Executive summary: This post shares ten of Founders Pledge’s largest recent grants across global health, catastrophic risk, and climate, aiming to clarify misconceptions about its scope, strategy, and scale of impact, while signaling plans to significantly grow its grantmaking and collaboration within the EA community.

Key points:

1. Clarifying misconceptions: The post directly addresses three common misunderstandings—that Founders Pledge (FP) only funds climate, follows member interests, and doesn't move much money—by highlighting diverse cause areas, research-led strategy, and over $323M moved to date.
2. Strategic funding across causes: FP has made large, high-leverage grants in:
   • Global health & development, e.g., $8M to TaRL Africa and $6.4M to J-PAL’s IGI, emphasizing scalable, evidence-based interventions.
   • Global catastrophic risks, e.g., $3M to seed IBBIS and $2.5M to Carnegie for nuclear escalation work, targeting underfunded existential risks.
   • Climate, e.g., $5M to DEPLOY/US and $4M to CATF, supporting bipartisan and international climate action.
3. Focus on catalytic impact: Many grants aim to unlock significant downstream funding or institutional change—e.g., J-PAL’s IGI expects to attract ~$70M in follow-on funding; BRSL and IBBIS aim to shape policy and security norms.
4. Use of advised grants and Funds: Some grants are made through donor-advised recommendations, while others come from FP-managed Funds, with an ambition to grow the Funds to improve flexibility and efficiency.
5. Plans to triple giving: FP intends to triple its giving to cost-effective opportunities across all cause areas over the next five years, increasing its role in the effective giving ecosystem.
6. Call for EA collaboration: The post invites deeper alignment and transparency with the EA community, positioning this update as a first step in more intentional public communication and cooperation.

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Executive summary: In this exploratory post, Karthik introduces the "relative range heuristic"—a simple decision-making tool that suggests prioritizing the dimension that varies most widely across options, especially when full quantification is impractical; he explains its rationale, formal structure, and potential limitations when applied to real-world tradeoffs.

Key points:

1. The heuristic: When comparing two options that trade off across dimensions, prioritize the option that is superior on the dimension with the wider intuitive range of variation.
2. Illustrative examples: The author applies this heuristic to decisions about animal welfare prioritization, medical research strategy, and survey frequency—favoring the option where the dominant factor varies over a greater range (e.g. number of small vs. large animals).
3. Formalization: The post includes a simple model where the value of each option is the product of key criteria; the heuristic approximates which product will be larger by comparing intuitive range ratios.
4. Use cases and limitations: This approach is most useful when you lack detailed data but have strong intuitions; it's less effective when variation spans multiple dimensions or when intuition is weak or disputed.
5. Cognitive bias warning: The author cautions that humans struggle to intuitively grasp very low probabilities, which might skew expected value comparisons and cause overemphasis on impact over likelihood in high-stakes interventions.
6. Implication for EA thinking: Many arguments for low-probability, high-impact causes may implicitly rely on the relative range heuristic—but their validity depends on whether large variation in probabilities truly exists or is just cognitively obscured.

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Executive summary: This exploratory post draws parallels between the 2003 Iraq War and future AI policy, suggesting that a shocking AI-related event—akin to 9/11—could empower preexisting elite factions with extreme views, potentially leading to poorly justified or harmful policy responses driven more by elite consensus than public demand.

Key points:

1. Historical analogy: The Iraq War was not an inevitable response to 9/11, but resulted from a shift in elite power dynamics, particularly the rise of a faction that had long supported intervention in Iraq, catalyzed by a national crisis.
2. Elite-driven decisions: Policy responses were largely shaped by elite beliefs and bureaucratic dynamics, with limited initial public pressure for war; classified intelligence and deference to authority played key roles in building public support.
3. Emotional overgeneralization: The fear of WMD-related mass terror led to scope-insensitive overreactions, despite weak evidence linking Iraq to 9/11—highlighting how novel or extreme threats can distort judgment.
4. Execution failures and consequences: The war’s disastrous rollout and false premises had long-term political fallout, especially for leaders who supported it, although accountability was delayed and muted.
5. AI implications: A similarly non-existential AI crisis could catalyze overreactions or radical policy shifts by empowering factions with extreme views (e.g. focused on existential risk or AI takeover), even if the triggering event is only loosely related.
6. Policy caution: The author implies that future AI governance should anticipate and guard against opportunistic or overbroad responses during crises, especially from elite groups with preexisting agendas.

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Executive summary: This evidence-based analysis argues that fish likely feel pain, challenging recent skepticism by presenting extensive behavioral and neurological evidence, and critiquing the assumption that consciousness requires a cortex—a view the author considers unsupported and ethically dangerous given the scale of fish suffering.

Key points:

1. Behavioral evidence supports fish sentience: Fish consistently exhibit pain-related behaviors—like seeking analgesics, avoiding painful stimuli, and displaying pain-specific reactions—that align with established criteria for pain perception, making non-sentient interpretations implausible.
2. Replication criticisms are overstated: The alleged replication failures in fish pain research often involve methodologically flawed studies, such as those using differing experimental conditions or misinterpreting prior findings.
3. Cortical necessity is not well-supported: The author disputes the claim that a cortex is required for consciousness or pain, citing alternative theories (e.g., midbrain-centric models), lesion studies, and conscious behavior in humans and animals lacking cortices.
4. Consciousness may arise through different structures across species: Just as flight can be achieved through wings or rotors, consciousness might emerge from non-cortical structures in fish, octopi, or insects—especially since multiple theories allow for this possibility.
5. Implications for moral treatment: Given the strong, albeit not conclusive, evidence for fish sentience, dismissing their capacity for pain poses significant ethical risks. Even a modest chance they suffer warrants serious moral concern due to the immense number of fish harmed annually.
6. Critiques of anti-sentience views: The author finds the arguments from DF, Rose, and Key unpersuasive—relying on speculative neuroscience, dismissing consistent behavioral evidence, and implying implausible conclusions (e.g., that octopi or mirror-passing fish aren't conscious).

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Executive summary: In this personal reflection, the author recounts their experience of altruistically donating a kidney to a stranger—despite post-operative complications and unexpected personal consequences—and affirms their decision with conviction, viewing it as an unequivocally worthwhile act.

Key points:

1. Motivation and decision-making: Inspired by a network of altruistic donors within the effective altruism (EA) community, the author pursued kidney donation after careful personal research, weighing medical risks (notably increased pre-eclampsia risk) against the anticipated benefit to the recipient.
2. Sociocultural and institutional friction: The process challenged prevailing norms around bodily integrity and altruism, and the healthcare system often treated her willingness to donate as a pathological condition ("Health Issue") requiring persistence to navigate.
3. Medical complication—bladder retention: A serious but ultimately temporary complication arose post-surgery, likely due to anesthesia and mismanagement by hospital staff, illustrating shortcomings in aftercare and communication, particularly around non-directed donors.
4. Institutional and bureaucratic challenges: The author faced significant administrative hurdles getting follow-up care covered, reflecting systemic gaps in supporting altruistic donors beyond the surgery itself.
5. Personal consequence—relationship strain: The donation precipitated the end of a long-term relationship, revealing deeper tensions over values, decision-making styles, and the emotional impact of large altruistic commitments.
6. Final assessment: Despite complications and personal cost, the author remains proud and grateful for the opportunity to donate, viewing it as a deeply meaningful act of service and reflecting positively on its broader moral significance.

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Executive summary: This evidence-based and exploratory review of After the Spike argues that reversing falling fertility trends and preventing long-term human depopulation will require comprehensive efforts—including massive financial support for families, policy and societal restructuring to lower parenting opportunity costs, and cultural change to elevate the social value of parenthood—since coercive or marginal policy tweaks have historically failed to influence fertility at scale.

Key points:

1. Coercive population policies—both pro- and anti-natalist—have historically failed to significantly alter long-term fertility trends, underscoring the need for voluntary, incentive-aligned approaches.
2. Rising opportunity costs, not affordability per se, appear to better explain declining fertility, as modern parenting increasingly competes with more attractive alternative life pursuits.
3. Incremental support policies like childcare subsidies and baby bonuses are worthwhile but insufficient, and must be part of a broader agenda to make parenting systematically easier and more appealing.
4. Cultural norms that excessively idealize parenting contribute to declining birth rates, and a shift toward recognizing and valorizing “good-enough” parenting could help make child-rearing more accessible and less daunting.
5. Spears and Geruso advocate for large-scale public investment in parenting infrastructure, akin to past radical transformations in education or public health, potentially justified by the long-term fiscal and social benefits of higher fertility.
6. The review suggests leveraging AI-driven economic changes to elevate care work and build better community infrastructure, aiming to lower parenting burdens and increase the social desirability of raising children.

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Executive summary: This exploratory post argues that, under a pragmatic and consequentialist interpretation of vegan ethics, including sardines and anchovies in an otherwise plant-based diet may reduce overall harm and better support health, environmental sustainability, and animal welfare than strict adherence to conventional vegan purity.

Key points:

1. Nutritional rationale: Sardines and anchovies offer highly bioavailable nutrients (e.g., EPA/DHA, B12, iron) often missing or hard to absorb from plant-based diets, and may enhance long-term health outcomes more reliably than supplementation alone.
2. Environmental impact: These small, wild-caught fish require no land, feed, or freshwater inputs and have significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions and ecological disruption compared to other animal or plant-based proteins.
3. Animal ethics: Although many individuals must be killed per calorie, sardines and anchovies likely have lower moral weight than many animals harmed in crop production, and their deaths via purse seining may be less painful than natural deaths from predation or starvation.
4. Societal implications: A pragmatic approach that includes low-sentience animal products could promote broader moral concern, reduce dropouts from veganism, and align more closely with effective altruist principles aimed at net harm reduction.
5. Movement strategy trade-offs: While such a view may weaken message clarity or group cohesion, it could also attract a wider audience to animal advocacy by offering a flexible and less dogmatic ethical framework.
6. Transitional ethics: Sardines and anchovies may serve as an ethically preferable interim option until plant-based or cellular agriculture fully mitigates harm from food production, making them a potential bridge toward a more sustainable food system.

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Executive summary: This interview with Joe Hardie offers an overview of Arcadia Impact’s evolution from a student-focused EA initiative into a multi-program organization supporting AI safety and related causes through research labs, talent development programs, and policy engagement, with a growing emphasis on experienced professionals alongside continued support for students.

Key points:

1. Arcadia Impact began as a student-focused community building initiative and has since expanded to support professionals and operate multiple AI safety-focused programs, including LASR Labs (technical research), ASET (engineering-focused safety projects), and Orion (governance talent development).
2. LASR Labs and ASET target technically skilled individuals at different stages, with LASR focused on producing academic research and ASET aimed at transitioning experienced engineers into AI safety work, particularly in evaluations and practical engineering.
3. Impact Research Groups and Safe AI London (SAIL) serve as student-facing entry points, providing part-time research experience and community resources, often in collaboration with EA university groups in London.
4. The LEAH coworking space supports cross-cause collaboration among EA-aligned professionals, serving as Arcadia’s operational base and fostering community among independent workers and small teams.
5. Arcadia is primarily funded by Open Philanthropy, and while this support has enabled growth, the organization is exploring diversification due to the risks of reliance on a single funder, and emphasizes clarity and impact-focused storytelling in its reporting.
6. There has been a strategic shift toward engaging experienced professionals in AI safety, prompted by increasing mainstream interest in AI risks, though Arcadia continues to invest in student programs and aims to build a pipeline from entry to advanced involvement.

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Executive summary: In this personal reflection and analysis, the author recounts their nearly year-long attempt to altruistically donate a kidney—ultimately thwarted by a diagnosis of thin basement membrane disease—and uses the experience to explore the ethical, practical, and emotional dimensions of kidney donation within the Effective Altruism (EA) framework.

Key points:

1. QALY trade-offs suggest kidney donation is not the most cost-effective altruistic action for people in developed countries, given the relatively high opportunity cost compared to global health interventions like malaria prevention.
2. Despite its inefficiency on paper, kidney donation offers unique emotional and moral value, providing visceral, direct evidence of altruistic action that abstract donations often lack.
3. The Finnish healthcare system offers a free, efficient, and thorough donor screening process, though it suffers from procedural bottlenecks, such as sequential rather than parallel donor evaluations.
4. The author's diagnosis of thin basement membrane disease disqualified them from donation, but also led to early detection of a potentially progressive kidney condition—underscoring the unexpected personal benefits of the process.
5. The post advocates for legal and policy reforms, including compensated donation schemes and coverage for lost income during recovery, to reduce supply-demand mismatches in kidney transplants.
6. The author encourages others to consider kidney donation, not just for its direct impact, but also for the personal clarity, systemic benefits, and potential health insights it can yield.

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Executive summary: This exploratory analysis argues that the far future is likely to be shaped by at least slightly misaligned values—especially regarding digital minds and population ethics—but maintains cautious optimism that the future will still be net positive, particularly if superintelligent AI helps humanity reason better about ethics.

Key points:

1. Far-future misalignment is probable (≈70%) but not necessarily catastrophic: While future values may deviate from the ideal—e.g., by ignoring digital minds or holding flawed population ethics—they are unlikely to be actively malevolent; most misalignment would likely reduce value rather than create disvalue.
2. Digital minds will likely dominate the future moral landscape: Given their expected abundance and scalability, digital minds are likely to vastly outnumber biological ones, making their treatment the central determinant of far-future value.
3. Arguments for misalignment include:
   • A historical trend of moral blind spots (e.g., slavery, factory farming).
   • Lack of a clear mechanism to ensure correct moral values emerge.
   • Deeply held but possibly harmful values, such as pro-nature biases.
   • The difficulty of detecting consciousness in non-human entities.
4. Arguments against misalignment include:
   • Potential for AI-assisted moral reflection to converge on better values.
   • Historical moral circle expansion, suggesting growing moral inclusivity—though the author cautions against overconfidence in this trend.
5. One of the most worrying misalignment scenarios is person-affecting ethics: If future actors believe creating new happy lives is morally neutral or unimportant, we might fail to realize vast amounts of potential value.
6. Moral circle expansion and philosophical clarity are crucial: Expanding ethical concern to digital minds and improving population ethics may be key levers for ensuring a valuable future, and are priorities regardless of one’s stance on moral realism.

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