This might mean that my assessment of neglectedness should be updated

I have now reviewed and edited the relevant section.

My feeling when I drafted it was as per Ozzie's comment -- as long as I was transparent, I thought it was OK for readers to judge the quality of the content as they see fit.

Part of my rationale for this being OK was that it was right at the end of a 15-page write-up. Larks wrote that many people will read this post. I hope that's true, but I didn't expect that many people would read the very last bits of the appendix. The fact that someone noticed this at all, let alone almost immediately after this post was published, was an update for me.

Hence my decision to review and edit that section at the end of the document, and remove the disclaimer.

You wrote:

Consider these types of questions that AI systems might help address:

• What strategic missteps is Microsoft making in terms of maximizing market value?
• What metrics could better evaluate the competence of business and political leaders?
• Which public companies would be best off by firing their CEOs?
• <...>

I'm open to the possibility that a future AI may well be able to answer these questions more quickly and more effectively than the typical human who currently handles those questions.

The tricky thing is how to test this.

Given that these are not e... (read more)

Can you give an indication of how common the problem is? (ie how often do papers get lost/deleted?) My intuition says not very often, and when it does happen it's most likely to be the least useful papers, but I could believe my intuition is wrong.

I don't think bringing the ISS down in a controlled way is because of the risk that it might hit someone on earth, or because of "the PR disaster" of us "irrationally worrying more about the ISS hitting our home than we are getting in their car the next day".

Space debris is a potentially material issue.

• There are around 23,000 objects larger than 10 cm (4 inches) and about 100 million pieces of debris larger than 1 mm (0.04 inches). Tiny pieces of junk might not seem like a big issue, but that debris is moving at 15,000 mph (24,140 kph), 10 times faster tha

A donor-pays philanthropy-advice-first model solves several of these problems.

• If your model focuses primarily on providing advice to donors, your scope is "anything which is relevant to donating", which is broad enough that you're bound to have lots of high-impact research to do, which helps with constraint 1.
• Strategising and prioritisation are much easier when you're knee-deep in supporting donors with their donations -- this highlights the pain points in making good giving decisions, which helps with constraint 2.
• If donors perceive that the research is w

Hi Ozzie, I typically find the quality of your contributions to the EA Forum to be excellent. Relative to my high expectations, I was disappointed by this comment.

> Would such a game "positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization," as described by the Long-Term Future Fund? For context, Rob Miles's videos (1) and (2) from 2017 on the Stop Button Problem already provided clear explanations for the general public.

It sounds like you're arguing that no other explanations are useful, because Rob Miles had a few videos in 2017 on the issue?

Thi... (read more)

Donors contribute to these funds expecting rigorous analysis comparable to GiveWell's standards, even for more speculative areas that rely on hypotheticals, hoping their money is not wasted, so they entrust that responsibility to EA fund managers, whom they assume make better and more informed decisions with their contributions.

I think it's important that the author had this expectation. Many people initially got excited about EA because of the careful, thoughtful analysis of GiveWell. Those who are not deep in the community might reasonably see the branding "EA Funds" and have exactly the expectations set out in this quote.

I'm working from brief conversations with the relevant experts, rather than having conducted in-depth research on this topic. My understanding is:

• the food security angle is most useful for a country which imports a significant amounts of its food; where this is true, the whole argument is premised on the idea that domestic food producers will be preserved and strengthened, so it doesn't naturally invite opposition. 
• the economy / job creation angle is again couched in terms of "increasing the size of the pie" -- i.e. adding more jobs to the domestic ec

When advocating that governments invest more in alt proteins, the following angles are typically used:

• climate/environmental
• bioeconomy (i.e. if you invest in this, it will create more jobs in your country)
• food security

I understand the latter two are generally popular with right-wing governments; either of these two positions can be advanced without referencing climate at all (which may be preferable in some cases for the reasons Ben outlines)

I can confirm that there exists at least NGO who has this type of risk on their radar. I don't want to say too much until we have gone through the appropriate processes for publishing our notes from speaking with them. 

If any donors want to know more, feel free to reach out directly and I can tell you more.

An application I was expecting you to mention was longer term forecasts. E.g. if there was a market about, say, something in 2050, for example, the incentives for forecasters are perhaps less good, because the time until resolution is so long. But a "chained" forecast capturing something like "what will next year's forecast say" (and next year's forecast is about the following year's forecast, and so until you hit 2050, when it resolves to the ground truth).

This assumes that forecasters are less effective when it comes to markets which don't resolve for a long time.

In 2020, we at SoGive were excited about funding nuclear work for similar reasons. We thought that the departure of the MacArthur foundation might have destructive effects which could potentially be countered with an injection of fresh philanthropy.

We spoke to several relevant experts. Several of these were with (unsurprisingly) philanthropically funded organisations tackling the risks of nuclear weapons. Also unsurprisingly, they tended to agree that donors could have a great opportunity to do good by stepping in to fill gaps left by MacArthur. 

There... (read more)

Thanks Larks, I definitely agree with your characterisation of Kevin Esvelt as the bio guy. An error crept into our notes but is now corrected. 

Could someone please explain how much extra value this adds given that we already have the Cambridge declaration?

If the authors of this post haven't indicated what their star signs are, how do I know if I believe what they say?

Can you say any more about what you plan to do?

At the time, the comment was "it's not obvious, more rationale needed" -- i.e. I expressed sympathies for the proposal of transparency, but erred towards not doing it. 

I think the main thing which has changed is that it's a slightly more academic question now -- we no longer have the resource to run something like this. 

If, hypothetically, we did have the resource to run this again, would we default to asking funders to be transparent (rather than our previous default choice of not making this request)? I'm not sure -- as I say, it's a rather more academic question now.

Thanks very much for this, much appreciated. Your best guess of vaccines being less cost-effective than bednets and SMC, but not by an order of magnitude, sounds sensible.

Thanks very much for the comment, this is really interesting. The idea of explicitly adding in suicide risk is an interesting direction for the analysis, it sounds like good work. When you publish your paper, I'll be interested to consider whether the underlying estimates of the badness of depression (perhaps implicitly) already reflect the suicide angle.

At some point it might be useful to do a more careful compare and contrast between your method (using Pyne et al's paper) and our method (using the Sanderson paper). Given that the methods are quite differ... (read more)

I certainly would like to equip my toddler with more maths (and preferably computer science) skills than we see in schools. I was planning to remedy this by taking more time on teaching her the content myself (assuming she's willing!) I appreciate this won't work for everyone -- it's time-consuming and not every parent has great maths.

I'm hoping that I will be able to get into a routine of regular maths fun with Daddy. At first this will be the basics (my daughter can't talk yet, so she still has a lot to learn!), and then over time moving on to more advan... (read more)

I said this in another comment, but in case it gets missed, I just want to highlight that 1Day Sooner has shown an excellent attitude. When we reached out to them, they were consistently welcoming of the criticism and had constructive useful comments. I've found these virtues to be more common in the EA community than elsewhere, but I still like to call them out when I see it.

Thank you Josh. I've found 1Day Sooner's collaborative spirit to be exemplary here -- both being welcoming of the challenge and adding useful thoughts.

It seems intuitive to me that the following package of considerations may lead to vaccines and nets/SMC having roughly the same cost-effectiveness:

• vaccines are 10x (ish) more expensive (bad for vaccines)
• vaccines are more targeted at the most vulnerable ages (good for vaccines)
• misc other considerations, like insecticide resistance (this is a bit hand-wavey at the moment, but I guess probably nets out to being

Sorry for asking about a minor detail, but Figure 3 in section 3.2.1 shows an internal validity adjustment of 90% for ITNs (top row of figure). I thought this was 95%? Am I misunderstanding how you're thinking about the adjustment in this document?

I've often thought that more quantification of the uncertainty could be useful in communicating to donors as well. E.g. "our 50% confidence interval for AMF is blah, and that confidence interval for deworming blah, so you can see we have much less confidence in it". So I think this is a step in the right direction, thanks for sharing, setting it out in your usual thoughtful manner.

Wow, great writing!

Good question. 

It's also helpful because the wording of my post was meant to convey that "expert opinions tend to believe that the therapeutic alliance matters" (and not necessarily that I'm confident that that's the case). 

One of the papers that I referenced did flag that most of the studies are observational rather than experimental, which does validate your concern. (I think it was Arnow & Steidman 2014 which said this; I don't know if a more recent paper sheds more light on this).

I'm not planning to look into this topic in any depth, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable can give a more definitive answer.