Podcasts about Against Malaria Foundation

I can't recall the last time I read a book in one sitting, but that's what happened with Moral Ambition by bestselling author Rutger Bregman. I read the German edition, though it's also available in Dutch. An English release is slated for May. The book opens with the statement: “The greatest waste of our times is the waste of talent.” From there, Bregman builds a compelling case for privileged individuals to leave their “bullshit jobs” and tackle the world's most pressing challenges. He weaves together narratives spanning historical movements like abolitionism, suffrage, and civil rights through to contemporary initiatives such as Against Malaria Foundation, Charity Entrepreneurship, LEEP, and the Shrimp Welfare Project. If you've been engaged with EA ideas, much of this will sound familiar, but I initially didn't expect to enjoy the book as much as I did. However, Bregman's skill as a storyteller and his knack for [...] --- First published: January 9th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ooK2FABokexBbXifJ/thoughts-on-moral-ambition-by-rutger-bregman --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm not a financial advisor; Superpowers for Good should not be considered investment advice. Seek counsel before making investment decisions.Watch the show on television by downloading the e360tv channel app to your Roku, AppleTV or AmazonFireTV. You can also see it on YouTube.When you purchase an item, launch a campaign or create an investment account after clicking a link here, we may earn a fee. Engage to support our work.Devin: What is your superpower?Frank: My job is to connect ideas, people, resources. And that is, I don't know if that's a superpower or just an obsession, but really constantly looking for creative ways to do that is really what my primary mission and work is.In today's world, effective giving can create far-reaching impact, amplifying each dollar's potential to transform communities and save lives. During this episode of Superpowers for Good, I spoke with Frank Fredericks, Executive Director of One for the World, about this high-impact approach to philanthropy.Frank shared a compelling truth: “The latest research shows the most highly effective organizations can be a hundred times or even more effective than your average nonprofit.” This revelation underpins One for the World's mission, which seeks to drive donations toward top-performing charities vetted through rigorous evaluation, including by GiveWell. This process identifies organizations where donations make a substantial impact in areas like global public health and poverty alleviation.One area where this approach shines is in malaria prevention. “Two of the four organizations on GiveWell's list are…focused on malaria,” Frank explained, highlighting that Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium use cost-effective strategies like distributing bed nets in malaria-endemic regions, ultimately saving lives at minimal cost per intervention. But the impact isn't limited to specific diseases. Frank noted that initiatives like New Incentives provide timely support to families needing help with child vaccinations, building community resilience.This episode illuminates a powerful philosophy: by giving smarter, we can do more with each dollar. Through One for the World, donors can channel their resources into strategies that measurably reduce suffering, especially for vulnerable communities. As Frank noted, we may be closer than we think to a world without extreme poverty—if we commit to giving effectively.tl;dr:* In today's episode, Frank Fredericks highlighted the transformative impact of effective giving, explaining how directing funds to the most effective charities can multiply the impact of each dollar by up to a hundred times.* Frank described how One for the World leverages research by organizations like GiveWell to identify charities with proven life-saving outcomes, particularly those focused on issues like malaria prevention and childhood nutrition.* The conversation underscored the power of targeted philanthropic strategies, with Frank emphasizing cost-effectiveness metrics, such as dollars per life saved, as a critical measure for meaningful impact.* Reflecting on the global decline in poverty and preventable diseases, Frank conveyed optimism that, with continued support, these challenges could be largely eradicated within a generation.* Frank encouraged donors to keep an open, evolving approach to philanthropy, continually assessing new evidence to maximize impact and achieve sustainable change on a global scale.How to Develop Connection-Building As a SuperpowerFrank's superpower lies in his talent for connecting people, ideas, and resources to reduce human suffering and expand human flourishing. He sees himself as a conduit for impactful change, fostering relationships and opportunities that multiply the positive effects of social good. This superpower, he notes, is as much an obsession as it is a skill—one he uses consistently in both his personal mission and professional roles.Frank illustrated his superpower through a consulting experience with a baby skincare startup. The team initially assumed that hypoallergenic products were the primary selling point. But as they engaged with working mothers, they uncovered a deeper emotional need: these mothers valued products that allowed them to demonstrate their care for their children, even while balancing careers. Frank's curiosity-driven approach revealed an unexpected market insight, enabling the team to reshape its strategy around a genuine connection with their target customers.Tips for Developing This Superpower:* Seek Personal Connections – Prioritize relationships in your work and make it personal. Show genuine interest and empathy toward those you work with.* Focus on Persuasion – Cultivate persuasive skills. Remember that knowledge alone isn't enough to drive change; creating understanding is essential.* Embrace Exploration – Stay open-minded and curious. Adopt a “lean startup” approach, continually testing assumptions and being ready to pivot based on real insights.By following Frank's example and advice, you can make connection-building a skill. With practice and effort, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Remember, however, that research into success suggests that building on your own superpowers is more important than creating new ones or overcoming weaknesses. You do you!Guest ProfileFrank Fredericks (he/him):Executive Director, One for the WorldAbout One for the World: With the mission of scaling the effective giving movement addressing global poverty, One for the World inspires young professionals to commit 1% of their income to highly effective charities. One for the World has moved some $7M to highly effective charities to date and continues to expand through campus engagement and corporate talks.Website: 1fortheworld.orgX/Twitter Handle: @1fortheworldorgCompany Facebook Page: fb.com/onefortheworldhqInstagram Handle: @1fortheworldBiographical Information: Frank Fredericks is the Executive Director of One for the World, an effective giving nonprofit. Previously, Frank founded World Faith, a global NGO addressing religious violence, and Mean Communications, a digital agency for social good. He also worked as a Senior Entrepreneur at Accenture, leading their Social Innovator Accelerator. He did his BM at NYU and his MBA at Oxford University as a Global Shaper Scholar. He teaches Social Entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at IE. He serves as a Board Member of Community Board 1 in Queens, New York, where he lives with his wife and three children.X/Twitter Handle: @frankiefredsLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/frankiefredericksInstagram Handle: @frankiefredsMax-Impact MembersThe following Max-Impact Members provide valuable financial support to keep us operating:Carol Fineagan, Independent Consultant | Lory Moore, Lory Moore Law | Marcia Brinton, High Desert Gear | Paul Lovejoy, Stakeholder Enterprise | Ralf Mandt, Next Pitch | Add Your Name HereUpcoming SuperCrowd Event CalendarIf a location is not noted, the events below are virtual.* SuperCrowd Mastermind Group, twice monthly on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays at noon Eastern. This group is for entrepreneurs and small business owners interested in raising money from the crowd. Attend your first meeting free!* Impact Cherub Club Meeting hosted by The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation, on November 19, 2024, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, the Club meets to review new offerings for investment consideration and to conduct due diligence on previously screened deals. To join the Impact Cherub Club, become an Impact Member of the SuperCrowd.* Superpowers for Good Televised Live Pitch, November 13, 9:00 PM Eastern during primetime. At the event, judges will select their pick, and the audience will select the SuperCrowd Award recipient. Put the date on your calendar to watch it live!* SuperCrowdHour, November 20, 2024, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, we host a value-laden webinar for aspiring impact investors or social entrepreneurs. At November's SuperCrowdHour, Devin will explain six common investment types you need to understand before you can invest like a pro. Free to attend.Community Event Calendar* Successful Funding with Karl Dakin, Tuesdays at 10:00 AM ET - Click on Events* Community Revitalization, Thursdays, 10:00 AM Eastern.* Main Street Skowhegan and NC3 Entrepreneur Finance Workshop Series, September 17 - November 19, 2023.* Asheville Neighborhood Economics, date TBD following impact of Helene.If you would like to submit an event for us to share with the 8,000+ members of the SuperCrowd, click here.We use AI to help us write compelling recaps of each episode. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at www.superpowers4good.com/subscribe

Musings host Charlie Bresler wrote a piece called “You Don't Have to Be Brave to Save Lives,” (www.thelifeyoucansave.org/you-dont-have-to-be-brave-to-save-lives) about how us ordinary humans can do good from the comfort of our living rooms. Someone should probably send that URL to Vincent “Vin” van der Holst.  Founder of BOAS, a company that both saves denim from landfills and donates profits to charitable organizations, Vin is already doing the hard work to help save lives. But in June of 2024, he decided to do more: on June 7, he undertook to break a world record and cycle at least 130 kilometers (about 81 miles) no-handed. Every kilometer he rode brought more money to the Against Malaria Foundation.  Did he make it? Listen and find out! In this conversation, Vin and Charlie discuss philanthropy and sustainability, but also the impacts of mental health on our behavior and choices in life. What drives us to do the things we do, believe the things we believe, act according to our beliefs or in contradiction to them? To learn more about Vin's world record attempt, read the article on The Life You Can Save website: donorbox.org/tlycs-us-against-malaria-foundation/fundraiser/vincent-van-der-holst-1. Also, check out BOAS and buy their products to help reduce our impact on our natural environment and donate to worthy causes: boas.co And donate to help prevent the spread of malaria through the Against Malaria Foundation, either via The Life You Can Save (www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/against-malaria-foundation) or directly on their website (www.againstmalaria.com). Connect with Vincent: Instagram - @vintagedenim LinkedIn - @invincentvanderholst Website -  boas.co Musings About Ourselves and Other Strangers is the podcast for the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save and is hosted by co-founder Charlie Bresler. Please check out other episodes as well as our website for ideas on how you too can extend your impact for good in the world: www.thelifeyoucansave.org.

This is a link post. It's a rare privilege to lead an organisation that embodies the very ideals that shaped your life. I've been fortunate to have been given that opportunity for the last four years. My journey with Giving What We Can began long before I became its CEO. Like many members, I started as a curious onlooker, lurking for many years after first googling something along the lines of “what's the best charity?” and slowly being drawn to the idea of effective giving. I vividly remember the day I first hovered over the ‘donate' button on the Against Malaria Foundation's website after getting my first raise. My heart was racing, wondering if a decent chunk of my small paycheck would truly make a difference… only to go back and read a report on malaria “just one more time.” Finally, I found the courage to act. I started giving [...] --- First published: September 10th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RkWWpYCnBgYHtisem/stepping-down-from-gwwc-so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Stepping down from GWWC: So long, and thanks for all the shrimp, published by Luke Freeman on September 10, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. It's a rare privilege to lead an organisation that embodies the very ideals that shaped your life. I've been fortunate to have been given that opportunity for the last four years. My journey with Giving What We Can began long before I became its CEO. Like many members, I started as a curious onlooker, lurking for many years after first googling something along the lines of "what's the best charity?" and slowly being drawn to the idea of effective giving. I vividly remember the day I first hovered over the 'donate' button on the Against Malaria Foundation's website after getting my first raise. My heart was racing, wondering if a decent chunk of my small paycheck would truly make a difference… only to go back and read a report on malaria "just one more time." Finally, I found the courage to act. I started giving more effectively and significantly, and a few years later, (after seeing so many others do so before me) I got serious and took the 10% Pledge. It started to feel like I was making good on some promises I'd made to myself back when I was a kid and first struck by the injustices of the world, our collective inaction, and our inability to stop such extreme levels of preventable suffering. Fast forward to 2020, and just as a global pandemic was tearing through the world, I found myself stepping in to lead the team at Giving What We Can. To say I was humbled would be an understatement. Here I was, entrusted with leading an organisation that had inspired my own giving journey. It was a responsibility I didn't take lightly. Over the past four years, I've had the immense honour of working alongside an incredible team and a passionate community of givers. I've been incredibly lucky to get to contribute to a variety of causes I care about, simply by driving more funding to all of them in the form of inspiring pledges and donations to high-impact causes. Together, we've achieved things that that wide-eyed kid donating pennies from his paper route (aka my younger self) could scarcely have imagined, for instance: We've roughly doubled the number of 10% Pledges; Revitalised our community, website, brand, and research; Integrated and improved the donation platform; Pulled off fantastic partnerships and campaigns; Built an exceptional team, with strong retention and a positive work culture, which operates effectively even in my absence (demonstrated recently when I was on parental leave); Spun out of our fiscal sponsor (EV) and established GWWC as an independent multi-entity organisation with a global presence. But as proud as I am of what we've accomplished together and as much as I have loved leading the team at GWWC, I've come to a crossroads. The past 18 months have been challenging, both for GWWC and for me personally. We've navigated significant changes and overcome substantial obstacles. While I'm incredibly proud of how we've handled these challenges, I've found my reserves depleting. Life has thrown a lot my way recently - from deeply painful personal losses to the joyous arrival of our first child. These experiences have led me to reassess my priorities and recognise the need for a change. And so, after careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to step down as CEO of Giving What We Can. The timing aligns with the completion of our spin-out from Effective Ventures, a major project that has set GWWC up for its next phase of growth. I felt that the decision in front of me was to either redouble my efforts for another 3-5 years or to pass the baton. After careful consideration, I believe it's the right time for new leadership to bring fresh energy and perspectives to drive the organisation forward. I'll be sta...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The value of a vote in the 2024 presidential election, published by Eric Neyman on September 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary: A blog post circulating among EAs points out that recent presidential elections have been decided by fewer than 100,000 votes. It may be tempting to conclude that each extra vote in a swing state has a 1-in-100,000 chance of changing the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. In this post, I explain why this is not the case. I estimate the actual number to be 1-in-3 million for a vote in Pennsylvania (the most important swing state) and 1-in-6 million for a generic "swing state vote". This has important implications for people who are deciding whether to donate to efforts to change the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Introduction Like most readers of this forum, I want Kamala Harris to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. I also think that electoral politics as a cause area is underrated by EAs, and in 2020 I wrote a blog post arguing that voting for Joe Biden is an effective use of time. To summarize the argument in a paragraph: If you live in a swing state, there's about a 1 in 10 million chance that your vote will flip the outcome of the entire presidential election. The outcome of the election will influence trillions of dollars in spending. So your vote influences how hundreds of thousands of dollars get spent, in expectation (in addition to non-budgetary considerations). By the same token, if you support Kamala Harris then you might consider donating to efforts to get her elected. If you can get her one extra swing-state vote for $1,000 (that's my best guess), that means that you can spend $1,000 to influence how hundreds of thousands of dollars get spent. Is that a good deal, compared with other EA interventions? Maybe! I usually estimate that the U.S. government saves about one life per $10 million that it spends well. If you believe this guess, you'd be saving a life for about $10k-100k, which is... fine but worse than interventions like the Against Malaria Foundation. (Of course, it's much more complicated than that.[1]) But what if you thought that one extra swing-state vote increased Harris' chances of winning by 1 in 100 thousand? In that case, you'd be spending $1,000 to influence how tens of millions of dollars get spent. That's a really good deal -- literally a 100x better deal -- and is probably worth it! Where does the number 100 thousand come from? The anonymous blog "Make Trump Lose Again" (MTLA) makes the case that some interventions to help Harris get elected are really cost-effective. Quoting from the blog post: Biden won the last election by 42,918 combined votes in three swing states. Trump won the election before that by 77,744 votes. In 2000, just 537 votes (and likely some Republican meddling) in Florida decided the election for Bush, who won a second term by 118,601 votes in 2004. There's a good chance the 2024 election will be extremely close too. [Emphasis original.] (What does it mean that Biden won by 42,918 votes? If Trump had won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, he would have won the election. He would have needed 10,457 more votes in Arizona, 11,779 more votes in Georgia, and 20,682 more votes in Wisconsin, for a total of 42,918 votes.) It may be tempting to draw the conclusion that an extra swing-state vote will increase Harris' chances of winning by 1 in 100 thousand. Indeed, a couple of people I've talked to implicitly had that takeaway from the blog post. But as I will argue, such a conclusion is unwarranted. This post has two parts. In Part 1, I explain why the quote from MTLA does not straightforwardly translate to an estimate of the impact of a marginal vote. Specifically, I argue that: (The less important reason) It is a coincidence that three of the last six elect...

Philanthropy operates on a slower gear than the private sector. It is constrained by systems and culture that block its potential to effect massive positive social uplift. It doesn't have to be this way. The Profit For Good Initiative advocates for charities to drive profit-seeking businesses. If the 'for purpose' sector were in charge--and if effective charities in particular held majority positions--the trillions of dollars in the consumer economy could go towards visions for a better world. My conversation with Brad came at an exciting time. The Commissions for a Cause project will soon put to test the theory that underpins the Profit For Good Initiative, that is, that consumers would rather do good than not, when given a choice. The concept is simple enough, and after talking about it more, I became convinced that the idea needs to be heard by more people. Please enjoy. Donate to Profit For Good here: https://profit4good.org/donation-elliot-billingsley/   Brad's EA Forum Profile: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/brad-west   The Against Malaria Foundation's current cost of saving a life: https://www.againstmalaria.com/   The 10% Pledge: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/   Natalie Cargill's TED Talk, “How to Solve the World's Biggest Problems” :  https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_cargill_how_to_solve_the_world_s_biggest_problems?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare   Explore coaching with elliot: https://elliotbillingsley.com/coaching/

TL;DR It's time for an absurd challenge. On June 7th around 11:00, I'm going to (try to) break the world record for cycling without hands!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I'm attempting a world record to raise money for AMF, published by Vincent van der Holst on May 20, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR It's time for an absurd challenge. On June 7th around 11:00, I'm going to (try to) break the world record for cycling without hands! For more than 100km, I am raising money for the The Against Malaria Foundation (100% donated, costs covered by my company and myself) with the help of The Life You Can Save. Pledge your donation per kilometer or fixed amount here (tax deductibility possible in most countries, email me on vin@boas.co). The full story I'm Vin from Amsterdam, and I'm doing a world record attempt for cycling without hands for charity on the 7th of June. I am donating 100% to The Against Malaria Foundation, with the goal of saving at least one life (5.000 USD). You can participate and push me to go further by joining here. It's going too far to say that my bike saved my life, but at least it made me want to live. I had a pretty bad anxiety disorder about 7 years ago and also became depressed as a result. My father then gave me his old road bike, and that was a golden combination for me. Exercising burned the adrenaline from my anxiety disorder, made me healthier, made me sleep better, and because I slept better and was healthier I started cycling harder and farther, and I regained goals in my life. Often I cycled with my father and best friend, which allowed me to vent my thoughts, and the bike took me to beautiful places all over the world. Soon I was no longer depressed and my anxiety disorder also almost completely disappeared after a few years. I'm good at cycling without hands because as a kid I used to bike to soccer without hands, where it was always a challenge to get through the turns without touching my handlebars. Eventually I found out I was better at cycling than playing soccer, and cycling became my hobby. So that started with cycling to get mentally healthy, and has gotten way out of hand over the past 7 years. In my first year of cycling my longest ride was 60KM, the year after that I rode 100, the year after that 200, the year after that 300, and last year I rode the 535 kilometers from Amsterdam to Paris with 3 other idiots in one day (on my birthday no less). I have less time now because of the startup BOAS I run (which donates 90% of profit to save lives, by donating to the most effective global health charities like AMF), and 600 kilometers is really too far for me, but I always like to have a cycling goal. And then I saw a list of cycling records that included one that I think I could break: the world record for cycling without hands. And not entirely impractical, I can train at my desk at home without hands, or do my calls on my bike and combine work and training that way. As a child, I spent hours in the library browsing through the Guinness Book of World Records, so it is a dream for me to be in it someday, so I had a new goal! Since my anxiety disorder and depression, I have found that a simple life is a good life, and that I'm happier when I help others. A simple life does not have to be expensive, and so why should I keep more money than I need to be healthy and happy? Especially if that money also allows me to help others, something that makes me even happier. So the company I started donates 90% of its profits to save lives, and if I can also raise money to save lives with my record attempt, why wouldn't I? It's important to me that if I have money to donate, that I try to do as much good with it as possible. I found out that 600,000 young people die every year from Malaria, even though it is preventable and curable. It bothers me that we haven't solved that in a world where a fraction of the wealth we have can save almost all those lives. Children didn't choose a world where we don't sh...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Émile P. Torres's history of dishonesty and harassment, published by anonymous-for-obvious-reasons on May 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a cross-post and you can see the original here, written in 2022. I am not the original author, but I thought it was good for more EAs to know about this. I am posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I am a longstanding EA who is concerned about Torres's effects on our community. An incomplete summary Introduction This post compiles evidence that Émile P. Torres, a philosophy student at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany, has a long pattern of concerning behavior, which includes gross distortion and falsification, persistent harassment, and the creation of fake identities. Note: Since Torres has recently claimed that they have been the target of threats from anonymous accounts, I would like to state that I condemn any threatening behavior in the strongest terms possible, and that I have never contacted Torres or posted anything about Torres other than in this Substack or my Twitter account. I have no idea who is behind these accounts. To respect Torres's privacy and identity, I have also omitted their first name from the screenshots and replaced their previous first name with 'Émile'. Table of contents Introduction My story Stalking and harassment Peter Boghossian Helen Pluckrose Demonstrable falsehoods and gross distortions "Forcible" removal "Researcher at CSER" Giving What We Can Brief digression on effective altruism More falsehoods and distortions Hilary Greaves Andreas Mogensen Nick Beckstead Tyler Cowen Olle Häggström Sockpuppetry "Alex Williams" Conclusion My story Before I discuss Torres's behavior, I will provide some background about myself and my association with effective altruism (EA). I hope this information will help readers decide what biases I may have and subject my arguments to the appropriate degree of critical scrutiny. I first heard about EA upon attending Aaron Swartz's memorial in January 2013. One of the speakers at that event was Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, a charity evaluator for which Aaron had volunteered. Karnofsky described Aaron as someone who "believed in trying to maximize the good he accomplished with each minute he had." I resonated with that phrase, and in conversation with some friends after the memorial, I learned that Aaron's approach, and GiveWell's, were examples of what was, at the time, a new movement called "effective altruism." Despite my sympathy for EA, I never got very involved with it, due to a combination of introversion and the sense that I hadn't much to offer. I have donated a small fraction of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation for the last nine years, but I have never taken the Giving What We Can pledge, participated in a local EA group, or volunteered or worked for an EA organization. I decided to write this article after a friend forwarded me one of Torres's critical pieces on longtermism. I knew enough about this movement -- which emerged out of EA -- to quickly identify some falsehoods and misrepresentations in Torres's polemic. So I was surprised to find, when I checked the comments on Twitter, that no one else was pointing out these errors. A few weeks later, I discovered that this was just one of a growing number of articles by Torres that attacked these ideas and their proponents. Since I also noticed several factual inaccuracies in these other publications, I got curious and decided to look into Torres's writings more closely. I began to follow Torres's Twitter presence with interest and to investigate older Twitter feuds that Torres occasionally references. After looking into these and systematically checking the sources Torres cites in support of their various allegations, I found Torres's behavior much more troublin...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: State of Global Development & EA (2024), published by DavidNash on April 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary A shallow overview of the EA & global development ecosystem.[1] There isn't one large EA & GD ecosystem, it is mainly individuals considering their own path to impact, with minor coordination amongst people who are part of the wider network and closer coordination amongst groups in a couple of areas (effective giving/charity entrepreneurship). Resources GD & EA newsletter updates covering a variety of topics relevant to broad global development GD & EA LinkedIn group - for anyone that has an interest in GD topics and can help people find each other who share that interest EA Forum Global Health & Development Topic/Wiki For global development professionals ( including think tanks/government/for-profit orgs/academia/finance) there is an EA & GD Slack. Currently there are ~200 members - you can apply using this form For GD professionals based in London there is also a WhatsApp group to help coordinate and arrange monthly meetups, message me for details[2] Global Development Ecosystems Effective Giving 57 organisations, including a few that evaluate impactful giving opportunities and others that only focus on fundraising There is one full time organiser to help with info sharing and connections between these orgs GWWC support incubation of early stage effective giving initiatives Givewell raised ~ $600 million in 2022 (the latest date I could find figures for, and includes OP giving ~$350m[3]) Other effective giving orgs in 2022 raised ~$103 million (for most of those orgs this isn't specifically for global development, although I wouldn't be surprised if 50%+ was allocated to GD) For 2023 the data is incomplete but so far ~$157 m was raised by non GiveWell orgs Effective Charities There are several charities recommended by evaluators, most of them founded before EA existed and usually have funding outside of EA Malaria Consortium , Against Malaria Foundation , Helen Keller International Charity Entrepreneurship helps found charities attempting to be good enough to get recommended status They also help the alumni network of charities and incubatees with connections, events and ongoing support Foreign Aid $211 billion was spent on international aid in 2022 by member states of the Development Assistance Committee - a collection of 32 donor countries There are debates over how much actually counts as aid, and it doesn't include aid from countries outside of DAC Open Philanthropy spent $16m on global aid policy in 2022 and 2023. They are aiming to Increase international aid budgets (and reduce cuts) Increase funding to especially impactful programs Spur cross-cutting improvements in existing programs Sam Anschell recently wrote about his experiences working on OP's Global Aid Policy program There are individuals who work in a variety of foreign aid departments who have an interest in EA ideas Probably Good with a post looking at careers in aid policy & advocacy Development Finance/Impact Investing There are many multilateral & bilateral development banks, aiming to promote economic development, provide long term financing and stabilise the global financial system It was hard to find out how much money was moved in development finance (and a lot of it is loans) but it is probably in the hundreds of billions There are some EA interested people working in development finance but very rarely are they connected to each other or the wider EA & GD network Similarly with impact investing, there are a few people but often not connected Startups/Private Sector in LMICs The most well known success story is Wave, a mobile service provider that allows unbanked people in Africa to access financial services. They estimated that the company saves people in Senegal over ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Bloomberg: Unacknowledged problems with LLINs are causing a rise in malaria., published by Ian Turner on February 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In this article, Bloomberg claims that undisclosed manufacturing changes at one of the largest producers of anti-malaria bednets have led to distribution of hundreds of millions of ineffective (or less-effective) bednets, and that this problem is linked to an increase in malaria incidence in the places where these nets were distributed. The manufacturer is Vestergaard and the Against Malaria Foundation is among their clients. Bloomberg has a steep paywall but the link here gives free access until March 2. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Project for Awesome 2024: Make a short video for an EA charity!, published by EA ProjectForAwesome on January 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Project for Awesome (P4A) is a charitable initiative running February 16th-18th this year (2024), and videos must be submitted by 11:59am EST on Tuesday, February 13th. This is a good opportunity to raise money for EA charities and promote EA and EA charities to a wider audience. In the last years, winning charities got between $14,000 and $38,000 each. Videos don't need to be professional! In short, People make short 1-4 min videos supporting charities, upload them on Youtube and submit them to the P4A website by 11:59am EST on Tuesday, February 13th. The videos must be new videos specifically for this year's P4A and should mention P4A. People vote on the videos on the weekend, February 16th-18th. Money raised during the Project for Awesome is split, with 50% going to Save the Children and Partners in Health, and 50% going to charities voted on by the community. One more video for a charity lets everyone vote one more time for that charity. This year, we want to support seven EA charities: Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, The Humane League, Good Food Institute, ProVeg International, GiveWell and Fish Welfare Initiative. Please consider making a short video for one (or more) of these charities! You will help us to coordinate if you sign up here. Please join the Facebook group, EA Project 4 Awesome 2024! In 2017, we secured a $50,000 donation for AMF, GiveDirectly and SENS. In 2018 GiveDirectly, The Good Food Institute and AMF all received $25,000. In 2020, seven out of eight of the charities we coordinated around have won ~$27,000 each, for a total that year of ~$189,700! In 2022, 3 out of 11 supported charities won. Last year, The Good Food Institute got ~$37,000. Here are some resources: Project for Awesome website A document with infos, resources and instructions http://www.projectforawesome.com/graphics How to Make a P4A video in 20 Minutes or Less Slides for a P4A video planning event from 2021 Video guidelines from the P4A FAQ: Your video must be made specifically for this year's P4A. So, you must mention Project for Awesome in the video itself, and it should have been created recently. You should put reasonable effort into making sure any information you include in your video is accurate, from anecdotal examples to statistics. There's a lot of misinformation on the internet, so we want to make sure that P4A videos are providing thoughtful, accurate context about the work that organizations are doing in the world. Try not to make your video too long. People are going to be watching a ton of videos during P4A, and no one wants to sit through a rambly, unedited vlog for ten minutes. Keep your video short and to the point so that people will watch the whole thing and learn all about your cause. A good length to aim for is 2-4 minutes, unless you have such compelling content that it just needs to be longer. Try not to spend too much time explaining what the Project for Awesome is. Most people watching your video will already know, so just mentioning it briefly and directing people to the website is plenty. An explanation in the description as well as a link to projectforawesome.com is also a great addition so people who stumble across your video can learn more about us. Similarly, try not to spend too much time promoting your own channel in your video. One or two sentences is fine to explain the type of videos you usually make if they're different from what you're doing for your P4A video, but much more than that and it just looks like you're using the P4A to help promote yourself, which isn't what this is all about. Please include a content warning at the beginning of your video if you're discussing sensit...

Magatte is an entrepreneur on a mission: to unleash the potential of Africa. She's a well known speaker, author and researcher who has written extensively about economic structures in the developing world, and the urgent need to create fairer regulatory environments to give everyone on earth access to the power of markets. She is also the founder of various Senegalese companies including Adina drinks, Tiossan and SkinisSkin, and an advisor to various institutions including the Charter Cities Institute Chapters 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:20 - African poverty, and her personal story 00:22:01 - Over-Regulation and Corruption 00:27:42 - What is Ubuntu? 00:32:17 - Kritarchy vs centralized structures 00:37:20 - Why Socialism was bad for Africa 00:42:57 - Flavours of Capitalism 00:49:35 - Thoughts on Foreign Aid 01:02:48 - Special Economic Zones 01:10:21 - What Rules Should a Startup City Have 01:15:50 - Common Law vs Civil Law 01:28:16 - How people can get involved Links ♾️ Her website - https://www.magattewade.com/ ♾️ Heart of a Cheetah Book - https://www.magattewade.com/book ♾️ Givedirectly - https://www.givedirectly.org ♾️ Against Malaria Foundation - https://www.againstmalaria.com/ ♾️ Noah Smith - Futurism is Afro-Futurism - https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-futurism-is-afrofuturism ♾️ It's Not About Whiteness It's About Wealth Book https://www.amazon.com › Its-Not-About-Whiteness-... ♾️ Kritarchy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritarchy ♾️ Conscious capitalism - https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/ ♾️ Startup/Charter cities - https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/ ♾️ Prospera - https://www.prospera.co Credits ♾️ Hosted by Liv Boeree ♾️ Produced & Edited by Raymond Wei ♾️ Audio Mix by Keir Schmidt The Win-Win Podcast: Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins. Watch the previous episode with Boyan Slat of the Ocean Cleanup here: https://youtu.be/QEYbLN-LC5k

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Podcast + Transcript] AMA: Founder and CEO of AMF, Rob Mather, published by tobytrem on January 9, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a transcript for the AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of AMF, which I recorded live on the 19th of December. To listen to a recording of the live AMA as a podcast, follow the link above for the RSS feed, or: Use these links to listen to the podcast on Spotify, Pocketcasts, or Apple Music. Click the speaker icon above to listen to the recording without leaving this page. The questions for the AMA, which were edited and supplemented to, can be found on the original AMA post. Hosting an AMA as a live event, followed by a podcast and a transcript, is a bit of an experiment for us, so please do comment or Forum dm me with any feedback you might have. All of your (and my) questions to Rob are in bold, so you can skim them quickly. Thanks to Rob Mather for his time, and Dane Magaway for her help with this transcript. AMA with Rob Mather, recorded 19th December '23 Toby Tremlett: Welcome to this live AMA with Rob Mather, CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation. I'm Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum's content manager. If you're interested in effective altruism, you've probably heard of Rob's charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they've been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from malaria. To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their currently funded nets have been distributed, AMF estimates it would have prevented 185,000 deaths. And it's not just AMF saying this, they've been a GiveWell Top Charity since 2009. So to get straight into the AMA, we're going to keep the answers pretty short and snappy. I think Rob said he's going to stick to two minutes per answer. And yeah, Rob, thank you for making the time for coming along for this. Rob Mather: Pleasure. Toby Tremlett: On the theme of making the time, somebody said that they've organized two small fundraisers with AMF, and in both cases, you were incredibly proactive and helpful, taking time to immediately respond to emails and hop onto calls. They say many thanks, but a question remains, where do you find the time and which time management strategies do you use? You have two minutes of time. Rob Mather: I don't use any particular strategies, I'm afraid. I think what I would say is we certainly leverage technology here, so that a lot of the things that I perhaps would normally do as a CEO of a charity I don't do because technology takes over. And perhaps I can give a couple of examples. One of the things that we have to do as a charity is we have to file our accounts. We have to do that, in our case, in 14 countries and there are typically between 10 and 15 documents we have to prepare for each country. Lots of documents, lots of information that would normally take months of a number of people probably putting that together. And we broadly have that content all available to us within nine hours of the end of our financial year because at the end of the day, finances are just ones and zeros so we can automate the living daylights out of it. And therefore a whole series of effort that would otherwise go into admin that would take my time effectively is struck down to just a sliver of time. I think that's one element [that] allows me to put my time in [another] direction. The second thing I would say is that the structure of AMF is very streamlined. We're very focused on what we do. There is a lot of complexity in many ways around distributing nets, particularly around the operations. That's the bit that really requires an awful lot of very careful attention to make sure nets get to people. And because we have a very simple series of steps, if you like, that we go through when we'r...

This podcast is an Ask Me Anything with Rob Mather, Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, hosted by Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum's Content Manager.If you're interested in Effective Altruism, you've probably heard of Rob Mather's charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they've been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from Malaria.To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their currently funded nets have been distributed, AMF estimates it will have prevented 185,000 deaths. And it's not just AMF saying this, they've been a GiveWell Top Charity since 2009.Listen to this episode to find out more about how Rob ended up starting one of the most effective global health charities, Rob's tips for running a charity, how AMF's work integrates with other NGOs that work on Malaria, and much more.The original AMA post, which features Forum user's questions for Rob, more information about AMF, and a link to a transcript for this episode, can be found

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Where are the GWWC team donating in 2023?, published by Luke Freeman on December 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In this post several Giving What We Can team members have volunteered to share their personal giving decisions for 2023. Wondering why it's beneficial to talk about your donations? Check out our blog post, "Should we be private or public about giving to charity?", where we explore the advantages of being open about our philanthropy. We also recommend reading Claire Zabel's insightful piece, "Talk about donations earlier and more", which underscores the importance of discussing charitable giving more frequently and openly. If you enjoy this post, we also encourage you to check out similar posts from teams at other organisations who've shared their personal giving this year too, such as GiveWell and CEA. Finally, we want to hear from you too! We encourage you to join the conversation by sharing your own donation choices in the comments on "Where are you donating this year and why?". This is a wonderful opportunity to learn from each other and to inspire more thoughtful and impactful giving. Now, let's meet some of our team and learn about their giving decisions in 2023! Fabio Kuhn Lead Software Engineer I took the Giving What We Can Pledge in early 2021 and have consistently contributed slightly above 10% of my income to effective charities since then. Similarly as last year, in 2023, the majority of my donations have been directed towards The Humane League (50%) and The Good Food Institute (5%). I continue to be profoundly unsettled by our treatment of other sentient species. Additionally, I am concerned about the potential long-term risk of moral value lock-in resulting from training AI with our current perspectives on animals. This could lead to a substantial increase in animal suffering unless we promptly address this matter. Considering my view on the gravity of the issue and the apparent lack of sufficient funding in the field, I am positive that contributing to this cause is one of the most impactful options for my donations. The majority of my donations are processed through Effektiv Spenden, allowing for tax-deductible donations in Switzerland. Additionally, I made other noteworthy donations this year: 15% to the Effektiv Spenden "Fight Poverty" fund, which is based on the GiveWell "All Grants Fund". 5% to Effektiv Spenden itself, supporting the maintenance and development of the donation platform. A contribution of 100 CHF to the climate fund, as an attempt of moral offsetting for my carbon footprint. Grace Adams Head of Marketing I took a trial pledge in 2021 for 3% of my income and then the Giving What We Can Pledge in 2022 for at least 10% of my income over my lifetime. My donations since learning about effective giving have primarily benefitted global health and wellbeing charities so far but have also supported ACE and some climate-focused charities as part of additional offsetting. I recently gave $1000 AUD to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project after a Giving Game I ran and sponsored in Melbourne. With the remaining donations, I'm likely to split my support between Giving What We Can's operations (as I now think that my donation to GWWC is likely to be a multiplier and create even more donations for highly effective charities - thanks to our impact evaluation) and GiveWell's recommendations via Effective Altruism Australia so I can receive a tax benefit (and therefore donate more). Lucas Moore Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator I took the Giving What We Can Pledge in 2017. Initially, I gave mainly to Against Malaria Foundation, but over time, I started giving to a wider variety of charities and causes as I learnt more about effective giving. In 2022, I gave mostly to GiveDirectly, and so far in 2023, my donations h...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, Rob Mather, published by tobytrem on December 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: Share questions for Rob Mather (founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation) in the comments of this post, by the 19th of December. Ask about anything! Comment on this post to ask Rob Mather, the founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), the charity that has protected 448,414,801 people with malaria nets, anything by the 19th of December. I'll be interviewing him live on 19th of December, at 6pm UTC. The interview will be hosted live on a link that I'll comment here before the event. I'll ask the questions you share on this post (and possibly some of my own). Although we might not get through all of them; we'll get through as many as we can in an hour. We'll aim for two dollars a net, two minutes an answer, so try to post short questions (1-2 sentences). Feel free to ask several questions (or add follow ups), though! If editing your question down would take a while, don't worry, I can shorten it. Though the questions won't be answered in the comments of this post, don't worry if you can't attend the live event. We'll post a video recording and perhaps a podcast version in the comments of this post. Some context for your questions: AMF distributes insecticide treated bed nets to protect sleepers from the bites of malaria carrying mosquitos, that would otherwise cause severe illness or worse. You can read about the toll of malaria on this Our World in Data page, and the effectiveness of bednets in this GiveWell report. Since 2009 AMF has been featured as a GiveWell top charity. Rob founded AMF in 2005. Since then, it has grown from a team of two to a team of thirteen. In 2006, they brought in $1,3 million in donations. In 2022, they brought in $120 million. AMF has received $545 million in donations to date, and has distributed 249 million bed nets. Currently, AMF's team of 13 is in the middle of a nine-month period during which they are distributing, with partners, 90 million nets to protect 160 million people in six countries: Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia. Rob tells me that: "These nets alone can be expected to prevent 40,000 deaths, avert 20 to 40 million cases of malaria and lead to a US$2.2 billion improvement in local economies (12x the funds applied). When people are ill they cannot farm, drive, teach - function, so the improvement in health leads to economic as well as humanitarian benefits." Impact numbers: Once all of the nets AMF has fundraised for so far have been distributed and have been given time to have their effect, AMF expects that they will have prevented 185,000 deaths, averted 100-185 million cases of malaria, and led to growth worth $6.5 billion in local economies. Some other links to check out: A video from GWWC telling the story of how Rob founded AMF. Rob's previous Forum AMA, four years ago. Rob discussed: The implications of adding 5 more staff to AMF's two person team. The flow-through effects of saving lives with bed nets. AMF's 2023 reflections and future plans. In it, Rob explains that: AMF has a $300m funding gap. The Global Fund, the top funder for Malaria control activities, has a $2.3B shortfall in 2024-6 funding, increasing the undersupply of malaria nets. Insecticide resistant mosquitoes are becoming more common, which may damage the effectiveness of older nets. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: HLI's Giving Season 2023 Research Overview, published by Happier Lives Institute on November 28, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary At the Happier Lives Institute, we look for the most cost-effective interventions and organisations that improve subjective wellbeing, how people feel during and about their lives[1]. We quantify the impact in 'Wellbeing Adjusted Life-Years', or WELLBYs[2]. To learn more about our approach, see our key ideas page and our research methodology page. Last year, we published our first charity recommendations. We recommended StrongMinds, an NGO aiming to scale depression treatment in sub-saharan Africa, as our top funding opportunity, but noted the Against Malaria Foundation could be better under some assumptions. This year, we maintain our recommendation for StrongMinds, and we've added the Against Malaria Foundation as a second top charity. We have substantially updated our analysis of psychotherapy, undertaking a systematic review and a revised meta-analysis, after which our estimate for StrongMinds has declined from 8x to 3.7x as cost-effective as cash transfers, in WELLBYs, resulting in a larger overlap in the cost-effectiveness of StrongMinds and AMF[3]. The decline in cost-effectiveness is primarily due to lower estimated household spillovers, our new correction for publication bias, and the prediction that StrongMinds might have smaller than average effects. We've also started evaluating another mental health charity, Friendship Bench, an NGO that delivers problem-solving therapy in Zimbabwe. Our initial estimates suggest that the Friendship Bench may be 7x more cost-effective, in WELLBYs, than cash transfers. We think Friendship Bench is a promising cost-effective charity, but we have not yet investigated it as thoroughly, so our analysis is more preliminary, uncertain, and likely to change. As before, we don't recommend cash transfers or deworming: the former because it's likely psychotherapy is several times more cost-effective, the latter because it remains uncertain if deworming has a long-term effect on wellbeing. This year, we've also conducted shallow investigations into new cause areas. Based on our preliminary research, we think there are promising opportunities to improve wellbeing by preventing lead exposure, improving childhood nutrition, improving parenting (e.g., encouraging stimulating play, avoiding maltreatment), preventing violence against women and children, and providing pain relief in palliative care. In general, the evidence we've found on these topics is weaker, and our reports are shallower, but we highlight promising charities and research opportunities in these areas. We've also found a number of less promising causes, which we discuss briefly to inform others. In this report, we provide an overview of all our evaluations to date. We group them into two categories, In-depth and Speculative, based on our level of investigation. We discuss these in turn. In-depth evaluations: relatively late stage investigations that we consider moderate-to-high depth. Top charities: These are well-evidenced interventions that are cost-effective[4] and have been evaluated in medium-to-high depth. We think of these as the comparatively 'safer bets'. Promising charities: These are well-evidenced opportunities that are potentially more cost-effective than the top charities, but we have more uncertainty about. We want to investigate them more before recommending them as a top charity. Non-recommended charities: These are charities we've rigorously evaluated but the current evidence suggests are less cost-effective than our top charities. Speculative evaluations: early stage investigations that are shallow in depth. Promising bets: These are high-priority opportunities to research because we think they're potentially mor...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare, published by Ariel Simnegar on November 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to Michael St. Jules for his comments. Key Takeaways The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong. Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking. If OP disagrees, they should practice reasoning transparency by clarifying their views: How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods? Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff? How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism? Summary Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives. Avoiding this conclusion seems very difficult: Rejecting hedonism (the view that only pleasure and pain have moral value) is not enough, because even if pleasure and pain are only 1% of what's important, the conclusion still goes through. Rejecting unitarianism (the view that the moral value of a being's welfare is independent of the being's species) is not enough. Even if just for being human, one accords one unit of human welfare 100x the value of one unit of another animal's welfare, the conclusion still goes through. Skepticism of formal philosophy is not enough, because the argument for animal welfare dominance can be made without invoking formal philosophy. By analogy, although formal philosophical arguments can be made for longtermism, they're not required for longtermist cause prioritization. Even if OP accepts RP's conclusion, they may have other reasons why they don't allocate most neartermist funding to animal welfare. Though some of OP's possible reasons may be fair, if anything, they'd seem to imply a relaxation of this essay's conclusion rather than a dismissal. It seems like these reasons would also broadly apply to AI x-risk within longtermism. However, OP didn't seem put off by these reasons when they allocated a majority of longtermist funding to AI x-risk in 2017, 2019, and 2021. I request that OP clarify their views on whether or not animal welfare dominates in neartermism. The Evidence Endorses Prioritizing Animal Welfare in Neartermism GiveWell estimates that its top charity (Against Malaria Foundation) can prevent the loss of one year of life for every $100 or so. We've estimated that corporate campaigns can spare over 200 hens from cage confinement for each dollar spent. If we roughly imagine that each hen gains two years of 25%-improved life, this is equivalent to one hen-life-year for every $0.01 spent. If you value chicken life-years equally to human life-years, this implies that corporate campaigns do about 10,000x as much good per dollar as top charities. … If one values humans 10-100x as much, this still implies that corporate campaigns are a far better use of funds (100-1,000x). Holden Karnofsky, "Worldview Diversification" (2016) "Worldview Diversification" (2016) describes OP's approach to cause prioritization. At the time, OP's research found that if the interests of animals are "at least 1-10% as important" as those of humans, then "animal welfare looks like an extraordinarily outstanding cause, potentially to the point of dominating other options". After the better part of a decade, the latest and most rigorous research funded by OP has endorsed a stronger claim: Any significant moral weight for animals implies that OP should prioritize animal welfare in ne...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: HearMeOut - Networking While Funding Charities (Looking for a founder and beta users), published by Brad West on November 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Two extremely important things are our time and our connections to others who can help advance shared goals. Significant time is wasted on low value introductions and meetings. But at the same time, projects are delayed, don't succeed, or don't reach their full potential because critical connections are never made. We are looking to build HearMeOut, a solution that will save your valuable time while facilitating valuable connections, by asking people to donate to a charity for your time, and/or enabling you to connect with others by donating to a charity. HearMeOut is the platform where you can book time with someone by donating to the chosen charity of the person who you want to meet with. For example: you sell software that you're confident company X wants, and you're willing to donate 500 to The Against Malaria Foundation to pitch it to them for one hour. If you want to cut down on cold emails and meetings, you can tell anyone that you only meet with people willing to donate a certain amount to the charity you chose (e.g. I'm a founder and anyone who wants to sell me something can do that if they donate 100 USD to AMF). You pay for meetings where you're confident you bring something valuable, and you can be assured the meetings scheduled with you are with people who value your time correctly and don't intend to waste your time. We believe the net result to be meetings with a higher average value- eliminating intros with those who don't value your time, while enabling those who demonstrate that they do to get on your calendar- with charities benefiting from the signals. It's close to zero cost to build and test this platform with some initial users, and it could be very scalable. We are seeking someone to lead this project and initial users who want to get donations before they take a cold meeting. What HearMeOut Offers Ability for people ("Seekers") to obtain introductions to people that could be helpful to their projects or goals by donating to a charity. Ability for people ("Listeners") to help others that can credibly signal that they will benefit from their help because they are gated behind a cost. Charities can be the beneficiaries of these signaling costs. Unfortunately, between working my own full time job as a lawyer and running a nonprofit (website will be changed soon- renaming to "Profit for Good Initiative"), I do not currently have the bandwidth to run such a project. Vincent van der Holst, founder of BOAS, also believes in the potential of this project, but is similarly unable to run this project because he is running the business. Both can advise the business and help attract resources. Vin already has connections to a designer and developer who are willing to help build the first version at no/low cost. How Would HearMeOut Work? Thanks to Jeff Reasor for developing some mockups of what HearMeOut might look like. HearMeOut would provide a platform for Listeners: those who want to spend their time potentially helping others by providing advice, funding projects, connecting people together who could be helpful, using their influence to advance a shared goal, purchasing products or services that could be beneficial to the Listener, and/or otherwise helping people. Listeners would be able to choose the charity(s) that would benefit from the fee to connect with them, the time increments they could make available, as well as the donation associated with various increments. This donation cost would serve a dual-function: it not only serves as a way to raise money for a charitable cause the listener cares about, but also serves a screening function- the cost associated with the audience will lik...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How we work, #2: We look at specific opportunities, not just general interventions, published by GiveWell on November 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is the second in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. The first post, on cost-effectiveness, is here. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of our research and decision-making. Author: Isabel Arjmand Looking forward, not just backward When we consider recommending funding, we don't just want to know whether a program has generally been cost-effective in the past - we want to know how additional funding would be used. People sometimes think of GiveWell as recommending entire programs or organizations. This was more accurate in GiveWell's early days, but now we tend to narrow in on specific opportunities. Rather than asking whether it is cost-effective to deliver long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in general, we ask more specific questions, such as whether it is cost-effective to fund net distributions in 2023 in Benue, Plateau, and Zamfara states, Nigeria, given the local burden of malaria and the costs of delivering nets in those states. Geographic factors affecting cost-effectiveness The same program can vary widely in cost-effectiveness across locations. The burden of a disease in a particular place is often a key factor in determining overall cost-effectiveness. All else equal, it's much more impactful to deliver vitamin A supplements in areas with high rates of vitamin A deficiency than in areas where almost everyone consumes sufficient vitamin A as part of their diet. As another example, we estimate it costs roughly the same amount for the Against Malaria Foundation to deliver an insecticide-treated net in Chad as it does in Guinea (about $4 in both locations). But, we estimate that malaria-attributable deaths of young children in the absence of nets would be roughly 5 times higher in Guinea than in Chad (roughly 8.8 deaths per 1,000 per year versus roughly 1.7 per 1,000), which leads AMF's program to be much more cost-effective in Guinea. This map from Our World in Data gives a sense of how deaths from malaria vary worldwide.[3] Because cost-effectiveness varies with geography, we ask questions specific to the countries or regions where a program would take place. When we were investigating an opportunity to fund water chlorination in Malawi, for example, we wanted to know: How does baseline mortality from poor water quality in Malawi compare with that in the regions where the key studies on water chlorination took place? What is the overall morbidity burden from diarrhea in Malawi? Might people be more or less likely to use chlorinated water in this area than in the areas where the key studies took place? What does it cost to serve one person with in-line chlorination for one year? We calculate this, in part, by estimating how many people are served by each device. What proportion of the population is under the age of five? This is important to our calculations because we think young children are disproportionately susceptible to death from diarrhea. What is the baseline level of water treatment in the absence of this program? Where relevant, we also consider implementation challenges caused by security concerns or other contextual factors. Why do cost-effective funding gaps sometimes go unfilled? People are often surprised that some high-impact funding gaps, like the ones GiveWell aims to fund, aren't already filled. Of course, many high-impact opportunities are already supported by other funders, like Gavi or the Global Fund, to name just a couple examples. When we see remaining gaps, we think about how our grant might affect other funders' decisions, and whether another funder would step in to fill a particular gap if we didn't.[4] The...

Hablamos de temas tan importantes como:Se podría clasificar, ayudar a los demás, como un apartado dentro de los hábitos saludables? Qué le aporta al que ayuda… ego? O algo más?¿Qué es el altruismo efectivo y cómo se diferencia de otras formas de ayudar?En vuestra web, señalas que seleccionamos y financiamos los programas que maximizan el impacto de tus donaciones, y estos son Malaria, Vitamina A, Vacunación, Entrega de dinero, Parásitos, Sufrimiento Animal y Cambio Climático… por qué estos problemas, ¿y no otros?Tenéis un fondo, en el que agrupáis los mejores programas, es como el IBEX 35 o el SP500 donde tenéis los mejores programas? Es decir por cada euro aportado invertís en: Distrubir mosquiteras: 25%, Medicación preventiva: 25%, Suplementar vit A: 25%, Incentivar vacunación: 25%... y esto como lo lleváis a cabo, lo hacéis vosotros mismos, o “invertís” en organizaciones que lo llevan a caboVuestro principal partner de investigación es Give Well, explícanos por que ellos y que función tienen? Por qué debería fiarme de GiveWell?Against Malaria Foundation, para las mosquiteras ¿por qué este partner y no otro? ¿cómo funciona? Por qué debería fiarmeMalaria Consortium, para la medicación preventiva ¿por qué este partner y no otro? ¿cómo funciona? Por qué debería fiarmeCHelen Keller Intl, para la ceguera, ¿por qué este partner y no otro? ¿cómo funciona? Por qué debería fiarmeNew Incentives, para la vacunación, ¿por qué este partner y no otro? ¿cómo funciona? Por qué debería fiarmeY en qué  contextos es mejor mandar el cash, que este tipo de ayudas?¿Qué evidencias tienen de que vuestros programas son efectivos y tienen un alto impacto? ¿Cómo garantizáis que las donaciones se usan de manera eficiente, y de que hay transparencia?¿Otras ONG… tienen detrás estos evaluadores?Si solo tengo opción de ayudar a los más cercanos, como en mi barrio o ciudad, vs los más necesitados, como Congo, Nigeria… ¿Por qué debería elegir los segundos?De qué manera es más eficaz ayudar, usando mi tiempo para trabajar una hora más al día, y donar ese dinero todo los días… o usar ese nº de horas en ayudar personalmente?A mi me has convencido, y quiero colaborar con vosotros… Por un lado en lo personal, pero además donando la publicidad que me pueda llegar con el podcast, o el canal de Youtube, y además me haría ilusión que los oyentes se puedan sumar… ¿dónde plo pueden hacer? Enlaces de la web de ayuda efectiva y de los partners que hemos comentado1) Ayuda Efectiva, es el lugar donde seleccionan y financian los programas que maximizan el impacto de tus donacionesProbablemente, tenemos la suerte de vivir en un lugar y en un contexto que tenemos la suerte que con poco, podemos hacer mucho, cambiar y salvar vidas.Únete a mi equipo de donación  y ayudemos juntos a que otros puedan vivir, y hacerlo de la manera más saludable y digna posible.https://ayudaefectiva.org/c/profeclaudionieto 2) Evaluador principal: GiveWell, web:  https://www.givewell.org/    GiveWell es una organización sin ánimo de lucro que dedica más de 40.000 horas de investigación al año a identificar los programas y organizaciones que salvan o mejoran más vidas por euro donado 3) Medicina para la Malaria de manera preventiva: Empresa Malaria Consortium – Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention:, web https://www.malariaconsortium.org/Malaria Consortium administra de forma preventiva medicamentos a niños menores de 5 años para evitar los contagios de malaria y el riesgo de muerte asociado.  4) Mosquiteras para prevenir la picadura de mosquitos, empresa: Against malaria, web https://www.againstmalaria.com/Against Malaria Foundation compra mosquiteras tratadas con insecticida de larga duración y coordina y supervisa su distribución. 5) Suplementar con vit A, empresa: Helen Keller Internacional, web https://helenkellerintl.org/Helen Keller Internacional trabaja en programas para reducir la malnutrición y evitar problemas de visión, entre los cuales se encuentra la suplementación de vitamina A.  6) Vacunación infantil, empresa New Incentives, web https://www.newincentives.org/New Incentives trabaja con centros de salud públicos y en colaboración con los programas existentes en el norte de Nigeria, donde sensibiliza a la población sobre los beneficios de la vacunación y proporciona pequeños incentivos en forma de dinero a las madres al vacunar a sus hijos.En total, el programa incentiva la vacunación contra 11 enfermedades Los incentivos se entregan durante las seis visitas a la clínica, donde se administran las vacunas, consiguiendo que aumente considerablemente la cantidad de menores vacunados, ayudando así a salvar sus vidas y a evitar que se propague con tanta facilidad estas patologías. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [JOB] Opportunity to found Charity Entrepreneurship NGO (outside of the incubation program): Tobacco taxation advocacy, published by Yelnats T.J. on August 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Overview of job posting Highlights Why found a NGO/charity Why tobacco taxation The role Who your future co-founder is The selection process How to apply FAQs Recommended readings Charity Entrepreneurship is often called the Y combinator of the charity/NGO space and its alumni are compared to the PayPal Mafia (but for the charity sector). Note: this is not an application for the upcoming CE incubation program. You can apply for that here. Early application deadline: August 6th 23:59 UTC Application deadline: August 13th 23:59 UTC After the deadline, applications will be taken on a rolling basis. The process is going to be fast and most applicants that go through the whole process will do so in about 3.5 weeks. Times will be quicker for applicants that submit earlier at each stage. Turnaround times will typically be a matter of days. Highlights The opportunity This is a CE-researched intervention with a CE incubatee - J.T. Stanley - that will be considered for seed funding (via the CE seed funder network) in mid-September. (The CE incubatee went through the winter 2023 cohort. His original match for co-founder from the cohort ended up pursuing another career opportunity with comparable impact that arose near the end of the program.) The impact Tobacco is 13x Malaria in deaths (WHO, 2023). Whereas malaria, HIV, and neonatal deaths are all decreasing year over year, deaths from tobacco are increasing. Tobacco is currently on track to kill a billion people in the 21st century (WHO, 2021). Here is a link to a section that talks about the financial and economic impacts. Taxation is both the most effective and most neglected form of tobacco control (WHO; NIH, 2016; World Bank, 2017). Multiple EA organizations have ran analysis that found tobacco taxation advocacy to be "an extremely cost-effective intervention." CE's cost-effectiveness analysis put the expected value between 39 and 51 USD per DALY averted.[1] Open Philanthropy's back-of-the-envelope calculation found 30 USD per DALY averted in expectation.[2] Giving What We Can's (GWWC) report suggested that cost per life saved could go as low as 800 USD according to one scientific study.[3] In other words, a successful tobacco taxation charity would immediately have an impact with cost-effectiveness at the upper echelons (think Against Malaria Foundation for GiveWell and Lead Exposure Elimination Project for CE). Why you should apply This is your chance to be a founder of an impactful organization. Don't count yourself out. If in doubt apply. Roughly half of the successful applicants/founders that are accepted into the CE incubation program did not think they would qualify. Don't preempt yourself from becoming a founder; let the process play out. If you've applied to CE in the past, this is the opportunity for you. Why found an NGO/charity Pros You are not just a cog in the machine; you have ownership of a venture/organization that could deliver massive impact. The health of hundreds of thousands of tobacco users depends on you and your co-founder's fateful actions. One of the best expected values for impact - This intervention has the potential to avert a ridiculously high amount of deaths and DALYs. Upward career mobility and increased impact later in your career. Running an impactful organization will give you critical skills, experience, and career capital that will better position you for impact later in your career. Cons A much more serious commitment than your typical job. Founder salaries of CE charities are very modest compared to other parts of the EA ecosystem and the first-year salary is lean. Founding an organization...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Consider giving money to people, not projects or organizations, published by NinaR on July 2, 2023 on LessWrong. When trying to improve the world via philanthropy, there are compelling reasons to focus on nurturing individual talent rather than supporting larger organizations, especially those with nebulous and unquantifiable goals. Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures is a prime example of this approach, providing grants to individual entrepreneurs and thinkers who aim to make a significant societal impact. When asked how his approach to philanthropy differs from the Effective Altruist approach, Cowen answers: I'm much more “person first.” I'm willing to consider, not any area—it ought to feel important—but I view it as more an investment in the person, and I have, I think, more faith that the person's own understanding of what's important will very often be better than mine. That would be the difference. This model has been effective in the scientific community. Funding individual researchers rather than projects has been shown to foster more novel ideas and high-impact papers, emphasizing the value of the person-first approach. The person-first approach is an effective diversification strategy. You are outsourcing the task of problem prioritization and strategy to highly competent individuals and trusting the result. This seems wise; I expect competence in executing effective solutions to problems to be highly correlated with competence in identifying important problems in the first place. In the same way as angel investors can significantly influence the success trajectory of startups, investing in highly competent individuals early on can amplify their potential for making major progress. By observing their academic achievements or impressive abilities early on in life, you can often obtain meaningful evidence that someone can have a major positive impact. Patronage is also a model well-suited to advancing many forms of creative or personal endeavor that promote a donor's personal aesthetic or other hard-to-quantify terminal values. Investing in people can create new writing, music, art, and architecture in a more steerable way than generally giving money to these industries. Why consider this model over donating to larger nonprofits where some employees will also be very talented? The answer lies in feedback loops and organizational efficiency. For-profit companies operate under tight feedback loops; they either provide value and thrive or fail to do so and perish. Nonprofits, however, especially those with hard-to-measure outcomes, lack these feedback mechanisms, making inefficiencies more likely. In larger organizations, many inefficiencies are amplified as coordination problems and operational overhead are more prevalent, wasting resources. Another crucial variable in deciding whether to donate to larger organizations or lean towards a person-first approach is how measurable the outcomes you are looking for are. Some nonprofit organizations are doing significant legible and measurable good work, for instance, Against Malaria Foundation and the other GiveWell top charities, as well as quite plausibly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. However, this is a small minority. In many cases, it is worth considering whether the problems nonprofits claim to tackle would be better tackled by funding competent individuals or for-profit organizations that can sustain themselves on the open market. Why should we not assume that talented people will receive enough funding and support to do important good stuff as it is? Indeed, capitalism provides an inherent mechanism for preference and information aggregation. By default, it is reasonable to assume markets are a reasonable source of truth regarding what humans want and need. However, free markets are not the silver bullet fo...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Consider giving money to people, not projects or organizations, published by NinaR on July 2, 2023 on LessWrong. When trying to improve the world via philanthropy, there are compelling reasons to focus on nurturing individual talent rather than supporting larger organizations, especially those with nebulous and unquantifiable goals. Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures is a prime example of this approach, providing grants to individual entrepreneurs and thinkers who aim to make a significant societal impact. When asked how his approach to philanthropy differs from the Effective Altruist approach, Cowen answers: I'm much more “person first.” I'm willing to consider, not any area—it ought to feel important—but I view it as more an investment in the person, and I have, I think, more faith that the person's own understanding of what's important will very often be better than mine. That would be the difference. This model has been effective in the scientific community. Funding individual researchers rather than projects has been shown to foster more novel ideas and high-impact papers, emphasizing the value of the person-first approach. The person-first approach is an effective diversification strategy. You are outsourcing the task of problem prioritization and strategy to highly competent individuals and trusting the result. This seems wise; I expect competence in executing effective solutions to problems to be highly correlated with competence in identifying important problems in the first place. In the same way as angel investors can significantly influence the success trajectory of startups, investing in highly competent individuals early on can amplify their potential for making major progress. By observing their academic achievements or impressive abilities early on in life, you can often obtain meaningful evidence that someone can have a major positive impact. Patronage is also a model well-suited to advancing many forms of creative or personal endeavor that promote a donor's personal aesthetic or other hard-to-quantify terminal values. Investing in people can create new writing, music, art, and architecture in a more steerable way than generally giving money to these industries. Why consider this model over donating to larger nonprofits where some employees will also be very talented? The answer lies in feedback loops and organizational efficiency. For-profit companies operate under tight feedback loops; they either provide value and thrive or fail to do so and perish. Nonprofits, however, especially those with hard-to-measure outcomes, lack these feedback mechanisms, making inefficiencies more likely. In larger organizations, many inefficiencies are amplified as coordination problems and operational overhead are more prevalent, wasting resources. Another crucial variable in deciding whether to donate to larger organizations or lean towards a person-first approach is how measurable the outcomes you are looking for are. Some nonprofit organizations are doing significant legible and measurable good work, for instance, Against Malaria Foundation and the other GiveWell top charities, as well as quite plausibly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. However, this is a small minority. In many cases, it is worth considering whether the problems nonprofits claim to tackle would be better tackled by funding competent individuals or for-profit organizations that can sustain themselves on the open market. Why should we not assume that talented people will receive enough funding and support to do important good stuff as it is? Indeed, capitalism provides an inherent mechanism for preference and information aggregation. By default, it is reasonable to assume markets are a reasonable source of truth regarding what humans want and need. However, free markets are not the silver bullet fo...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team: Introductions and Next Steps, published by Bob Fischer on June 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Some months ago, Rethink Priorities announced its interdisciplinary Worldview Investigation Team (WIT). Now, we're pleased to introduce the team's members: Bob Fischer is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals. Before leading WIT, he ran RP's Moral Weight Project. Laura Duffy is an Executive Research Coordinator for Co-CEO Marcus Davis and works on the Worldview Investigations Project. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and co-facilitated UChicago Effective Altruism's Introductory Fellowship. Arvo Muñoz Morán is a Quantitative Researcher working on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities and a research assistant at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and earned an MPhil in Economics from Oxford. His background is in mathematics and philosophy. Hayley Clatterbuck is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on topics in probability, evolutionary biology, and animal minds. Derek Shiller is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a PhD in philosophy and has written on topics in metaethics, consciousness, and the philosophy of probability. Before joining Rethink Priorities, Derek worked as the lead web developer for The Humane League. David Bernard is a Quantitative Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He will soon complete his PhD in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where his research focuses on forecasting and causal inference in the short and long-run. He was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Global Priorities fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. Over the next few months, the team will be working on cause prioritization—a topic that raises hard normative, metanormative, decision-theoretic, and empirical issues. We aren't going to resolve them anytime soon. So, we need to decide how to navigate a sea of open questions. In part, this involves making our assumptions explicit, producing the best models we can, and then conducting sensitivity analyses to determine both how robust our models are to uncertainty and where the value of information lies. Accordingly, WIT's goal is to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities. Among the planned contributions, you can expect: A cross-cause cost-effectiveness model. This tool will allow users to compare interventions like corporate animal welfare campaigns with work on AI safety, the Against Malaria Foundation with attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, biosecurity projects with community building, and so on. We've been working on a draft of this model in recent months and we recently hired two programmers—Chase Carter and Agustín Covarrubias—to accelerate its public release. While this tool won't resolve all disputes about resource allocation, we hope it will help the community reason more transparently about these issues. Surveys of key stakeholders about the inputs to the model. Many people have thought long and hard about how much x-risk certain interventions can reduce, the relative importance of improving human and animal welfare, and the cost of saving lives in developing countries. We want to capture and distill those insights. A series of reports on the cruxes. The model has three key cruxes: animals' “moral weights,” the expected value of the future, and your preference for ...

Some months ago, Rethink Priorities announced its interdisciplinary Worldview Investigation Team (WIT). Now, we're pleased to introduce the team's members:Bob Fischer is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals. Before leading WIT, he ran RP's Moral Weight Project.Laura Duffy is an Executive Research Coordinator for Co-CEO Marcus Davis and works on the Worldview Investigations Project. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and co-facilitated UChicago Effective Altruism's Introductory Fellowship.Arvo Muñoz Morán is a Quantitative Researcher working on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities and a research assistant at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and earned an MPhil in Economics from Oxford. His background is in mathematics and philosophy.Hayley Clatterbuck is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on topics in probability, evolutionary biology, and animal minds. Derek Shiller is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a PhD in philosophy and has written on topics in metaethics, consciousness, and the philosophy of probability. Before joining Rethink Priorities, Derek worked as the lead web developer for The Humane League.David Bernard is a Quantitative Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He will soon complete his PhD in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where his research focuses on forecasting and causal inference in the short and long-run. He was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Global Priorities fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. Over the next few months, the team will be working on cause prioritization—a topic that raises hard normative, metanormative, decision-theoretic, and empirical issues. We aren't going to resolve them anytime soon. So, we need to decide how to navigate a sea of open questions. In part, this involves making our assumptions explicit, producing the best models we can, and then conducting sensitivity analyses to determine both how robust our models are to uncertainty and where the value of information lies.Accordingly, WIT's goal is to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities. Among the planned contributions, you can expect:A cross-cause cost-effectiveness model. This tool will allow users to compare interventions like corporate animal welfare campaigns with work on AI safety, the Against Malaria Foundation with attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, biosecurity projects with community building, and so on. We've been working on a draft of this model in recent months and we recently hired two programmers to accelerate its public release. While this tool won't resolve all disputes about resource allocation, we hope it will help the community reason more transparently about these issues.Surveys of key stakeholders about the inputs to the model. Many people have thought long and hard about how much x-risk certain interventions can reduce, the relative importance of improving human and [...]--- First published: June 21st, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kSrjdtazFhkwwLuK8/rethink-priorities-worldview-investigation-team --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. Share feedback on this narration.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: World Malaria Day: Reflecting on Past Victories and Envisioning a Malaria-Free Future, published by 2ndRichter on April 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. World Malaria Day, inaugurated in 2017 by the United Nations World Health Organization, reminds us of malaria's impact on humanity and the role we can take in preventing the disease. Malaria was only eradicated from areas like Europe as recently as the 1970s, and nearly half of the world's population was still at risk of malaria in 2021. Over 600,000 people died of malaria in 2021 and 247 million people contracted the disease in 2021—and three-quarters of those deaths were children under five. Almost half of the world's countries have eradicated malaria since 1945, and we have reason to hope that countries still affected can eradicate it as well. With significant scientific advancements, we know that effective malaria prevention can be impactful and relatively cheap. Typical interventions to prevent and treat malaria include insecticide-treated bednets, removing standing water from affected areas, and antiviral medications—and some of these interventions are relatively cheap. Only $5 USD can provide one malaria net and $7 can protect a child from malaria through malaria chemoprevention. Roughly $5000 USD will provide enough bednets or seasonal medicine doses to save someone's life. Recent advances in vaccines against malaria and in work exploring the use of gene drives provide further hope that we could eradicate malaria from countries that are still affected. On World Malaria Day, we encourage you to donate to Giving What We Can's fundraiser partnering with the Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium. Malaria is preventable and treatable; a lack of resources leaves people personally affected by the disease or affected by the loss of loved ones. Your giving can directly impact the lives of those affected by malaria: if we reached the $1 million USD fundraising goal, we could directly prevent roughly 200 deaths from malaria. Put simply, this is an area where we really can make a difference. Plasmodium falciparum prevalence from 2000 to 2019. The decreasing amount of red, orange, and yellow represents the decreasing prevalence of one of the deadliest strains of malaria due to prevention efforts. Data from, animation idea by Sam Deere. Where we've been Malaria has been a part of human history for thousands of years, from infections in ancient Rome to the infections of several U.S. presidents. Early treatment for malaria came in the form of quinine from the cinchona tree, first isolated by French chemists in 1820, and was commonly administered in the form of tonic water or the gin and tonic. French surgeon Alphonse Laveran discovered the plasmodium parasite as the cause of malaria in 1880, opening up further research that would identify antimalarials like chloroquine and DDT. Proportion of deaths from malaria to deaths from all causes in the eastern United States, 1870 US Census. From Our World In Data/Statistical Atlas from the 9th Census of the United States 1870 (published 1874). Fighting malaria was the impetus for developing public health infrastructure in a number of countries. The predecessor to the United States Centers for Disease Control was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, designed to limit the impact of malaria during World War II around US military bases in the Southern United States (hence its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia rather than Washington DC). Roughly half of the world's countries have eliminated malaria in their territories through public health efforts, including some in tropical regions where malaria is most likely to be prevalent. 79 countries eliminated malaria from 1945 to 2010, and several more since 2010. Countries must achieve at least three consecutive y...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Predicting the cost-effectiveness of running a randomized controlled trial, published by Falk Lieder on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: Research is underrated. Running an RCT to evaluate a digital intervention for promoting altruism could be more than 10x as cost-effective as the best charities working on global health and wellbeing. In the previous post, we found that – in expectation – Baumsteiger's (2019) intervention for promoting altruism is about 4x as cost-effective as GiveDirectly but lower than the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation or StrongMinds. However, the uncertainty about the actual cost-effectiveness of this intervention is still extremely high. The uncertainty is, in fact, so high that the 95% credible interval on the cost-effectiveness of the new intervention ranges from -0.5 WELLBYs/$1000 to 88 WELLBYs/$1000. The upper bound of this credible interval is close to the cost-effectiveness of the presumably most cost-effective mental health charity StrongMinds (90 WELLBYs/$1000; Plant, 2022), and more than twice the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation (39 WELLBYs/$1000; Plant, 2022). Based on these estimates, there is a 5% chance that the intervention might be harmful and a more than 5% chance that it might be at least as cost-effective as the charities recommended by GiveWell and the Happier Lives Institute. Because of this high uncertainty, any decisions based on the current state of knowledge could be highly suboptimal compared to what we would do if we had additional information. However, information can be costly, especially when running a randomized controlled trial (RCT). And the more money we spend on information, the less we can spend on saving lives. This dilemma raises the question, “When is it worthwhile to run an RCT to gather more data, and when should we exploit what we already know?” To answer this question, we introduce a new method for predicting the cost-effectiveness of gaining new information through an RCT and comparing it to the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and directly promoting global health and well-being. We illustrate this method using the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019) as an example. However, the approach we are illustrating is more general and can also be applied to RCTs on established, emerging, and yet unknown EA interventions, including deworming, motivating parents to vaccinate their children, water purification, and interventions for improving mental health. We develop our method in two steps. First, we apply the established Value of Information framework (Howard, 1966) to obtain an upper bound on the cost-effectiveness of running an RCT. Then, we replace this method's unrealistic assumption of perfect information with more realistic assumptions about the imperfect information generated by an RCT. This yields a new method that can provide more accurate estimates of the cost-effectiveness of evaluation research. As a proof of concept, we apply this method to predict how cost-effective it would be to evaluate the altruism intervention based on Baumsteiger (2019) in RCTs with different numbers of participants. Our method predicts that running such an RCT with 1200 participants would be highly cost-effective. This post is a brief summary of the longer report presented in this interactive notebook. How valuable would it be to know the true exact value of the cost-effectiveness of the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019)? To obtain an upper bound on how valuable it might be to evaluate the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019), I first calculate the value of obtaining perfect information about its cost-effectiveness. The value of perfect information is an established mathematical concept introduced by Howard (1966). It has recently been applied to charity evalu...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tensions between different approaches to doing good, published by James Özden on March 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Link-posted from my blog here. TLDR: I get the impression that EAs don't always understand where certain critics are coming from e.g. what do people actually mean when they say EAs aren't pursuing "system change" enough? or that we're focusing on the wrong things? I feel like I hear these critiques a lot, so I attempted to steelman them and put them into more EA-friendly jargon. It's almost certainly not a perfect representation of these views, nor exhaustive, but might be interesting anyway. Enjoy! I feel lucky that I have fairly diverse groups of friends. On one hand, some of my closest friends are people I know through grassroots climate and animal rights activism, from my days in Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rebellion. On the other hand, I also spend a lot of time with people who have a very different approach to improving the world, such as friends I met through the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program or via effective altruism. Both of these somewhat vague and undefined groups, “radical” grassroots activists and empirics-focused charity folks, often critique the other group with various concerns about their methods of doing good. Almost always, I end up defending the group under attack, saying they have some reasonable points and we would do better if we could integrate the best parts of both worldviews. To highlight how these conversations usually go (and clarify my own thinking), I thought I would write up the common points into a dialogue between two versions of myself. One version, labelled Quantify Everything James (or QEJ), discusses the importance of supporting highly evidence-based and quantitatively-backed ways of doing good. This is broadly similar to what most effective altruists advocate for. The other part of myself, presented under the label Complexity-inclined James (CIJ), discusses the limitations of this empirical approach, and how else we should consider doing the most good. With this character, I'm trying to capture the objections that my activist friends often have. As it might be apparent, I'm sympathetic to both of these different approaches and I think they both provide some valuable insights. In this piece, I focus more on describing the common critiques of effective altruist-esque ways of doing good, as this seems to be something that isn't particularly well understood (in my opinion). Without further ado: Quantify Everything James (QEJ): We should do the most good by finding charities that are very cost-effective, with a strong evidence base, and support them financially! For example, organisations like The Humane League, Clean Air Task Force and Against Malaria Foundation all seem like they provide demonstrably significant benefits on reducing animal suffering, mitigating climate change and saving human lives. For example, external evaluators estimate the Against Malaria Foundation can save a human life for around $5000 and that organisations like The Humane League affect 41 years of chicken life per dollar spent on corporate welfare campaigns. It's crucial we support highly evidence-based organisations such as these, as most well-intentioned charities probably don't do that much good for their beneficiaries. Additionally, the best charities are likely to be 10-100x more effective than even the average charity! Using an example from this very relevant paper by Toby Ord: If you care about helping people with blindness, one option is to pay $40,000 for someone in the United States to have access to a guide dog (the costs of training the dog & the person). However, you could also pay for surgeries to treat trachoma, a bacterial infection that is the top cause of blindness worldwide. At around $20 per ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On the First Anniversary of my Best Friend's Death, published by Rockwell on March 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to encouragement from several people in the EA community, I've just started a blog. This is the first post: www.rockwellschwartz.com/blog/on-the-first-anniversary-of-my-best-friends-deathThe title likely makes this clear, but this post discusses death, suffering, and grief. You may not want to read it as a result, or you may want to utilize mental health resources. Some weeks back, I had the opportunity to give a presentation for Yale's undergraduate course, “A Life Worth Living”. As I assembled my PowerPoint—explaining the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework; Against Malaria Foundation; and global catastrophic threats—I felt the strong desire to pivot and include this photo: It was taken sometime in 2019 in my Brooklyn basement and depicts two baby roosters perched upon two of my human best friends, Maddie (left) and Alexa (right). One year ago today, Alexa died at age 25. This is my attempt to honor a tragic anniversary and, more so, a life that was very worth living. I'm sure you're curious, so I'll get it out of the way: The circumstances surrounding their death remain unclear, even as their family continues to seek the truth. I made a long list of open questions a year ago and, to my knowledge, most remain unanswered today. What I do know is that Alexa suffered greatly throughout their short-lived 25 years. And I also know that Alexa still did far more good than many who live far less arduous lives for thrice as long. That's what I want to talk about here: Alexa, the altruist. Alexa, my best friend, roommate, codefendant, and rescue and caregiving partner. Alexa, cooing in the kitchen, milk-dipped paintbrush in hand, feeding an orphaned baby rat rescued from the city streets. Alexa, in a dark parking lot somewhere in Idaho, warming a bag of fluids against the car heater before carefully injecting them into an ill chicken. Alexa, pouring over medical reference books on the kitchen floor, searching for a treatment for sick guppies. Alexa, stopping when no one else stopped–calling for help when no one else called–as countless subway riders walked over the unconscious man on the cement floor. Alexa, hopping fences, climbing trees, walking through blood-soaked streets, bleary-eyed and exhausted but still going, going. Alexa, saving lives. Alexa, saving so many lives. Thousands. From childhood, through their last weeks. In dog shelters, slaughterhouses, and the wild. Everywhere they went. Alexa, walking the streets of Philadelphia, gently collecting invasive spotted lantern flies before bringing them home to a lush butterfly enclosure, carefully monitoring their energy levels and food. Alexa, caring for 322 spotted lantern flies until they passed naturally come winter. Alexa, the caregiver. Alexa, the life-giver. Alexa directly aided so many individuals over the years, I don't think any one person is aware of even half those they helped. Their efforts were relentless but shockingly low-profile. They were far more likely to share a success to spotlight the wonders of the individual they aided than their heroic efforts to bring them to safety. And, painfully, they were also much more likely to dwell on the errors, accidents, or unavoidable heartbreaking outcomes inherent to the act of staving off suffering and dodging death. Alexa's deep compassion caused them equally deep pain. And when Alexa and I ultimately distanced, it was to evade the deep void of grief too great to bear that lay between us. I know the pain Alexa carried because I do too. Sometimes, the pain that binds you to another becomes the pain you run from, and you never get the chance to go back and shoulder their pain in turn. Alexa had a bias: Do. And do fearles...

This episode is Pod and Prejudice co-host duel, with Molly playing for NY Bully Crew and Becca playing for the Against Malaria Foundation, as they set out to solve American Girl Mini Mysteries! It's the first time we've ever covered this series on the podcast and it's absolutely delightful. Cases - The Original Boston Brooke, Play With Your Feud, Witch lady, Light Housekeeping Clues & Evidence - bullying politicians, hot stances, the Boxcar Children lore, the America Girl Store, IKEA, NYC moving, baseball ghosts, Hawaiian poke, Jane Austen, dragon bannisters, the Steph Curry of Podcasting WARM Domestic Violence Rescue: https://www.weallreallymatter.org/—Thanks for listening to Meddling Adults! If you want to help the prize pool grow, become a member of our Patreon. If you want to learn more about the show or interact with us online, check out the links below:WEBSITE: meddlingadults.comTWITTER: twitter.com/meddlingadultsINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/meddlingadultsFACEBOOK: facebook.com/meddlingadults —CREDITS Creator/Host/Executive Producer: Mike Schubert Producer/Editor: Sherry Guo Music: Bettina Campomanes, Brandon GrugleArt: Maayan Atias, Kelly SchubertWeb Design: Mike & Kelly Schubert

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Atlas Fellowship] Why do 100 high-schoolers need $50k each from Open Philanthropy?, published by Sparcalum2 on February 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note this is a sincere question. Not intended to cause controversy. It was inspired by this post questioning another OP Grant. Full Disclosure I applied to the Atlas Fellowship but was rejected. However, I attended SPARC, a free in-person program that teaches rationality tools to high schoolers (and follows a similar structure to Atlas Fellowship's camp). I'm friends with many Atlas Fellows. What is the Atlas Fellowship? For those newer to the EA Community, the Atlas Fellowship is a competitive program for high schoolers. If you are awarded it, you receive, A $50k scholarship (or $12,000 for Atlas India). Atlas Fellows can spend this money on anything considered an "academic expense". This includes travel expenses if justification can be provided. A fully-funded 11-day summer program in the Bay Area in a large former fraternity on UC Berkley's campus. College admissions preparation for top universities. (The admissions tutors are paid $200-300/hr). Access to the $1m Atlas Fund to learn, experiment, and build impactful projects. For 500 finalists, they receive $1,000 and 5 free books. Total Cost of Prizes $50k x 100 + $12k x 20 + $1k x 500 = $5.74m This does not include the instructors, venue, or travel costs. What made me write this post? This came to my attention after reading EA London's monthly newsletter. It highlighted new grants that Open Philanthropy made. I learnt that OP made an additional $1.8m grant to the Atlas Fellowship in December 2022 This is on top of a $5m grant they made in March 2022 and a $5m grant that the FTX Future Fund made. There is much discussion (even amongst Atlas Fellows) that it is not a good use of money and that high schoolers don't need $50k scholarships; therefore, I felt raising this question is worthwhile and of interest to the wider community. Questions I have for Open Philanthropy and the Atlas Fellowship Why do high schoolers need $50k scholarships? If the reason is to attract talent, why is this required when programs such as SPARC and ESPR do an excellent job of attracting talented high schoolers? Note that SPARC and ESPR have been running for close to a decade. Many alumni go to top universities worldwide (MIT, Stanford, Oxford, etc.) I estimate each Atlas Fellow costs $80-90k, given you need to divide the total costs by the number of fellows (i.e., instructor cost should be considered). If the answer is to attract better talent, is there a significant difference in talent between Atlas Fellows and those attending SPARC and ESPR that makes this $80-90k money worthwhile? (Note that this would be over 20 lives saved through the Against Malaria Foundation). Why was a $50k scholarship offered if a $25k scholarship would attract, say, 80-90% of the same applicants? I suspect that a $5k unconditional grant that they can spend on whatever would attract just as many quality applications and be much cheaper. What is the breakdown of the socioeconomic background of Atlas Fellows? What countries are all Atlas Fellows from? What about the finalists? Atlas says they're doing "talent search". This connotes finding talent from under-resourced communities or poor students. Do the statistics match this? From friends who are Atlas Fellows, they said many Atlas Fellows do not require the scholarship as their parents earn a lot and can already pay for college. This makes me question why some people are accepted as $50k to the Against Malaria Foundation, which would save over ten lives. (Even more, if you consider it $80-90k). What are the Atlas Fellows spending the money on if their parents have more than enough to pay for college? What measures do they have to identify talent that ot...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Organization Updates: January 2023, published by Lizka on January 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. These monthly posts originated as the "Updates" section of the EA Newsletter. Organizations submit their own updates, which we edit for clarity. Job listings that these organizations highlighted (as well as a couple of other impactful jobs) are at the top of this post. Some of the jobs have pressing deadlines. You can see previous updates on the "EA Organization Updates (monthly series)" topic page, or in our repository of past newsletters. Notice that there's also an “org update” tag, where you can find more news and updates that are not part of this consolidated series. The organizations are in alphabetical order, starting with L-Z, 0-A-K. Job listings Consider also exploring jobs listed on “Job listing (open).” GiveWell Senior Researcher (Remote / Oakland, CA, $181,400 - $199,800) Senior Research Associate (Remote / Oakland, CA, $127,000 - $139,900) Content Editor (Remote / Oakland, CA, $83,500 - $91,900) Global Priorities Institute Operations Coordinator (Maternity Cover) (Oxford, £29,614 - £35,326, apply by 24 January) IDinsight 2023 Associate & Senior Associate Global Drive (Multiple locations) Technical Delivery Manager/Director (New Delhi, India or Nairobi, Kenya) Associate Product Manager (New Delhi, India or Nairobi, Kenya) Open Philanthropy Assorted jobs in Salesforce administration, operations, and recruiting (Remote; working hours must overlap with US hours for most roles. Salary range $84,303 - $127,021 across all jobs) Rethink Priorities Board Member (Remote, voluntary roles entail 3-10 hours/month while paid roles require 5-10 hours/week at a rate of $40.53/hour, apply by 20 January) Wild Animal Initiative Development Director (Remote, US preferred, open to UK applicants, $82,020 - $100,247, apply by 23 January) Organizational updates These are in alphabetical order, starting with L-Z, 0-A-K. Legal Priorities Project LPP's Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter published a new working paper titled “Ordinary meaning of existential risk” investigating the ordinary meaning of legally relevant concepts in the existential risk literature. The paper aims to provide crucial insights for those tasked with drafting and interpreting existential risk laws, and for the coherence of ordinary meaning analysis more generally. José Villalobos and Christoph Winter participated in EAGxLatinAmerica. They hosted a Q&A on international law and existential risk. Matthijs Maas published a blog post titled “Existential risk mitigation: What I worry about when there are only bad options” as part of Draft Amnesty Day. LPP received a grant of $115,000 from the Survival and Flourishing Fund to support their general operations. One for the World One for the World mirrors the recommendations made by GiveWell for their own Nonprofit Partners portfolio. This year, GiveWell has updated its portfolio to contain a smaller list of nonprofits than before. In practice, this means that their Nonprofit Partners list has temporarily become much smaller, containing just four individual nonprofits. These nonprofits continue to offer gold-standard evidence that their method works and is incredibly cost-effective: Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, New Incentives, and Helen Keller International. They are also adding a new option upon taking the 1% Pledge, which is GiveWell's new All Grants Fund. This Fund will continue to make higher-risk grants, potentially including grants to nonprofits removed from GiveWell's recommended nonprofits list. One for the World therefore thinks this gives donors the best chance to continue supporting a wider variety of granting opportunities. Open Philanthropy Open Philanthropy pre-announced its AI Worldviews Contest, which will launch in early 20...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What you prioritise is mostly moral intuition, published by James Ozden on December 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note: A linkpost from my blog. Epistemic status: A confused physicist trying to grapple with philosophy, and losing. Effective Altruism is about doing as much good as possible with a given amount of resources, using reason and evidence. This sounds very appealing, but there's the age-old problem, what counts as “the most good”? Despite the large focus on careful reasoning and rigorous evidence within Effective Altruism, I speculate that many people decide what is “the most good” based largely on moral intuitions. I should also point out that these moral dilemmas don't just plague Effective Altruists or those who prescribe to utilitarianism. These thorny moral issues apply to everyone who wants to help others or “do good”. As Richard Chappell neatly puts it, these are puzzles for everyone. If you want to cop-out, you could reject any philosophy where you try to rank how bad or good things are, but this seems extremely unappealing. Surely if we're given the choice between saving ten people from a terrible disease like malaria and ten people from hiccups, we should be able to easily decide that one is worse than the other? Anything else seems very unhelpful to the world around us, where we allow grave suffering to continue as we don't think comparing “bads” are possible. To press on, let's take one concrete example of a moral dilemma: How important is extending lives relative to improving lives? Put more simply, given limited resources, should we focus on averting deaths from easily preventable diseases or increasing people's quality of life? This is not a question that one can easily answer with randomised controlled trials, meta-analyses and other traditional forms of evidence! Despite this, it might strongly affect what you dedicate your life to working on, or the causes you choose to support. Happier Lives Institute have done some great research looking at this exact question and no surprises - your view on this moral question matters a lot. When looking at charities that might help people alive today, they find that it matters a lot whether you prioritise the youngest people (deprivationism), older children over infants (TRIA), or the view that death isn't necessarily bad, but that living a better life is what matters most (Epicureanism). For context, the graph below shows the relative cost-effectiveness of various charities under different philosophical assumptions, using the metric WELLBYs, which taken into account the subjective experiences of people. So, we have a problem. If this is a question that could affect what classifies as “the most good”, and I think it's definitely up there, then how do we proceed? Do we just do some thought experiments, weigh up our intuitions against other beliefs we hold (using reflective equilibrium potentially), incorporate moral uncertainty, and go from there? For a movement based on doing “the most good”, this seems very unsatisfying! But sadly, I think this problem rears its head in several important places. To quote Michael Plant (a philosopher from the University of Oxford and director of Happier Lives Institute): “Well, all disagreements in philosophy ultimately come down to intuitions, not just those in population ethics!” To note, I think this is very different from empirical disagreements about doing “the most good”. For example, Effective Altruism (EA) is pretty good at using data and evidence to get to the bottom of how to do a certain kind of good. One great example is GiveWell, who have an extensive research process, drawing mostly on high-quality randomised control trials (see this spreadsheet for the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation) to find the most effective ways to hel...

The fourth episode in our series on Effective Altruism focuses on fighting malaria.  Jeremiah is joined by Rob Mather, founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation. They discuss why bed nets are such an effective intervention for stopping the spread of malaria, AMF's approach to data and how we can prove our dollars are making a difference, and the future of malaria as we race to develop new technologies like gene-edited mosquitos and vaccines. Recommended resources:  http://againstmalaria.org/   To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack.  Become a supporter today! Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast?  Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.instagram.com/neoliberalproject/ https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject   Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/

Maria Manuel Mota é bióloga e uma autoridade internacional na investigação sobre a malária. Doutorou-se em Parasitologia Molecular pela University College London, no Reino Unido, e, depois de ter feito investigação sobre a malária internacionalmente, regressou a Portugal em 2002, onde tem continuado a desenvolver investigação que lhe tem valido diversas distinções. Desde 2014, assumiu também funções de Diretora Executiva do Instituto de Medicina Molecular, em Lisboa. -> Apoie este projecto e faça parte da comunidade de mecenas do 45 Graus em: 45grauspodcast.com -> Página do 45 Graus no Youtube _______________ Índice da conversa: (4:03) O que te levou a estudar a malária? | Progressos nos últimos anos na investigação nesta área. | Against Malaria Foundation (considerada pela Givewell a instituição mais eficaz do mundo)  (18:41) Nova vacina contra a malária (Oxford) | Adrian Hill | Vacina Gsk.  (27:04) O que causa a malária, e como nos infecta. Plasmodium. | Porque se manifesta de maneira diferente nas pessoas. | Como a anemia falciforme protege contra a malária.  (35:19) A importância da investigação em ciência fundamental. | A vantagem do IMM em ter uma ligação ao hospital (45:11) Importância e desafios da interdisciplinaridade na ciência. | Horizontes iMM: Uma Pergunta a Três | série: Diagnosis (59:41) Forças e limitações de Portugal na investigação científica. | Investigação de Bruno Silva-Santos | O que é preciso corrigir no financiamento em Portugal? | Independência da FCT. (1:13:44) Dificuldade em atrair doutorados para a investigação fundamental.  (1:29:08) Problemas do actual sistema de publicação e avaliação científica. | PLOS (Open Science) Livro recomendado: Empire of Pain, de Patrick Radden Keefe  _______________ Obrigado aos mecenas do podcast: Julie Piccini, Ana Raquel Guimarães Galaró family, José Luís Malaquias, Francisco Hermenegildo, Nuno Costa, Abílio Silva, Salvador Cunha, Bruno Heleno, António llms, Helena Monteiro, BFDC, Pedro Lima Ferreira, Miguel van Uden, João Ribeiro, Nuno e Ana, João Baltazar, Miguel Marques, Corto Lemos, Carlos Martins, Tiago Leite Tomás Costa, Rita Sá Marques, Geoffrey Marcelino, Luis, Maria Pimentel, Rui Amorim, RB, Pedro Frois Costa, Gabriel Sousa, Mário Lourenço, Filipe Bento Caires, Diogo Sampaio Viana, Tiago Taveira, Ricardo Leitão, Pedro B. Ribeiro, João Teixeira, Miguel Bastos, Isabel Moital, Arune Bhuralal, Isabel Oliveira, Ana Teresa Mota, Luís Costa, Francisco Fonseca, João Nelas, Tiago Queiroz, António Padilha, Rita Mateus, Daniel Correia, João Saro João Pereira Amorim, Sérgio Nunes, Telmo Gomes, André Morais, Antonio Loureiro, Beatriz Bagulho, Tiago Stock, Joaquim Manuel Jorge Borges, Gabriel Candal, Joaquim Ribeiro, Fábio Monteiro, João Barbosa, Tiago M Machado, Rita Sousa Pereira, Henrique Pedro, Cloé Leal de Magalhães, Francisco Moura, Rui Antunes7, Joel, Pedro L, João Diamantino, Nuno Lages, João Farinha, Henrique Vieira, André Abrantes, Hélder Moreira, José Losa, João Ferreira, Rui Vilao, Jorge Amorim, João Pereira, Goncalo Murteira Machado Monteiro, Luis Miguel da Silva Barbosa, Bruno Lamas, Carlos Silveira, Maria Francisca Couto, Alexandre Freitas, Afonso Martins, José Proença, Jose Pedroso, Telmo , Francisco Vasconcelos, Duarte , Luis Marques, Joana Margarida Alves Martins, Tiago Parente, Ana Moreira, António Queimadela, David Gil, Daniel Pais, Miguel Jacinto, Luís Santos, Bernardo Pimentel, Gonçalo de Paiva e Pona , Tiago Pedroso, Gonçalo Castro, Inês Inocêncio, Hugo Ramos, Pedro Bravo, António Mendes Silva, paulo matos, Luís Brandão, Tomás Saraiva, Ana Vitória Soares, Mestre88 , Nuno Malvar, Ana Rita Laureano, Manuel Botelho da Silva, Pedro Brito, Wedge, Bruno Amorim Inácio, Manuel Martins, Ana Sousa Amorim, Robertt, Miguel Palhas, Maria Oliveira, Cheila Bhuralal, Filipe Melo, Gil Batista Marinho, Cesar Correia, Salomé Afonso, Diogo Silva, Patrícia Esquível , Inês Patrão, Daniel Almeida, Paulo Ferreira, Macaco Quitado, Pedro Correia, Francisco Santos, Antonio Albuquerque, Renato Mendes, João Barbosa, Margarida Gonçalves, Andrea Grosso, João Pinho , João Crispim, Francisco Aguiar , João Diogo, João Diogo Silva, José Oliveira Pratas, João Moreira, Vasco Lima, Tomás Félix, Pedro Rebelo, Nuno Gonçalves, Pedro , Marta Baptista Coelho, Mariana Barosa, Francisco Arantes, João Raimundo, Mafalda Pratas, Tiago Pires, Luis Quelhas Valente, Vasco Sá Pinto, Jorge Soares, Pedro Miguel Pereira Vieira, Pedro F. Finisterra, Ricardo Santos _______________ Esta conversa foi editada por: Hugo Oliveira _______________ Bio: Maria Manuel Mota Licenciou-se em Biologia e obteve o grau de Mestre em Imunologia pela Universidade do Porto. Em 1998 doutorou-se em Parasitologia Molecular pela University College London, no Reino Unido. Maria M. Mota desenvolveu investigação como investigadora pós-doutorada no Laboratório do Prof. Vitor Nussenzweig da New York University Medical School, nos Estados Unidos e lecionou na mesma escola médica. Regressou a Portugal em 2002, onde liderou o seu grupo de investigação do Laboratório de Biologia Celular da Malária, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, em Oeiras, tendo-se tornado em 2005 investigadora principal da Unidade de Malária no iMM, além de lecionar na Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa. Maria M. Mota é atualmente Diretora Executiva do iMM e Professora Convidada na Harvard School of Public Health, nos Estados Unidos. O seu trabalho no campo da malária centra-se no estudo de ambas as fases da infeção (hepática, sanguínea) por Plasmodium, o parasita causador da malária, no hospedeiro humano. Maria M. Mota venceu o EMBO Young Investigator Award em 2003, o European Young Investigator Award da European Science Foundation em 2004, e foi investigadora internacional do Howard Hughes Medical Institute (EUA) entre 2005 e 2010. Em Maio de 2016 foi eleita para integrar a Organização Europeia de Biologia Molecular (European Molecular Biology Organization – EMBO). Em 2017 recebeu o prémio Pfizer e em 2018 o Prémio Sanofi – Institut Pasteur – Mid-Career category. Em Portugal foi condecorada pelo Presidente da República com a Ordem do Infante D. Henrique em 2005 e foi agraciada com o Prémio Pessoa em 2013. Em 2019 recebeu o Prémio Dona Antónia-Consagração de Carreira. Maria Manuel Mota é uma voz ativa pelos direitos das mulheres e equidade de oportunidades na educação. Atualmente tem uma coluna de opinião mensal no jornal Expresso, como um contributo para alcançar o seu sonho de viver numa sociedade centrada no conhecimento. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Don't give well, give WELLBYs: HLI's 2022 charity recommendation, published by MichaelPlant on November 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post sets out the Happier Lives Institute's charity recommendation for 2022, how we got here, and what's next. We provide a summary first, followed by a more detailed version. Summary HLI's charity recommendation for 2022 is StrongMinds, a non-profit that provides group psychotherapy for women in Uganda and Zambia who are struggling with depression. We compared StrongMinds to three interventions that have been recommended by GiveWell as being amongst the most cost-effective in the world: cash transfers, deworming pills, and anti-malarial bednets. We find that StrongMinds is more cost-effective (in almost all cases). HLI is pioneering a new and improved approach to evaluating charities. We focus directly on what really matters, how much they improve people's happiness, rather than on health or wealth. We measure effectiveness in WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years). We estimate that StrongMinds is ~10x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly, which provides cash transfers. StrongMinds' 8-10 week programme of group interpersonal therapy has a slightly larger effect than a $1,000 cash transfer but costs only $170 per person to deliver. For deworming, our forthcoming analysis finds it has a small but statistically non-significant effect on happiness. Even if we assume this effect is true, deworming is still half as cost-effective as StrongMinds. We expect to publish our full report in the coming days (sadly, it's been delayed due to a bereavement for one of the authors). In our new report, The Elephant in the Bednet, we show that the relative value of life-extending and life-improving interventions depends very heavily on the philosophical assumptions you make. This issue is usually glossed over and there is no simple answer. We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell. HLI's original mission, when we started three years ago, was to take what appeared to be the world's top charities - the ones GiveWell recommended - reevaluate them in terms of subjective wellbeing, and then try to find something better. We believe we've now accomplished that mission: treating depression at scale allows you to do even more good with your money. We're now moving to ‘Phase 2', analysing a wider range of interventions and charities in WELLBYs to find even better opportunities for donors. StrongMinds aims to raise $20 million over the next two years and there's over $800,000 of matching funds available for StrongMinds this giving season. Why does HLI exist? The Happier Lives Institute advises donors how to maximise the impact of their donations. Our distinctive approach is to focus directly on what really matters to people, improving their subjective wellbeing, how they feel during and about their lives. The idea that we should take happiness seriously is simple: Happiness matters. Although it's common to think about impact in terms of health and wealth, those are just a means, not an end in themselves. What's really important is that people enjoy their lives and are free from suffering. We can measure happiness by asking people how they feel. Lots of research has shown that subjective wellbeing surveys are scientifically valid (e.g. OECD, 2013; Kaiser & Oswald, 2022). A typical question is, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life, nowadays?” (0 - not at all satisfied, 10 - completely satisfied). Our expectations about happiness are often wrong. When we try to guess what life would be like, for others or our future selves, we suffer from biases. When we put...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The elephant in the bednet: the importance of philosophy when choosing between extending and improving lives, published by MichaelPlant on November 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Michael Plant, Joel McGuire, and Samuel Dupret Summary How should we compare the value of extending lives to improving lives? Doing so requires us to make various philosophical assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly. But these choices are rarely acknowledged or discussed by decision-makers, all of them are controversial, and they have significant implications for how resources should be distributed. We set out two crucial philosophical issues: (A) an account of the badness of death, how to determine the relative value of deaths at different ages, and (B) locating the neutral point, the place on the wellbeing scale at which life is neither good nor bad for someone. We then illustrate how different choices for (A) and (B) alter the cost-effectiveness of three charities which operate in low-income countries, provide different interventions, and are considered to be some of the most cost-effective ways to help others: Against Malaria Foundation (insecticide-treated nets), GiveDirectly (cash transfers), and StrongMinds (group therapy for depression). We assess all three in terms of wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs) and explain why we do not, and cannot, use standard health metrics (QALYs and DALYs) for this purpose. We show how much cost-effectiveness changes by shifting from one extreme of (reasonable) opinion to the other. At one end, AMF is 1.3x better than StrongMinds. At the other, StrongMinds is 12x better than AMF. We do not advocate for any particular view. Our aim is simply to show that these philosophical choices are decision-relevant and merit further discussion. Our results are displayed in the chart below, which plots the cost-effectiveness of the three charities in WELLBYs/$1,000. StrongMinds and GiveDirectly are represented with flat, dashed lines because their cost-effectiveness does not change under the different assumptions. The changes in AMF's cost-effectiveness are a result of two varying factors. One is using different accounts of the badness of death, that is, ways to assign value to saving lives at different ages; these three accounts go by unintuitive names in the philosophical literature, so we've put a slogan in brackets after each one to clarify their differences: deprivationism (prioritise the youngest), the time-relative interest account (prioritise older children over infants), and Epicureanism (death isn't bad for anyone – prioritise living well, not living long). We also consider including two variants of the time-relative interest account (TRIA); on these, life has a maximum value at the ages of either 5 or 25. The other factor is where to locate the neutral point, the place at which someone has overall zero wellbeing, on a 0-10 life satisfaction scale; we assess that as being at each location between 0/10 and 5/10. As you can see, AMF's cost-effectiveness changes a lot. It is only more cost-effective than StrongMinds if you adopt deprivationism and place the neutral point below 1. 1. Introduction How should we compare the value of extending lives to improving lives? Let's focus our minds with a real choice. On current estimates, for around $4,500, you can expect to save one child's life by providing insecticide-treated nets (ITNs). Alternatively, that sum could provide a $1,000 cash transfer to four-and-a-half families living in extreme poverty ($1,000 is about a year's household income). The cost of both choices is the same, but the outcomes differ. Which one will do the most good? This is a difficult and discomforting ethical question. How might we answer it? And how much would different answers change the priorities? There are various m...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Diversification is Underrated, published by Justis on November 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note: This is not an FTX post, and I don't think its content hinges on current events. Also - though this is probably obvious - I'm speaking in a strictly personal capacity. Formal optimization problems often avail themselves of one solution - there can be multiple optima, but by default there tends to be one optimum for any given problem setup, and the highest expected value move is just to dump everything into that optimum. As a community, we tend to enjoy framing things as formal optimization problems. This is pretty good! But the thing about formal problem setups is they encode lots of assumptions, and those assumptions can have several degrees of freedom. Sometimes the assumptions are just plain qualitative, where quantifying them misses the point; the key isn't to just add another order-of-magnitude (or three) variable to express uncertainty. Rather, the key is to adopt a portfolio approach such that you're hitting optima or near-optima under a variety of plausible assumptions, even mutually exclusive ones. This isn't a new idea. In various guises and on various scales, it's called moral parliament, buckets, cluster thinking, or even just plain hedging. As a community, to our credit, we do a lot of this stuff. But I think we could do more, and be more confident and happy about it. Case study: me I do/have done the following things, that are likely EA-related: Every month, I donate 10% of my pre-tax income to the Against Malaria Foundation. I also donate $100 to Compassion in World Farming, mostly because I feel bad about eating meat. In my spare time, I provide editing services to various organizations as a contractor. The content I edit is often informed by a longtermist perspective, and the modal topic is probably AI safety. I once was awarded (part of a) LTFF (not FTX, the EA Funds one) grant, editing writeups on current cutting-edge AI safety research and researchers. Case study from a causes perspective On a typical longtermist view, my financial donations don't make that much sense - they're morally fine, but it'd be dramatically better in expectation to donate toward reducing x-risk. On a longtermist-skeptical view, the bulk of my editing doesn't accomplish much for altruistic purposes. It's morally fine, but it'd be better to polish general outreach communications for the more legible global poverty and health sector. And depending on how you feel about farmed animals, that smaller piece of the pie could dwarf everything else (even just the $100 a month is plausibly saving more chickens from bad lives than my AMF donations save human lives), or irrelevant (if you don't care about chicken welfare basically at all). I much prefer my situation to a more "aligned" situation, where all my efforts go the same single direction. It's totally plausible to me that work being done right now on AI safety makes a really big difference for how well things go in the next couple decades. It's also plausible to me that none of it matters, either because we're doomed in any case or because our current trajectory is just basically fine. Similarly, it's plausible to me (though I think unlikely) that I learn that AMF's numbers are super inflated somehow, or that its effectiveness collapsed and nobody bothered to check. And it's plausible that in 20 years, we will have made sufficient progress in global poverty and health that there no longer exist donation opportunities in the space as high leverage as there are right now, and so now is a really important time. So I'm really happy to just do both. I don't have quantitative credences here, though I'm normally a huge fan of those. I just don't think they work that well for the outside view of the portfolio approach - I've ...

Malaria is a devastating disease for African villages. It is estimated that malaria can devastate complete villages, as nearly half of the world's population is at risk of malaria transmission. Malaria is a disease found in 87 countries and territories, and in 2020, malaria caused more than 600,000 deaths. Against Malaria Foundation wants to protect people from malaria. Find out how Against Malaria Foundation makes it its mission to provide people with bed nets to battle malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Want to support Against Malaria Foundation? https://www.againstmalaria.com Find the episode on Great.com: https://great.com/great-talks-with/against-malaria-foundation/

Choosing where to donate is incredibly difficult. Luckily, the charity evaluator GiveWell spends thousands of hours on program research each year to help people find highly-impactful giving opportunities. In this episode, Luke sits down with Neil Buddy Shah, GiveWell's managing director at the time of recording, for a deep dive into GiveWell's work. We cover GiveWell's origin, approaches, and focus areas, as well as Buddy's personal background and relationship to effective giving. We also discuss why funding gaps exist despite foreign aid, and the important role donors play in improving people's lives. Buddy responds to some common critiques of GiveWell's work, and clarifies some misconceptions about how the organisation operates.   Neil Buddy Shah is now the CEO of The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). Note: This interview was recorded in April 2022. GiveWell has since updated its cost-effectiveness bar to be higher than it was at the time of recording.  A shorter version of this interview is available on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/BC64OnNHH9A

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Optimism, AI risk, and EA blind spots, published by Justis on September 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Preface I'm going to start this post with a personal story, in part because people tend to enjoy writing that does that. If you don't want the gossip, just skip section one, the takeaway of which is: "EA has a strong cultural bias in favor of believing arbitrary problems are solvable". The gossip - and this takeaway - are not the only insight I'm trying to communicate. I don't mean for this post to be a "community" post overall, but rather one that is action relevant to doing good on the object level. N=1 I had a two week work trial with a prominent EA org. There were some red flags. Nobody would tell me the projected salary, despite the job opportunity taking place across the country and in one of the most expensive cities on Earth. But whatever. I quit my job and flew over. It didn't work out. My best guess is that this was for cultural reasons. My would-be manager didn't think I'd been making fast enough progress understanding a technical framework, but the jobs I've had since have involved that framework, and I've received overwhelmingly positive feedback, working on products dramatically more complicated than the job opportunity called for. C'est la vie. Much later, I was told some of the things in my file for that organization. I was told by the organization's leader in a totally open way - nothing sneaky or "here's the dirt", just some feedback to help me improve. I appreciate this, and welcomed it. But here's the part relevant to the post: One of the negative things in my file was that someone had said I was "a bit of a downer". Much like with my technical competency, maybe so. But it's worth mentioning that in my day to day life, my coworkers generally think I'm weirdly positive, and often comment that my outlook is shockingly sanguine. I believe that both are true. I'm unusually optimistic. But professional EA culture is much, much more so. That's not a bad thing (he said, optimistically). But it's also not all good. (Why) is there an optimism bias? If you want to complete an ambitious project, it's extremely useful to presume that (almost) any challenge can be met. This is a big part of being "agentic", a much-celebrated and indeed valuable virtue within the EA community. (And also within elite circles more generally.) The high-end professional world has lots of upside opportunities and relatively little downside risk (you will probably always find a pretty great job as a fallback), so it's rational to make lots of bets on long odds and try to find holy grails. Therefore, people who are flagged as "ambitious", "impressive", "agentic", will both be selected for and encouraged to further cultivate a mindset where you never say a problem is insurmountable, merely challenging or, if you truly must, "not a top priority right now". But yeah. No odds are too long to be worth a shot! How is this action relevant? To avoid burying the lede, it's a major part of my reasoning to donate my 10% pledge to the Against Malaria Foundation, rather than x-risk reduction efforts. I'll trace out the argument, then pile on the caveats. On the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Will MacAskill put the odds of a misaligned AI takeover around 3%. Many community figures put the odds much higher, but I feel pretty comfortable anchoring on a combination of Will and Katja Grace, who put the odds at 7% that AI destroys the world. Low to mid single digits. Okay. So here's a valid argument, given its premises: Premise One: There is at least a 6% chance that AI destroys the world, or removes all humans from it. Premise Two: There exist interventions that can reliably reduce the risk we face by at least 1% (of the risk, not of the total - so 6% would turn into 5.94%, not 5%). Premise Three: W...

Willem Powerfish is one of the most entertaining and good hearted creators on the Gold Coast. Since 2019 he has grown not only a massive audience, but a loyal following, with his entertaining content and commitment to charity. I first met the great man at Isaac Butterfields stand up show in 2019 and was instantly stuck by how much of a down to earth dude he was, and always hoped we would meet up for the podcast at some point.This was a super enjoyable episode of the podcast but not only that, Willems stories of charity inspired to me to donate some of our ad revenue, and post podcast we made a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. Malaria is currently killing more people than any other disease globally and with the simple purchase of treated mosquito nets, countless lives can be saved.https://www.againstmalaria.com/ NEW HATS!http://www.gypsy-tales.shopSPONSORS:MANSCAPED: http://www.manscaped.comGet 20% Off + Free Shipping, with the code GYPSYGANGANTIGRAVITY BATTERIES: http://www.antigravitybatteries.comBOOST MOBILE: https://boost.com.au/pages/winCLICK TO ENTER TO WIN A BOOST PRIZE PACKKRUSHOZ: http://www.krushoz.comDriTimes: http://www.dritimes.comRIVAL INK: https://www.rivalinkdesignco.com/product/gypsy-tales-retro-graphics-kit/- CODE: GYPSYGANG 15%MXSTORE: http://www.mxstore.com.auFIST HANDWEAR: http://www.fisthandwear.com- CODE: GYPSYGANG 15%DIXXON: http://www.dixxonquality.com.auTICK TOCK NUTRITION: https://www.ticktocknutrition.com.auCode: GYPSYGANG for $20 off...SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ►https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtl-RTKdYdCzf8hUnuGRiBgADD GYPSY TALES ON INSTAGRAM ►https://www.instagram.com/gypsytalespodcastSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Zzapp Malaria: More effective than bed nets? (Wanted: CTO, COO & Funding), published by Yonatan Cale on September 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: This post describes Zzapp's approach and effectiveness from their own perspective, intended as an intro aimed at the Effective Altruism community, as an invitation to investigate further and maybe fund them. They claim to be 2x more cost effective than bed nets in reducing malaria in urban and semi-urban areas (over 70% of Africa's population). Epistemic status: Based on conversations with Arnon, the CEO of Zzapp Malaria, not cross checked with other info such as Givewell's review of Against Malaria Foundation. Zzapp's approach and theoretical reason to think it would work You can skip to their experiment and how it went, if you prefer. TL;DR: Spray water bodies with larvicide to prevent mosquitoes from reproducing, and do it extra well by managing the considerable ops work of finding and spraying the water bodies using satellite imaging and an app for the people on the ground. Spraying water bodies with larvicide - is tried and works, unrelated to Zzapp Sources [link] [link]. Theoretical advantages compared to bed nets In every place that malaria was eliminated (which happened many times), larvicide (the treatment of standing water bodies) was the main component. Bed Nets only help people indoors during the night. Many people don't use their bed nets. Mosquitos developed resistance to the bes nets' insecticide in many countries Note I think Givewell already took the problems into account in their analysis, and Arnon emphasizes he thinks bed nets are great, and this is a pitch for using larvicide in urban (and semi urban) areas, not for stopping distributing bed nets. Zzapp think the ideal solution would probably combine many interventions. We are writing this as a comparison with bed nets since EAs already think bed nets are great. Problems in existing larvicide approaches Existing solutions: Problems in theory Coverage is important It's important [how many water bodies you find] and [how many of those you spray], and the difference between 95% and 50% is really big, similarly to the situation when vaccinating 95% or 50% of the population, because of the effect on R (reproduction number) - less infected people will infect less other people, it snowballs but in a good way (hopefully), and the same is true about reproduction of mosquitos. Existing solutions have bad coverage People miss water bodies in the areas they are assigned to search People miss entire areas Even when water bodies are found, the spray team sometimes may still skip them or forget to treat them according to schedule Small RCT Ref to a (tiny) randomized controlled trial run by Zzapp and AngloGold Ashanti Malaria Control (AGAMal), where two groups scanned the same square kilometer, one group used the app and one didn't and the group with the app found 28% more water bodies. Scanning an entire town In a different operation, when scanning an entire town with AGAMal, they found 20x more water bodies when using Zzapp's app. (publication in progress, we'll add a link when it's ready). From that they think that on a larger scale the app has an even greater impact.What happened behind the scenes is that without the app - the scanners skipped entire neighborhoods. Not a problem: Poisoning water bodies The larvicide in the relevant quantities (bti) isn't poisonous to humans, animals, or other insects except for mosquitoes and black flies. Zzapp's advantages compared to “manual” larvicide Zzapp has an app they give to the people “on the ground”: The app follows “where do the people go go” and lets the people mark “I checked this house's garden” and “I found a water source here” and “this house didn't let me in” The control room shows a map with ״Here...

Hear the powerful, personal story behind AMF, the organisation responsible for protecting 400 million people from malaria (roughly equal in size to 40% of the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa!) and saving tens of thousands of lives. It started with one man's fundraiser for a little girl who had suffered 90% burns in a house fire at her home in Suffolk, England, and turned into one of the most efficient and effective charities in the world. Rob Mather's journey shows us the power of combining the head and the heart to make a tremendous difference in the lives of others. Watch this story on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Ex7hgpXfw0U

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why You Should Give a TEDX Talk, published by Kearney Capuano on August 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. For helpful comments I thank Emma Williamson and Chloe Shrager TLDR: It's easy to give a TEDx Talk at your university, yet I think very few university students do. I think this talk has a unique opportunity to frame EA from a personal perspective, in a way that makes it more palatable to your average audience. I would advise against giving a “This is what Effective Altruism is” talk for various reasons (PR risks most notably). Instead, I would encourage people specifically interested in communications to deliver a talk to their university on something like “I care about the world. Here are some tools I learned from EA on how I can do my best to help,” or “I want to do good. EA principles helped me do that.” After doing my talk, my university EA group gained much more traction, many students reached out wanting to learn more about EA, audience members donated to AMF, hundreds of people received a Doing Good Better book, and a handful of students told me they are considering changing their career path. Watch Ted Talk Here In this post I will go over Who should give a TED Talk? Lessons learned from giving a TEDx Talk Why I might be wrong Part 1: Who should give a TED talk I don't encourage all people to give a Ted or Tedx talk. If you are thinking about giving a talk about EA, definitely consult others before doing so. I want to specify that this post is directed at people interested in communications. Specifically, I think giving a university Tedx talk on EA requires the ability to digest EA ideas and frame them in an appealing way for a “normal” college audience. If you are well versed in public speaking (or feel like you have the potential to be), are more eloquent than I am, and feel like your university may be a target audience for these ideas, I would encourage you to consider giving a Tedx Talk. Part 2: Lessons learned from giving a TED Talk Pros: “Weird EA ideas” can be communicated in a non-weird way. We should probably do this more often. There are many university students out there who are already thinking about these ideas but don't know EA exists. Ted and TedX talks are a great way of reaching these audiences. Talking to an audience about how much you care about these principles may inspire others to care. After the talk, three parents independently came up to me and said “This inspired me to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation. Being a student that takes these ideas seriously may rub off on other students to take these ideas seriously. So far, over twenty students at Georgetown have reached out to me after seeing the talk (either from being in the audience or watching the youtube clip) with various requests such as “Can we meet to talk through plans to shift my area of study towards one that better helps the world?” or “I've had thoughts like these before and can very much relate to the talk but I had no idea something like EA existed, can you teach me more?” or my favorite “Because of this talk I am changing my career plans” (three students told me this.) b. After the talk, students reached out about getting involved with the Georgetown EA group, and our website had substantially more views. Tedx Talks are a great way to encourage people to read books. I (well actually EA Books Direct) provided everyone in the audience with a copy of Doing Good Better. Days after the talk I walked around campus and saw a few people reading it on the lawn together. Seeing this made me smile. Ted talks reach a large audience. They're also a well-trusted brand. EA ideas may be taken more seriously when communicated through a credible, known source. Cons: This isn't the best information I could have provided for an Intro to EA talk. As I was preparing, I felt ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Three common mistakes when naming an org or project, published by Kat Woods on July 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. If Hermione had named her organization H.E.R.O (House Elf Release Organization) instead of S.P.E.W, she might have gotten a lot more traction. Similarly, aspiring charity entrepreneurs know that finding a good name for their organization or project can play an important role in their future impact. After starting four EA organizations (with varying degrees of name quality), I am often asked what I think of a charity entrepreneur's name for their new venture. I always have the same three pieces of advice, so I thought I'd put it into a blog post so others can benefit from it as well. 1. People will shorten the name if it's too long. Name accordingly Consider how people will shorten your organization's name in everyday conversation. People don't like saying more than two or three syllables at once. In everyday conversation, no one wastes their breath on the lengthy names of ‘Eighty-thousand Hours' or ‘the Open Philanthropy Project'. They say ‘80k' or ‘Open Phil'. Your name should either have 1-3 syllables in the first place (‘GiveWell') or look good when shortened to 1-3 syllables. The full name can have more than three syllables if it has a snappy acronym. It's great if your acronym spells a word or phrase, especially if it evokes the organization's mission (e.g., ACE, CFAR, ALLFED). If your acronym doesn't spell something, avoid Ws - it's very awkward and long to say ‘double-you'. 2. Don't artificially lock yourself into a particular strategy with your name Your name shouldn't tie you to a specific project, method, goal, or aim. Over time, you will hopefully change your mind about what's the highest impact thing to do; a vague name preserves your option value. If the Against Malaria Foundation wanted to work on tuberculosis instead, or 80k decided to focus on donations rather than career choice, they'd be stuck. Names like ‘Lightcone' and ‘Nonlinear' are evocative, but they don't imply that the organizations are working on anything in particular. At Nonlinear we could switch our focus from meta work to direct work tomorrow and the name would still work. Of course, names won't necessarily stop you from pivoting. Oxfam is the shortened form of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, and now they do far more than help those facing famine. However, it increases the friction of updating based on new evidence or crucial considerations, which is where a massive percentage of your potential future impact comes from. So don't artificially limit yourself simply because of a name. 3. Get loads of feedback on loads of different names Generate LOTS of options - potentially hundreds - then choose the best 10 and ask your friends to rate them. Don't just choose one name and ask your friends what they think. First, they can't tell you how the name compares to other possible names - maybe they think it's fine, but they'd much prefer another option you considered. Second, it's socially difficult for your friends to respond ‘actually, I hate it,' so it's hard to get honest feedback this way. Even if you name your child Adolf or Hashtag, people will coo ‘aww! How cute! How original!' If you send your friends options, it's easier for them to be honest about which they like best. So there's the 80/20 advice on naming your organization or project: Keep it three syllables or less, or know that its shortened form will also be good Preserve option value by giving yourself a vague name Generate a ton of options and get feedback on the top 5-10 from a bunch of friends Reminder that if this reaches 25 upvotes, you can listen to this post on your podcast player using the Nonlinear Library. This post was written collaboratively by Kat Woods and Amber Dawn Ace as part of Non...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An update on GiveWell's funding projections, published by GiveWell on July 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As little as six months ago, we were in the position of having more funding available than we could spend on opportunities that met our very high cost-effectiveness bar. Today, the opposite is true—we don't expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find. In this post we will: provide an update on GiveWell's projected funding position, explain how we have been successful in identifying cost-effective opportunities, and share our initial thoughts about what this update means for GiveWell's forward-looking grantmaking strategy. The state of funding We wrote last year that we would roll over approximately $110 million in funding from 2021 to spend this year. We ultimately rolled over substantially less because we were imprecise in calculating our projected funds in and out (more details available on our mistakes page). But at a high level, it remained true that we received more money than we chose to spend on highly cost-effective funding opportunities. We expected to be in a similar position this year, rolling over approximately $110 million. We now believe that we will be funding constrained. There are two core reasons for this: We found a lot more cost-effective opportunities that need funding. Based on our current research pipeline, we think we'll be able to recommend up to approximately $750 million in grants that are at least 6x as cost-effective as cash transfers.[1] Last year, we identified about $500 million in grants, most of which were at least 8x. We think we will receive less money than we projected due to recent declines in financial markets. We currently expect to receive $500 to $600 million (though the range of possible outcomes is wide). This is driven by a revision in Open Philanthropy's 2022 allocation ($350 million, up from $300 million in 2021 but down from the tentatively planned $500 million[2]), as well as expected declines from other donors. How we have been able to identify more funding opportunities Our researchers have identified more opportunities across two streams of work: Core interventions: Core interventions are the programs we know best because we have recommended them for a long time (e.g., malaria nets, deworming, etc.). They are the most cost-effective programs that we know of and are often delivered at scale. This stream of grantmaking currently accounts for approximately three-quarters of our spending and is most commonly spent on top charities. We have been able to grow spending in this stream by encouraging organizations to expand their programs into locations that are underserved. For example, we supported the Against Malaria Foundation's expansion into Nigeria, the country with the largest malaria burden in the world.[3] New interventions: New interventions are programs that are newer to us and that we have funded for shorter periods of time. We source new interventions by reading academic papers, talking to subject matter experts, and hearing directly from organizations. We build cost-effectiveness models to determine how to prioritize further work, and make grants to a small number of programs that meet our cost-effectiveness bar. This stream of grantmaking currently accounts for about one-quarter of our spending. Some grantees in this stream may be on a pathway to become a top charity, but this is not the goal of this stream of work—the goal is to fund opportunities if their expected value reaches or exceeds our funding bar. We have grown the number of opportunities in this stream by adding research capacity to investigate more programs. In addition to considering programs we haven't evaluated before, we have updated our views on cause areas following the release of new a...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Misercordia Launch!!!, published by Tomer Goloboy on June 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I'm a student going into the ninth grade this fall. I launched a clothing store called Misercordia (misercordia.square.site) to promote effective giving. The idea was inspired by Brad West's post "Guided Consumption: Funding Charities by Leveraging Consumer Sentiment in the Broader Economy". If you haven't read it, the basic idea is that rational economic transactions create a surplus of value for both the consumer and producer and that consumers might be more inclined to choose a producer that directs their profits towards charitable causes. He posits that this could be an effective means of raising money for effective charities. I've spent much of this past week setting up an online clothing store. We thought: What if you could wear the coolest shirt you've ever worn, and save the world doing it? 100% of profits will be split between Clean Air Task Force and Against Malaria Foundation, although I think much of the value of the project could lie in the growth of the Effective Altruism community as well. Here are some of our products if you are interested: The website (misercordia.square.site) is up and running as of this afternoon. It would mean the world to me if my community coalesced behind Misercordia and purchased our clothing and (perhaps most importantly) recommend and discuss it with as many friends, colleagues, etc. as possible. Unfortunately, for the time being, our products are only available in the United States. Thank you all so much!!! Website: misercordia.square.site Instagram: @shop_misercordia Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, published by Hazelfire on May 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Effort: This took about 40 hours to research and write, excluding time spent developing Squiggle. Disclaimer: Opinions do not represent the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute nor GiveWell. I talk about GiveWell's intentions with the GiveDirectly model. However, my understanding may not be complete. All mistakes are my own. Epistemic Status: I am uncertain about these uncertainties! Most of them are best guesses. I could also be wrong about the inconsistencies I've identified. A lot of these issues could easily be considered bike-shedding. Target Audiences: I wrote this post for: People who are interested in evaluating interventions. People who are interested in the quantification of uncertainty. EA software developers that are interested in open source projects. TLDR: I've transposed GiveDirectly's Cost-Effectiveness Analysis into an interactive notebook. This format allows us to measure our uncertainty about GiveDirectly's cost-effectiveness. The model finds that GiveDirectly's 95% confidence interval for its effectiveness spans an order of magnitude, which I deem a relatively low level of uncertainty. Additionally, I found an internal inconsistency with the model that increased GiveDirectly's cost-effectiveness by 11%. The notebook is quite long, detailed and technical. Therefore, I present a summary in this post. This model uses Squiggle, an in-development language for estimation and evaluation, developed by myself and others at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute. We'll write more about the language itself in future posts, especially as it becomes more stable. GiveWell's cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) of top charities are often considered the gold standard. However, they still have room for improvement. One such improvement is the quantification of uncertainty. I created a Squiggle Notebook that investigates this for GiveDirectly CEA. This notebook also serves as an example of Squiggle and what's possible with future CEAs. In GiveWell's CEAs, GiveDirectly is used as a benchmark to evaluate other interventions. All other charities' effectiveness is measured relative to GiveDirectly. For example, as of 2022, the Against Malaria Foundation was calculated to be 7.1x to 15.4x as cost-effective as GiveDirectly. Evidence Action's Deworm the World is considered 5.3x to 38.2x as cost-effective. GiveDirectly makes a good benchmark because unconditional cash transfers have a strong (some might even say tautological) case behind their effectiveness. GiveDirectly being a benchmark makes it a good start for quantifying uncertainty. I also focus on GiveDirectly because it's the most simple CEA. GiveWell CEAs do not include explicit considerations of uncertainty in their analysis. However, quantifying uncertainty has many benefits. It can: Improve people's understanding of how much evidence we have behind interventions. Help us judge the effectiveness of further research on an intervention using the Value of Information. Allows us to forecast parameters and better determine how wrong we were about different parameters to correct them over time. Cole Haus has done similar work quantifying uncertainty on GiveWell models in Python. The primary decision in this work is choosing how much uncertainty each parameter has. I decided on this with two different methods: If there was enough information about the parameter, I performed a formal bayesian update. If there wasn't as much information, I guessed it with the help of Nuño Sempere, a respected forecaster. These estimates are simple, and future researchers could better estimate them. Results Methodology and calculations are in my Squiggle notebook: /@hazelfire/giv...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Impact is very complicated, published by Justis on May 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: gestural food for thought. This is a post to aggregate a bunch of boring or obvious observations that are easy to overlook. I don't expect anything to be new. But I do think difficulties gauging impact, in aggregate, form a sort of missing mood that we should be paying more attention to. At the end of the post, I'll touch on why. Let us count the ways Here are some factors that can make assessing impact complex: Some interventions are backed by scientific studies. Scientific studies vary in quality in many ways. They can be larger or smaller, more or less numerous, clearly biased or apparently unbiased, clearly significant or only marginally significant, randomized or non-randomized, observational or experimental, etc. Even for good studies, the same interventions may become better or worse over time as conditions in the world change, or may be very particular to certain places. Cash transfers, for example, might just work way better in certain parts of the world than others, and it may be hard to predict how or why in advance. Many interventions require many simultaneous layers of involvement. Suppose I give to the Against Malaria Foundation. I can say "I estimate I am saving a life per $5,000 I spend." But I read Peter Singer when I was 13, then Scott Alexander when I was 19, and I likely wouldn't have ended up donating much without these. I also couldn't give to AMF if it didn't exist, so I owe a debt to Rob Mather. And perhaps whoever told Scott Alexander about AMF. All these steps are necessary to actually "save a life", so we run the risk of massively overcounting if we give every person in the chain "full credit". But there's no objectively rigorous way to decide who gets how much of the credit! Just using counterfactuals doesn't work; it may be the case that all of us are required and a single person "out of the chain" breaks it down. But we can't all get all the credit! Plus many interventions, like in the AMF example, mostly are just reducing probabilities across large numbers of people anyway. What does it even mean for "my money" to "save life". Once the money all goes into a pool, whose money actually funds which nets anyway? And which nets prevent cases of malaria that would have been fatal? No way to answer these questions even in principle. Some (perhaps all) interventions rely on difficult-to-impossible philosophical questions to resolve. How should we weigh insect suffering? All we can do is guess - learning more facts about insects doesn't really get us over Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" hurdle. Empirical information, analogies, and intuition pumps all can help, but there are fundamental judgment calls at play. How to assess well being and weigh well being against survival is another example here where it's hard to boil down to numbers: there are lots of ways to do it (QALYs, seeing how much people would pay to avert various harms, natural experiments) but none is perfect and all involve their own judgment calls. Some interventions require certain thresholds being met or they don't actually accomplish anything. Donating to a political campaign that promises credibly to do something good might help bring about that good thing. But if the campaign fails, that donation accomplished basically nothing. Existential risk mitigation efforts (as such) only do any good if they work. If the world ends anyway, that effort didn't actually accomplish anything. Plenty of interventions can also backfire. Some interventions aim to increase or decrease probabilities. There are a lot of ways to mess this up. My least favorite arguments in intro EA messaging historically were things like: "even if the chance of [EVENT] is quite low, say 1%, then ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Help Charity Entrepreneurship scale - we are hiring!, published by SteveThompson on May 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. At Charity Entrepreneurship, in the past few years, we've launched 18 new charities. Several exceed the cost-effectiveness of the strongest charities in their fields and a few have been supported by Givewell. (e.g. Fortify Health just announced an $8.2m grant). To further our impact in the coming years, we are excited to grow the CE team. We are currently recruiting for 3 new hires (London or remote). By growing, we aim to double the quality of our incubated charities and then, to double the quantity. (More details here.) Please share this post with your network. Doing so may have a large counterfactual impact, as finding the right people is the primary bottleneck to our scaling plans. The Roles: Recruitment & Outreach Manager to help us find program applicants Research Analyst to help us find promising charity ideas Training Program Lead to run the Foundations program We offer: A job that has a huge impact on the world The chance to shape the direction, goals, and achievements of CE 30 paid vacation days p/yr Experience working at a nonprofit start-up A community of talented, dedicated, and like-minded EAs N.B. Salary and moving costs are flexible depending on employee needs and fall between $40-60k USD. 1) RECRUITMENT & OUTREACH MANAGER: To help find the next aspiring founders for our Incubation Program, we are looking for a Recruitment & Outreach Manager to create and maintain talent pipelines online and in person and to represent CE to both engaged EA audiences and external cause area communities around the world How this role will cause impact The best predictor of which of our incubated charities will end up causing the highest impact is the quality of the co-founders. As we scale, key to our success will be finding more highly talented, value-aligned people to join our incubation program. The role will involve appearing at different conferences around the world, presenting CE's model to (EA) groups and helping audiences determine whether charity entrepreneurship might be a good fit for them. Each person we find is estimated to have the expected impact equivalent to donating $200,000 USD / year to effective charities, so finding these gems is challenging, but extremely rewarding. The Recruitment & Outreach manager will focus on researching and comparing the best outreach tools, identifying potential candidates, and building connections. Their work will focus on one-on-one communications, in writing and in person, as well as on giving talks and presentations (rather than focusing on our website or social media presence). 2) RESEARCH ANALYST: We are looking for a research analyst to join our research team to conduct both shallow and in-depth research into promising ideas to find the very best charity interventions for charity entrepreneurs to found: How this role will cause impact As we scale up, one of our biggest bottlenecks to launching more high-impact charities is our capacity to vet hundreds of charity ideas across cause areas and narrow to the most impactful, cost-effective, evidence-based few that will then be launched through our charity incubation program. As a member of the 4 person research team you'll start off with hundreds of charity ideas and then progress through increasingly deep rounds of research. This culminates in publishing reports which in turn become the basis for the charities that get launched. Your impact will be fast, tangible, and lasting. The current bar for charity ideas is for them to be substantially better than current top global health charities, e.g. potentially 5x better than Against Malaria Foundation. By the end of your first year as a Research Analyst, you will have: Identified the best five char...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Notes From a Pledger, published by Justis on April 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a response to Jeff's post here, and the genre of post it represents. I think Jeff's post is valid and valuable, and that thinking through this sort of thing is a good idea. I also think that necessarily, personal testimonies are going to be more common from more engaged EAs. So I'd like to give the perspective of a GWWC pledge taker more toward the periphery. N=1, so have your salt shaker ready! EA status is unimportant at a certain distance I've done freelance editing work for EAs and EA-related organizations for over five years, including (at various times) CEA, LessWrong, AI Impacts, BERI, PIE, and probably others I'm forgetting. There have been times - the longest was a little under a year - when this editing work was my primary source of income. I read a lot of EA content and occasionally wade into the discourse. So among non-inner-ring EAs, I think I'm probably unusually engaged by most metrics, perhaps among the most engaged 10% in the reference class of people who might skim the EA newsletter now and then. All this being said, my relative status as an EA is just not very important to me at all. I took the Giving What We Can pledge several years ago. I've been donating 10% of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation since then. I care approximately 0 if EA bigwigs think I'm a bit dim for this decision, or if they think "ok well, a direct worker is worth about 30 Justis equivalents on the margin." My grandparents were religious and tithed; it feels nice to "do my part" not in an abstract EA community cred sense but in a vague, "being a morally decent person" sense, and no amount of focus on direct work by people across the country/world is likely to make me feel inadequate or rethink this. Really! I will maintain my pledge with a similar level of pride and joy no matter what the official recommendation to current Yale students in EA student groups is (not to undermine them - they are very important, just approximately irrelevant to my life). I am in Florida. Most of my friends work at restaurants or for the state government. Sure, it feels nice when people across the country want to include me or rank me well, but it's not in a crucial spot on my hierarchy of needs. I suspect the same is true for most pledge-takers. It's possible to regard EA roles as desirable without regarding them as morally necessary I've applied for a few jobs in EA over the years. I didn't get them. This was painful. In one case I was doing 25+ hours a week freelance work for an org for several months, it went really well, they put up a job posting with precisely my current duties and invited me to apply, then hired someone else. This was very painful, and strongly discouraged me from applying to full time EA roles in the future. However, at no point did I think "oh no, now I can't have all the impact I might have had counterfactually, so I'm a bad/worthless person." Here I think it's time for another interlude: I've got moderate OCD and a lot of that manifests as scrupulosity. My most common negative emotion is guilt. I'm confident that I worry about being somehow ineffably "bad" significantly more than the average human being. I read Peter Singer in high school and it rocked my world - I got on the phone with Oxfam to donate something, anything, but realized I didn't actually have any money I'd earned myself yet and hung up. I'm confident that I am among the most vulnerable people to feeling distress from the notion that I've not lived up to an ethical obligation. But no, none of my EA-role-failure pain has really been in that direction. I am giving 10% of my income. This is much more than basically anyone I know, including virtually all my friends and all my family. I will proba...

Sille-Liis on EAs annetustiimi juht, mis sai detsembris valmis veebilehe Anneta Targalt, mille kaudu on võimalik teha Eestist tulumaksuvabasid annetusi GiveWelli soovitatud organisatsioonidele. Ta õppis Tartu Ülikoolis psühholoogiat ja hiljem Utrechti Ülikooli magistris sotsiaalpsühholoogiat. Hetkel töötab ta Tartu Ülikooli psühholoogia instituudis, kus tegeleb erinevate rakenduspsühholoogia projektidega, mis on seotud tööalase vaimse heaoluga, aga ka käitumise mõjutamise ja müksamisega. Rääkisime saates annetamise psühholoogiast ja täpsemalt sellest, mis takistab meil tegemast kõige efektiivsemaid annetamise otsuseid ja kuidas seda probleemi lahendada. Ajatähised: 01:12 Kuidas Sille-Liisi karjääritee on seotud efektiivse annetamisega 07:40 Mis karjäärivõimalused on psühholoogia taustaga inimestel efektiivse altruismiga seotud valdkondades 12:20 Kui levinud on mõjuga arvestamine annetusotsuseid tehes 23:00 Mis on motiveerinud inimesi annetama Ukraina sõjakriisi ajal 27:20 Tõhusat annetamist takistavad faktorid 46:45 Annetamine ja emotsioonid 54:40 Lahendused - kuidas mõjutada inimesi efektiivsemalt annetama 1:06:20 Sille-Liisi soovitused tõhusamaks annetamiseks nii Eestisiseselt kui ülemaailmselt 1:17:50 1-minutiline pitch pereliikmele efektiivse annetamise vajalikkusest Hinda saadet siin: https://forms.gle/LPRE2ziBs62pjGTX9 Vestluse jooksul mainitud allikad: - The many obstacles to effective giving: https://psyarxiv.com/3z7hj/ - Effective Thesis: https://effectivethesis.org/ - EA Funds: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/ - Animal Charity Evaluators: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/ - Give Directly: https://www.givedirectly.org/ - Giving What We Can: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ - Against Malaria Foundation: https://www.againstmalaria.com/ - Kiusamisvaba Kool: https://kiusamisvaba.ee/ - Nähtamatud Loomad: https://nahtamatudloomad.ee/ - SPIN programm: https://www.spinprogramm.ee/ - Vaikuseminutid: https://vaikuseminutid.ee/ Uudised: - Effective Ideas: https://effectiveideas.org/ - William MacAskilli uus raamat: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/William-MacAskill/dp/1541618629/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12U75HD85YBC7&keywords=What+We+Owe+the+Future&qid=1650870774&sprefix=what+we+owe+the+future%2Caps%2C141&sr=8-1 - Nähtamatud Loomad tööpakkumine: https://nahtamatudloomad.ee/nahtamatud-loomad-votab-toole-vabatahtlike-koordinaatori-ja-fundraiseri

This episode concludes Jonathan's close reading of Chapter 2: The Chain. Jonathan interprets the chapter as a series of scenes that feature different species of the category "moocher." In this last scene, Hank tries to make his brother, Philip, feel a moment of happiness but that backfires terribly. Jonathan analyzes Ayn Rand's caricatures of the "failure to launch" phenomenon and of charitable organizations. Jonathan mentions anti-malaria nets as an example of the kind of charitable work that never gets mentioned in Atlas Shrugged. Check out GiveWell's review of the Against Malaria Foundation. Also mentioned (again) in this episode is the conceptualization of shame by Brené Brown. At the end of the episode, Jonathan delves into the dynamics of dysfunctional relationships. My five themes to explore in this podcast's close read of Atlas Shrugged are:What is human nature?Straw-man arguments and their impact on the world Ayn Rand creates. Dagny Taggart as a true hero.How empathy can be de-legitimized.What is Capitalism and what is wrong with it? Questions or comments? Email me at: socialistreads@gmail.comLearn more about Jonathan Seyfried at their website, https://jonathanseyfried.artIf you'd like to support my creative work, please visit my Patreon page.The intro/outro music was composed by John Sib.The podcast theme image was created by Karina Bialys.Support the Show.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New community builders don't have enough fun!, published by Engelhardt on March 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. tldr; if you're a new EA community builder, or someone who has considered it but decided not to because it seemed like too much of a sacrifice, please consider the fact that the best kind of community building is fun for the organizer too. You should value your enjoyment of the events and the community building process higher than you likely do at the moment, even if you take a completely altruistic rather than egoistic perspective. (Disclaimer: a reviewer noted that this article was ironically not that exciting to read, but I'm not that excited about rewriting it so I'll follow my own advice and work on more exciting tasks) I have been active in the Swedish EA community since 2015 and have done both community building and guided others doing the same. From this time my biggest takeaway has been that new community builders focus way too much on what they feel they "should" be doing rather than what they want to be doing. Doing what would actually be fun for them. When we started the group at my local university we saw the other associations running public lectures, so we felt like we had to do that too. Even if we weren't that excited about it nor really had any lecturers in mind. So we spent way too much time thinking about and planning for that instead of just arranging something more fun. And these days all the other cool EA groups run fellowships, which we've enjoyed so far, but I'm concerned that it gets so heavily recommended that organizers feel obligated to do them even if they don't feel like it. While it's good to not reinvent the wheel, I think this type of behavior really limits the potential of both the community builders themselves and the group as a whole. In my opinion community builders should also be more hesitant about running projects that they aren't excited about. Why excitement is important: Your interest in EA is a really valuable resource that you should be very hesitant to use up. Your impact as an EA is ideally going to be over a period of many years of work, donations, and thinking. So anything that increases your risk of just giving up on those aspirations is something to be careful with. It's not worth it to drain away your excitement for improving the world just for the sake of doing events you feel like you should want to run. The “Scratch your own itch” principle applies to community building too. “Scratch your own itch” is the idea that many of the best businesses (especially startups) come from someone making a product to solve a problem they have themselves. I think this applies to community organizers too. You should have more events you're excited to go to, not that some hypothetical other person might want to go to. Most of the best EA events I've been to or organized have just come from one organizer being super curious about a topic and creating an event to try to dig deeper into it. For example some years ago EA NTNU in Norway arranged an event where the crown princess attended, which was certainly impressive. But it was also a lot of time and effort to organize. So they felt like that event was much less worthwhile than another event where they just asked lots of really in depth questions to one of the people at Against Malaria Foundation. The lecture was more impressive, but the organizers seemed more excited about scratching their own itch of getting all their questions about the Against Malaria Foundation answered. EA groups tend to die off if it's not fun to be an organizer in them. The main recommendations for how to create an ea group is to make sure to have a core group of active members who are engaged enough to keep the group going. Such a group can be pretty hard to find. Several groups here in ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Operations is really demanding, published by jwithing on March 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Operations is really, really demanding. I work as a software product manager, but spend two weeks a year as a reservist at a US Navy operations center. There I work 12 hour shifts where I send chat and email messages, make and take phone calls, and otherwise try to be of use. Before I was a full-time software PM, I was a full-time submariner where I project managed our ship's maintenance. My current workplace is a large e-commerce company with heavy operations footprint. My experiences there confirm what I already knew from the Navy--operations is a really demanding field. Operations is so, so important! How do we make it less demanding to its practitioners? What is operations? I want to play a little bit with the version of operations discussed in the 80,000 Hours career guide. Organizations have people that create things (medicine/widgets/research), people that highlight the value of these goods (salespeople/marketers/outreach), and then people that make sure all of the above goes smoothly--those are the operations folks. The career guide focuses on operations as the support class of the organization: HR, recruiting, finance, etc. But if GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation, or any org that delivers aid/goods are within the scope of "high-impact organizations," then operations might be the org's core competency, rather than something (relatively) behind-the-scenes. Their operations teams are responsible for delivering the products. Both forms of operations are hyper challenging and undervalued. Why is operations especially demanding? Operations is especially demanding because the scope and impact of its errors. Because operations deals heavily with human systems, the scope of ways things can wrong is nearly unbounded. You can't debug or test human systems. You can provide all the thoughtful written documentation on "How to X" but humans can still find a way to get it wrong. This is unlike code or other forms engineering--those objects do precisely what you tell it to do! So not only are the failure modes unbounded, the impact of an operations team's error can be quite high. Think about botching payroll, event execution, HR policies, or having an unprepared executive. An organization can't readily undo these things or make them "right." A poor marketer/salesperson/researcher has limited downside by comparison--they just cost you money. Bad ops exacts institutional damage. OK, but what exactly about operations especially demanding? Operations staff are keenly aware of the stakes of their work, and tirelessly work to reduce the chance of errors. This is super demanding! Consider the following real-life examples I've witnessed or personally dealt with in my most recent two weeks of operations work. Perhaps these are military heavy, but I'm sure they have analogs elsewhere: It's 1am on a Thursday night. The flight scheduled for midnight didn't happen, and now your team is running behind schedule. You get a call about this, and need to get some guidance from your boss so now you call them. Both of you will need to be in the office by 8am. It's 6pm on Sunday night. The scheduler for a Royal Navy admiral calls you to get something on the calendar with your US Navy admiral tomorrow. The earlier in the morning the better--can you accommodate? Your executive gets a daily report on operations, including on the weekend. The last few times the report hasn't been made to standard so you need to come in Saturday and Sunday mornings to make sure they're done properly. The above may seem pretty mundane, and it is if you work in ops. But human systems run 24/7. The cost of operations errors is high. Combine those two things and operations staff are never really quite off-the-c...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: In current EA, scalability matters, published by Peter Wildeford on March 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary: A less cost-effective opportunity that is more scalable can be better than a more cost-effective but less scalable opportunity. That is, in the current effective altruism movement with lots of funding, to maximize the total effectiveness of the entire EA portfolio, scalability should be prioritized on the margin and cost-effectiveness should become more of a bar to meet than something to maximize. This is what motivates a lot of the current focus on highly scalable projects (megaprojects). The Case We're now in a world where effective altruism funding is definitely very plentiful[1]. At least for now, total available funding seems to currently exceed total available fundable opportunities[2]. This implies two things: (1) When looking for new opportunities, a less cost-effective (in terms of social good per dollar spent) opportunity that is more scalable (in terms of total dollars that can be spent to achieve the target cost-effectiveness) can sometimes be more exciting and more helpful to the overall EA portfolio than a more cost-effective but less scalable opportunity. (2) Cost-effectiveness still matters, but requires us either to threshold fund everything above a certain bar (e.g., everything that can be about as good as Against Malaria Foundation[3]) or identify very scalable opportunities that can take billions of dollars on the margin at a higher bar. My sense is that the earlier effective altruism movement of 2010-2014 spent all their time aiming to find opportunities that maximized cost-effectiveness per dollar without caring much about scalability (e.g., "how to do the most good with your limited money"), whereas if the above is right we need to shift to caring about scalability much more and use cost-effectiveness more as a threshold (e.g., identify very scalable opportunities that are as good as AMF or better)[4]. An Example Imagine that we had these five projects (and only these projects) in the EA portfolio: Alpha: Spend $100,000 to produce 1000 units of impact (after which Alpha will be exhausted and will produce no more units of impact; you can't buy it twice) Beta: Spend $100,000,000 to produce 200,000 units of impact (after which Beta will be exhausted and will produce no more units of impact; you can't buy it twice) Gamma: Spend $1,000,000,000 to produce 300,000 units of impact (after which Gamma will be exhausted and will produce no more units of impact; you can't buy it twice) GiveDeltaly: Spent any amount of money to produce a unit of impact for each $2000 spent (GiveDeltaly cannot be exhausted and you can buy it as many times as you want). Research: Spend $200,000 to create a new opportunity with the same "spend X for Y" of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, or GiveDeltaly. EA as of 2010-2014, with relatively fewer resources (we didn't have $100M to spend), would've been ecstatic about Alpha because it only costs $100 to buy one unit of impact, which is much better than Beta's $500 per unit, GiveDeltaly's $2000 per unit, or Gamma's $3333.33 per unit. But "modern" EA, with lots of money and a shortage of opportunities to spend it on would gladly buy Alpha first but would be more excited by Beta because it allows us to deploy more of our portfolio at a better effectiveness. Note though that no one in "modern EA" would be excited by Gamma - even though it's a huge megaproject and very scalable, it doesn't beat our baseline of GiveDeltaly. ...Now let's think of things as allocating an EA bank account and use Research. What should we use Research for? Early EA would want us to focus our research efforts on finding another opportunity like Alpha since it is very cost-effective! But modern EA would rather we look for opportunities like Beta - ev...

Joe Biden has pledged to nominate a black woman to the forthcoming Supreme Court vacancy--should race and gender factor in at all? In politics, does ideology or identity weigh more heavily? Jeremiah Johnson and Andrea Jones-Rooy joins to discuss. Against Malaria Foundation https://www.againstmalaria.com/orphans Nita Fashions https://www.nitafashions.com/

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Concerns about AMF from GiveWell reading - Part 3, published by JPHoughton on January 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I've now read everything on the GiveWell website about the Against Malaria Foundation, a top rated charity since 2011. This has helped me increase my understanding of the work they do and the challenges involved. This is the third in a series of posts summarising my outstanding questions from this reading. It may be that I'll find the answers to some of these questions by looking elsewhere, for example reading the AMF website or getting in touch with them directly. That means this is not the final word on my view of the Against Malaria Foundation. However, I'm capturing my progress at this stage so that I have a clear basis to build on for further work. Concern #3: Significant uncertainty in cost-per-life-saved estimates means the true cost could be $20,000 or more. Digging into GiveWell's 2021 v2 cost effectiveness calculation shows around 80% of the expected deaths averted are in children under 5 years old. The expectation is that protecting 1,000 under 5s for a year will save 2.72 lives on average. This is derived as follows: (A) Reduction in child mortality due to having bednet17%(B) Mortality if no bednet distribution, per 1,000 child years11.9(C) Mortality attributed to malaria vs. 2018 meta-analysis180%(D) Adjustment for net use, insecticide resistance, etc75%(E) Deaths averted per 1,000 years of coverage: AxBxCxD2.72 For (A), the reduction in child mortality due to having a bednet comes straight from the 2018 Cochrane review, covering data collected between 1987 and 2001. The 95% confidence interval is 11%-23%, implying an interval of 1.76-3.67 lives saved in under 5s assuming nothing else changes. Put another way, while the central estimate by GiveWell is $7,400 per life saved, the uncertainty around this input alone suggests a confidence interval between $5,500 and $11,500. For (B), the mortality if there is no bednet distribution is estimated based on the reduction in deaths between 2004 and 2019 and assuming 25% of the reduction was due to mass distributions of bednets. Firstly, as part (A) of the calculation says bednets cause a 17% reduction, using a higher rate of 25% here seems a little odd. Secondly, as this calculation is based on a counterfactual world that cannot be observed it is obviously quite uncertain, the true confidence interval must be wider than that suggested above. More importantly however, it is not clear to me why any adjustment based on estimated reductions in deaths is required at all. When considering the impact of a donation to AMF, we should compare the expected mortality benefit if AMF distributes bednets compared to if they do not. According to their website, AMF did not make any significant bednet distributions before 2019, with just 1.4m nets across 2014-2016 for a population of around 75m. This means the counterfactual for AMF not making distributions in future is the same as the past, and that the current mortality rate of 7.7 per 1,000 child years is maintained. There is no reason to consider an increase to 11.9 or any other number if there are no future AMF distributions since there have been almost no past AMF distributions in this country. It may well be that child mortality has decreased in the past due to net distributions from other sources, but those distributions are not affected by any donation to AMF and so are not relevant here. Changing this assumption from 11.9 to 7.7 increases the cost-per-life-saved estimate from $7,400 to $11,400, with a confidence interval of $8,400-$17,600. For (C), the 180% difference in malaria mortality between potential AMF distributions and the 2018 meta-analysis highlights the difference between the world where RCT effectiveness was measured and the world w...

Life gets busy. Has Atomic Habits been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now. We're scratching the surface here. To dive into the details and support the author, order the https://geni.us/atomic-habit-book (book) or get the audiobook https://geni.us/atomic-free-audiobook (for free) on Amazon. Read, listen or watch the animated analysis and summary for free at https://go.getstoryshots.com/kvZ5 (https://go.getstoryshots.com/kvZ5) “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.” - James Clear StoryShots is proud to bring you this free audiobook summary. Do you want to get access to more audiobook summaries like this? Subscribe and click the bell button now to get notified each time we upload a new summary. You can also download our free app and enjoy thousands of other summaries of bestselling nonfiction books that are available in text, audio and animated formats. StoryShots has been featured by Apple, Google, and The Guardian as one of the world's best reading and learning apps. Go to getstoryshots.com and download the app today. Happy learning! StoryShots Review and Summary of Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James ClearAbout James Clearhttps://geni.us/james-clear (James Clear) has been researching habits and decision-making for many years. He made his name as the author of one of the fastest-growing email newsletters in history. This newsletter grew from zero to 100,000 subscribers in just two years. Today, his newsletter has over one million subscribers, and the articles on his website receive ten million hits each year. His work frequently appears in publications including The New York Times, Forbes and Business Insider. His first book, Atomic Habits, has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages. He's a speaker about habits and continuous improvement at major companies such as Cisco, Honda, Intel and LinkedIn. He's a former athlete and a contributor to Against Malaria Foundation. Introduction In https://geni.us/atomic-free-audiobook (Atomic Habits), James Clear argues that big goals shouldn't be your main focus in life. Instead, you should be utilizing frequent, repetitive actions and systems to help develop habits that stick. The significant changes you want to make in your life depend more on creating small habits than sizable shifts. For example, suppose you want to get in shape. In that case, your best bet is eating slightly better, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep. Instead of wasting your time setting unachievable goals with drastic changes, all you have to do is make one minor change daily. This theme runs throughout Atomic Habits. The quality of your life depends on the quality of your habits. Some habits are small like an atom. As these atomic habits accumulate, they can make a significant impact in your life. The Fundamentals - Why Tiny Changes Make a Big DifferenceWhat Are Habits? “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.” - James Clear Habits are small, everyday behaviors that we perform automatically, with little or no thought. Habits are also powerful. We are what we do every day. In this way, habits form our identity. So, when repeated daily, even the smallest...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Debate Championship & Lecture Series, published by Dan Lahav, sella on the Effective Altruism Forum. Executive Summary On October 23-25 2020, we hosted the inaugural online EA Debate Championship - a three-day debate championship with EA-themed topics. The championship had 150+ participants, from roughly 25 countries, that span 6 continents. The championship was supported by the World Universities Debating Championship, aka WUDC - one of the largest international student-driven events in the world. There were a total of 7 debate rounds - 5 preliminary rounds and 2 knockout rounds. The knockout rounds were held in 2 different language proficiency categories to promote inclusivity. In total over the course of that weekend over 500 EA-related speeches were delivered. The championship featured a Distinguished Lecture Series as non-mandatory preparation material - 9 lectures, 3 debate exercises and 1 Q&A session containing introductory EA materials (totalling ~10 hours), with top EA speakers including Ishaan Guptasarma, Joey Savoie, Karolina Sarek, Kat Woods, Lewis Bollard, Olivia Larsen, Nick Beckstead, and Will MacAskill. The debate exercises were filmed by world-renowned debate teams. The championship included a research component to examine if debating on EA topics changes the stance of debaters towards EA values. Most of the participants were not familiar with EA prior to the competition, or had limited exposure to core EA ideas. However, when asked after the tournament many were highly positive on the prospect of attending a future EA debating championship, and reported a strong willingness to continue their engagement with the EA community. During the tournament, over $2,000 were donated to effective charities by the participants (with most of the funds going to the Against Malaria Foundation). The funds were doubled via donation matching provided by Open Philanthropy. The competition was initiated and organized by members of EA Israel who are also debaters; with the support of several highly influential international debaters and the World Championship. This collaboration was possible due to the strong ties that exist between the debating community and the EA community in Israel. We think that there is room to building similar ties on a more global scale. In the rest of the post we will explain our motivation to run the event, describe the program and its outcomes in detail, share what we have learned from the process, and discuss our next steps. Organizing the tournament was an effort of a great many. We thank them all, and would like to stress that any mistakes or inaccuracies in the description are our own. In particular we would like to thank Adel Ahmed, Ameera Moore, Barbara Batycka, Bosung Baik, Chaerin Lee, Connor O'Brien, Dana Green, Emily Frizell, Enting Lee, Harish Natarajan, Ishaan Guptasarma, Jaeyoung Choi, Jessica Musulin, Joey Savoie, Kallina Basli, Karolina Sarek, Kat Woods, Lewis Bollard, Milos Marajanovic, Mubarrat Wassey, Nick Beckstead, Olivia Larsen, Omer Nevo, Sally Kwon, Salwaa Khan, Seoyoun, Seungyoun Lee, Sharmila Parmanand, Tricia Park, Will MacAskill and Yeaeun Shin for their contributions in running the tournament, filming lectures or creating exercises; to David Moss, David Reinstein and Stefan Schubert for their advice on running the tournament survey; and to the many incredibly qualified debate adjudicators & speakers that made the event possible Motivation We initiated this effort due to the impression that themed debating tournaments (along with matching preparation materials) can be a relatively broad yet high-fidelity outreach opportunity. We believe this is the case for several reasons: The international debating community mostly consists of undergraduate students from around 50 countries (elite universities are represented ac...

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: The most successful EA podcast of all time: Sam Harris and Will MacAskill (2020), published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum. Context My job is about helping people get involved in effective altruism, so I pay attention to how this happens. I'm not sure I've ever seen any piece of content not named "Doing Good Better" get as much positive as Sam Harris's two podcast episodes with Will MacAskill. After the first episode, Sam was deeply affected, and pledged to donate $3500/month in podcast proceeds to the Against Malaria Foundation. After the second episode, Sam joined Giving What We Can and pledged 10% of profits from his Waking Up app (well over $3500/month) to effective charities. Impact Both episodes seem to have caused a spike in GWWC memberships, and the second may have boosted EA engagement more generally. Some notes on that: GWWC estimates that over 600 people have taken the pledge in part because of the episodes (with another ~600 signing up for Try Giving). To break this down: ~800 people who finished the sign-up survey mentioned a podcast as one way they found GWWC (the average person chose 1.8 sources). Of the 123 people who said which podcast it was, 107 said Sam Harris (87%). Extrapolating a similar rate to the ~700 who didn't say which podcast gives another ~600 referrals on top of the original 107. The "podcast" option was only added to the form in October 2020, before the second episode but after the first; another ~500 people who filled it out before then mentioned Sam somewhere. I'd guess that most of these were coming from the first episode with Will, though he may have mentioned his giving in other episodes, and GWWC by extension. An extremely engaged community builder told me in February 2021: "I feel like most new EAs I've met in the last year came in through Sam Harris." My subjective impression in the weeks after the second episode came out was that most of the ambient "positive EA chatter" I heard on Twitter (people tweeting out random EA endorsements who normally talked about other things) included mentions of the podcast. Why was this so impactful? Some factors I think were important: Sam set an example. One of the most persuasive ways to promote something is to do it yourself. One of Sam's explicit goals on the podcast is to get listeners to make ethical decisions, and I'd imagine that many listeners seek him out for ethical advice. This isn't as much the case for podcasters like Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan, or other sources of publicity (TED, op-eds, etc.) From the transcript below: "The question that underlies all of this, really, is: How can we live a morally beautiful life? That is more and more what I care about, and what the young Will MacAskill is certainly doing." Sam made a rare endorsement. Sam took several minutes to explain why he thinks giving is important, and gives GWWC a strong recommendation. This is a rare thing for him to do; most of his guests aren't selling anything (save maybe a book), and he doesn't advertise on his podcast. Comparatively, Tim Ferriss (another major podcaster who had Will as a guest) has ~5 minutes of long-form advertising on every episode, and generally recommends lots of things every time a guest comes on. On the writeup of Will's episode, GWWC was the 23rd item on a bullet list of "selected links". Tim's podcast referred 8 people to GWWC. This is actually a solid number, given that the "where you heard about us" question wasn't added until more than a year after that episode came out. But I think the true impact of the episode was still much lower than that of the Sam episodes, despite Tim's larger audience. The conversation is really good. I listened to the second episode soon after it came out, before I knew anything about its impact, and was almost immediately struck by how good Wi...

welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading, published by saulius on the effective altruism forum. In my cost-effectiveness estimate of corporate campaigns, I wrote a list of all the ways in which my estimate could be misleading. I thought it could be useful to have a more broadly-applicable version of that list for cost-effectiveness estimates in general. It could maybe be used as a checklist to see if no important considerations were missed when cost-effectiveness estimates are made or interpreted. The list below is probably very incomplete. If you know of more items that should be added, please comment. I tried to optimize the list for skimming. How cost estimates can be misleading Costs of work of others. Suppose a charity purchases a vaccine. This causes the government to spend money distributing that vaccine. It's unclear whether the costs of the government should be taken into account. Similarly, it can be unclear whether to take into account the costs that patients have to spend to travel to a hospital to get vaccinated. This is closely related to concepts of leverage and perspective. More on it can be read in Byford and Raftery (1998), Karnofsky (2011), Snowden (2018), and Sethu (2018). It can be unclear whether to take into account the fixed costs from the past that will not have to be spent again. E.g., costs associated with setting up a charity that are already spent and are not directly relevant when considering whether to fund that charity going forward. However, such costs can be relevant when considering whether to found a similar charity in another country. Some guidelines suggest annualizing fixed costs. When fixed costs are taken into account, it's often unclear how far to go. E.g., when estimating the cost of distributing a vaccine, even the costs of roads that were built partly to make the distribution easier could be taken into account. Not taking future costs into account. E.g., an estimate of corporate campaigns may take into account the costs of winning corporate commitments, but not future costs of ensuring that corporations will comply with these commitments. Future costs and effects may have to be adjusted for the possibility that they don't occur. Not taking past costs into account. In the first year, a homelessness charity builds many houses. In the second year, it finds homeless people to live in those houses. In the first year, the impact of the charity could be calculated as zero. In the second year, it could be calculated to be unreasonably high. But the charity wouldn't be able to sustain the cost-effectiveness of the second year. Not adjusting past or future costs for inflation. Not taking overhead costs into account. These are costs associated with activities that support the work of a charity. It can include operational, office rental, utilities, travel, insurance, accounting, administrative, training, hiring, planning, managerial, and fundraising costs. Not taking costs that don't pay off into account. Nothing But Nets is a charity that distributes bednets that prevent mosquito-bites and consequently malaria. One of their old blog posts, Sauber (2008), used to claim that "If you give $100 of your check to Nothing But Nets, you've saved 10 lives." While it may be true that it costs around $10 or less[1] to provide a bednet, and some bednets save lives, costs of bednets that did not save lives should be taken into account as well. According to GiveWell's estimates, it currently costs roughly $3,500 for a similar charity (Against Malaria Foundation) to save one life by distributing bednets. Wiblin (2017) describes a survey in which respondents were asked "How much do you think it would cost a typical charity working in this area on average to prevent one child in a poor country from dying unnecessarily, by ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA and tackling racism , published by Sanjay on the AI Alignment Forum. Write a Review As I write, the world is gripped in shockwaves of hurt and anger about the recent death of George Floyd and the issue of racism. And many are asking what effective altruism (or EA) has to say about this (see here, or here, or here) I have engaged with the EA community for many years, but I don't consider myself an authoritative voice on effective altruism. I am a non-white person living in a predominantly white country, but I don't consider myself an authoritative voice on racism. But I wanted to share some thoughts. First of all, let's just acknowledge that the EA community has been -- in its own way -- fighting against a particular form of racism right from the earliest days of the EA movement. What greater racism is there than the horrifically uneven distribution of resources between people all because of an accident of their birth? And how disgusting that some of the worst off should be condemned to death as a result? Is not the obscene wealth of the developed world in the face of tractable, cost-effective ways of saving lives in the developing world wholly unjustifiable if we were treating people as equals, regardless of where they are, and regardless of the colour of their skin? I still find this argument compelling. And I would encourage the EA movement to be proud of what it has done, proud of the hundreds of millions of dollars already moved in an expression of global solidarity to people around the world. But in some ways this argument feels insular. Is EA really all about taking every question and twisting it back to malaria nets and AI risk? Those of us who, like me, have spent most of their lives in the UK and are old enough will remember the name of Stephen Lawrence. And for those of us, like me, who have spent a substantial chunk of their lives in charities in South East London, his name will have followed us like a ghost. For those who have sensed or lived systemic racism, I do think that the EA way of thinking has something to offer. And something more than “donate to the Against Malaria Foundation”. In this post, I set out some thoughts. I would love to have provided good solutions, like "this is the best place to donate" or "this is the best thing to do" but the range of existing thoughts on this topic is too broad and complex for me to be able to do that now. I think the most important thing that an EA mindset has to offer is this: EA is not just about finding the right answers, it's about asking fundamental questions too. The effective altruism movement is unusual. Not only do EA-minded people answer questions like "what is the best way to improve global health" (finding the right answers). The EA approach also poses questions like "what is the best cause area to tackle, is it global health, or is it existential risk, or is it something else?" (asking more fundamental questions). At first glance, asking the more fundamental questions about cause prioritisation risks subverting our goal. We may conclude that tackling an intractable thing like systemic racism isn't really the best bang for your buck, and then we're back to turning everything into malaria nets again. On second glance, it's clear that EA does have something to offer. For example, someone who cares about animals would be encouraged by an effective altruist to consider the different "sub-causes" within the animal cause area, and provided data and arguments about why some are much more effective than others. So in that vein, here are some thoughts about tackling systemic racism as seen through (my interpretation of) an EA lens. These thoughts will raise more questions than answers. My hope and intention is that these are good, useful questions. Before I get started, just an observation: achieving chan...

Välgörenhet värmer och svenskarna ger mer för varje år. Hur ser man till att göra mest gott för sina pengar? Om det handlar dagens avsnitt som gästas av Agnes Stenlund på Effektivt givande, en ideell organisation som arbetar för att maxa nyttan av donationer. Vi pratar om vad effektivt givande innebär, vilka hjälporganisationer som är effektiva, budgettänk och skattereduktion för donationer. Svenskarna gav 9 miljarder kronor år 2020, enligt branschföreningen Giva Sverige. Vad tänker du om det? – Det är fantastiskt. Jag tror det finns en snöbollseffekt med givande. Om man känner att det är bara jag och ingen annan som drar sitt strå till stacken, kommer jag bli mindre sugen på att ge. Om de jag känner också ger 5, 10 procent så kommer det kännas naturligt för mig också. Sen kan jag inte låta bli att tänka på hur mycket bättre det kunde bli om vi gav mer till effektiva organisationer, säger Agnes Stenlund. Vad är effektiva välgörenhetsorganisationer?– Många tänker ofta på administrationskostnader, hur mycket organisationen tar av det vi ger. Det kan var 10-20 procent av summan. Men det är inte det viktigaste när man bedömer effektivitet. Vissa organisationer är 100 gånger mer effektiva så spelar inte de 10-20 procentenheterna så stor roll. Om den resterande summan gör 100 gånger mer gott så är det det vi ska titta på. – Det finns fyra kriterier man tittar på när man bedömer effektivitet. För det första att arbete är vetenskapligt dokumenterat, att det verkligen funkar. Sen tittar man på kostnadseffektivitet, till exempel kostnad per räddat levnadsår. För det tredje tittar man på tillväxtpotential, har organisationen möjlighet att använda pengarna som kommer in. Till sist tittar man på öppenhet, att man kan granska organisationen. Nischade organisationer t ex Against Malaria Foundation är med på listan över rekommenderade effektiva organisationer. Varför kvalar inte de stora, världsomspännande in – t ex Unicef, Rädda barnen, Röda korset?– Det är en viktig fråga. Det är två aspekter. Dels har de inte den transparens och öppenhet som krävs. Det finns inte tillräcklig dokumentation över vart pengarna går tillgänglig. Men kanske ännu viktigare är att de kan ha svårt att vara effektiva just eftersom de är så stora.Hur kan man tänka kring sin budget, hur mycket är rimligt att ge?– Föreningens rekommendation är 10% av lönen. Det är ingen regel, men det är tillräckligt högt för att göra skillnad utan att lämna för stort avtryck i den egna ekonomin. Om du bryr dig om att hjälpa andra men inte vill ge mer än snittet så kan 2-6% av sin inkomst vara en fingervisare. Om man kan tänka procent istället för hundralappar så har man kommit långt. Precis som med sin övriga budget- och ekonomiplanering så kan man sätta sig ner och tänka igenom vad man vill, om man har några mål. Och så sätter man upp ett autogiro. Då slipper man fatta nya beslut varje gång en insamlare kommer fram på stan, säger Agnes Stenlund. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The following is a conversation between Rob Mather, the Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving. The Against Malaria Foundation, AMF, provides long-lasting insecticidal nets to populations at high risk for malaria, primarily in Africa. It has been rated as the most effective charity in the world and is the epitome of a movement called "effective altruism." And here to tell us more about what they do and how they do it, it's a pleasure to have with us the founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, Rob Mather.

The Against Malaria Foundation is one of the most effective global health charities in the world, and the single most common donation target for EA Survey respondents (2018 and 2019). What makes this organization so special? How do they approach their work, and what challenges do they face? Founder and CEO Rob Mather answers these … Against Malaria Foundation: the impact of accountability | Rob Mather Read More »

Rob Mather, the CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, is this episode’s guest. Rob begins by telling the inspirational story that led to his founding AMF, and then discusses how malaria harms hundreds of thousands of individuals, and how the distribution of inexpensive malaria nets is saving lives and preventing debilitating illness across Sub-Saharan Africa. (0:21).Website:  https://www.againstmalaria.com/

Sarina Richard is the Founder and CEO of HERdle, India's first private women's one-stop healthcare expert. HERdle.health provides Indian women power over their sexual and mental health in a safe, anonymous, fast, and convenient way. They aim to give women the care they need without judgment or stigma, from the comfort and privacy of their mobile phone. 25% of the world’s cervical cancer deaths come from India, and 4 out of every 10 women in the world who commit suicide are from India. There is a lack of access to information and resources and a massive social stigma against sexual and mental health. HERdle hopes to bridge this gap and remove Indian women's health hurdles by providing access to non-judgy experts, resources and technology. Connect with Sarina Richard HERdle Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Some of the Topics Covered by Sarina Richard in this Episode How Sarina’s background in healthcare and women’s development led to her funding HERdle The issue of access to healthcare and sexual health education for women in India Understanding the problem and the business models Sarina came up with Deciding between for-profit and non-profit The first steps Sarina took to start HERdle How Sarina went about customer discovery and understanding pain points from the supply side HERdle’s services and how it works From bootstrapping to pre-seed and seed round fundraising What Sarina values in building a team How Sarina has been resourceful while bootstrapping Sarina’s takeaways from previous founder experiences and applying them to HERdle Customer acquisition, partnerships, and creating an organic community How Sarina currently structures her day and distributes her time and finding work-life balance How Sarina recharges and stays active (for free!) Sarina’s advice for other entrepreneurs Links from the Episode: Five Whys #108: Rob Mather, Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, one of the World’s Top-Rated Charities #48: Candice Lu, Founding Partner of OnPrem Solution Partners, on Scaling from 4 to 200 Employees, Solving Problems, and Running a Remote Company #137: Cole Zucker on His Remarkable Journey from $0 to $60M in Revenue, Selling a Company, and Starting the Influencer Platform Hey Hero #126: Christian Peverelli, CEO & Co-Founder of WeAreNoCode, an Educational Platform Empowering Non-Technical Founders Through No-Code Technology Webflo Jetboost Memberstack Airtable Girl Up Sheroes Sairee Chahal The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Peloton

Today I’m speaking with New York Times bestselling author James Clear.Author of the international bestselling book, Atomic Habits. Creator of jamesclear.com and the popular 3-2-1 weekly newsletter.Speaker at major companies and events.Weightlifter and (former) athlete.Contributor to the Against Malaria Foundation where he donates 5% of all profit.Journaling Prompts:Am I climbing the right mountain?What are you optimizing for?  Who am I optimizing to become?Can my current habits carry me to my desired future?Am I being effective right now or just busy? 

Malaria kills about 400,000 people per year with millions more falling ill - 70% of these people are children under 5 years old. Rob Mather and his team at the Against Malaria Foundation are working to solve this massive problem. Rob Mather is the founder and CEO of The Against Malaria Foundation. AMF has now raised more than $230 million, funding more than 100 million anti-mosquito bed nets protecting millions of people. AMF uses technology, rigorous processes and clear accountability to ensure aid is delivered effectively. For seven of the past eight years, AMF has been a top-ranked charity of the independent charity evaluators GiveWell and The Life You Can Save.

The Against Malaria Foundation is one of the most effective global health charities in the world, and the single most common donation target for EA Survey respondents (as of 2018). What makes this organization so special? How do they approach their work, and what challenges do they face? CEO Rob Mather answers these questions in … Continue reading EAG 2018 London: Against Malaria Foundation—What we do

A Patreon episode released for free - Rob Mather, CEO of Against Malaria joins the podcast to discuss fighting malaria and effective altruism. If you enjoyed the episode, we ask that you consider donating to Against Malaria Foundation.

We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others. Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and Nat discuss The Elephant in the Brain Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. In this book the authors dig into the true motives that drive our decisions and behaviors. We cover a wide range of topics, including: Being selfish without noticing it Outsmarting other humans Gossiping, signalling and laughing The truth about Rolex watches (and is not about time precision) Metrics used to measure a charity effectiveness Mona Lisa conspiracy theories And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of The Elephant in the Brain Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro, a cited book that explains the true language of our body, as well as our episode on Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, another book that talk about different types of signalling. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show The Redistribution of Sex - Robin Hanson’s Tweet [1:18] Jordan Peterson about the Toronto school shooter [2:00] Chinese app to watch attractive women [3:18] PornHub [3:35] Melting Asphalt – Kevin Simler’s Blog [4:20] PayPal Mafia [23:40] Spotlight Effect [24:26] Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying on the Joe Rogan Experience - hot vs beautiful [30:25] Game of Thrones [40:40] Uber [4224] Bill Simmons Podcast [47:33] Game of Chicken [47:55] Birchbox [57:01] Superbad film [1:06:48] Harvard students case publishing offensive memes in a private Facebook group [1:10:02] Buzzfeed [1:25:00] Pavlovian Theory [1:29:57] Mona Lisa ashes vs replica [1:35:14] Against Malaria Foundation [1:40:07] Good Street [1:41:14] Effective Altruism [1:42:04] Give Well [1:42:09] Red Cross [1:46:30] Susan G Komen Charity [1:46:50] United Way [1:47:30] Books mentioned The Elephant in the Brain Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (Nat’s notes) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [6:56] (Nat’s notes) (book episode part 1 & part 2) Homo Deus by Yuval Harari [6:56] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Daily Rituals by Mason Currey [7:47] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Chimpanzee Politics [14:20] 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson [24:14] (Nat’s notes) (Neil’s notes) (book episode) Lying by Sam Harris [38:18] Switch by Chip and Dan Heath [40:26] Lord of the Rings [40:40] What Every Body is saying by Joe Navarro [1:03:20] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson [1:21:50] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter [1:25:14] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Antifragile by Nassim Taleb [1:25:14] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault [1:53:02] (Nat’s notes) (book episode)   People mentioned Kevin Simler Robin Hanson Jordan B. Peterson [] (on Twitter) (12 Rules episode) Adil Majid [38:29] (Crypto episode) Sean Spicer [54:00] Donald Trump [54:00] Ronaldinho [1:13:37] Geoffrey Miller [1:33:53] Alex Jones [1:39:21] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1:49:11] (Antifragile episode) (Skin in the Game episode) Show Topics 4:50 – “Elephant in the brain, n. An important but unacknowledged feature of how our minds work; an introspective taboo”. Is there a survival advantage to not being too much introspective? Pros and cons of meditation. Stated reasons for doing things when we interact with other people. The effect of open offices, cafes and music on Neil. 9:17 – Underlying motives of our actions. Figuring out other people: what's making them tick? Example: parents who believe that college is a good idea for their kids, once they already paid. Starting a bitcoin mining company to pay studies at CMU. 11:41 – Thesis outline: we all have selfish modisms. However: People are judging us all the time. Because they are judging we are eager to look good. It’s better if we don’t show our selfishness. This applies not just to our words, but also to our thoughts. In some areas of life, especially polarized ones like politics, we’re quick to point out when others’ motives are more selfish than they claim. But in other areas, like medicine, we prefer to believe that almost all of us have pretty motives. 12:51 – #1 Animal Behavior. Biological social reasons for selfish modisms. Social grooming. The monkeys example: they over spend grooming others, much more than really needed and they'll fight to groom the higher rank monkeys. Analogies with employees in the corporate context. We do things that on the surface look pro social, but in reality we are just looking to increase our social standing. Altruistic behavior is not quite what it seems. 15:18 – Altruistic babblers example: these birds work to earn “prestige” in their community. Prestige will give them more mating opportunities. Analogies with student and religious groups. Knowledge suppression: we hide our big motivators from ourselves because other people are better at reading to our intentions. For example we can read bad sellers. 19:06 – #2 Competition. We are more selfish than we let ourselves think. Evolution first was about competition with the environment. Since we outsmarted other animals, we evolve to outsmart other humans. Unconsciously we try to increase our elements of social status: dominance (intimidate others) and prestige (being an impressive human being). 23:04 – Envy. “But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success”. Signalling. The most honest signals are expensive. Nowadays being in shape is more expensive than being fat. Facebook and Instagram as tools for signalling. The King and the whisperer. 26:46 – Deceiving signals. Digital Nomads showing off while not being able to support themselves in the US. Behaviors that can be explained by competitive signalling. Luxury consumption is our version of the peacock tail. No one buys a Rolex to tell the time. There is sexual sense to men paying for the first meal on a date. Hot vs Beautiful: most products are advertised to make women hotter than attractive, and that may be a cause of unhappiness. 33:21 – #3 Norms. Gossiping and reputation. Gossip is to tell our group other people is not following norms. We lose reputation when others gossip of us. Gossip is cross cultural, and it seems to exist to enforce reputations and norms. Useful and harmful gossiping. Gossiping as valuable recommendations of people to employ and work with. 37:27 – Gossip are learned behavior or inherited genetics? Gossiping to get attention. Arguments that telling small lies in front of friends erodes your reputation and trust. Telling small lies to ourselves to prove ourselves an action we took. Analogies to the book: Chip & Dan’s elephant and the writer in Switch, Plato’s horses and the chariot driver. 41:01 – #4 Cheating. In order to cheat people, we need to be able to hide our intentions because we are good at sniffing out cheaters. Drinking in public, hiding the bottle in brown paper bags. Pipes and vape pens for... tobacco? Finding ways to encourage good behavior that one wouldn't do otherwise. Recycling. 44:09 – Tangent. Danish study on grocery bags: plastic bags beat paper bags 40 to 1. Electric cars CO2 impact much larger than gas cars. 47:53 – #5 Self Deception. Convincing others that you had sabotaged yourself, and the best way to convince someone for something is for you to actually believe it. Iran’s nuclear deal with the US. North Korea wanting to be taken seriously. Looking like the mad man in town. Closing or degrading a channel communication. Strategic ignorance. Avoid looking at kidnappers face. 52:02 – #6 Counterfeit Reasons. We make up reasons to explain why we do things or why we want things. Split brain patients test. Narrative fallacy. Making up reasons to deny a disability. Press secretary. Sean Spiner on the podium trying to explain Trump's decisions. We accentuate and exaggerate our pro-social motives and downplay our ugly selfish ones. 55:32 – Sponsor! Scentbird. Monthly subscription for premium perfumes and colognes, delivered at your door in convenient packaging for only $15/mo! Avoid the weird and bulky shapes of perfume bottles. Scentbird has a very compact and handy rechargeable cartridge system. Neil is using Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue which is very summery. Nat buyed Gin by Commodity, Bergamote by Commodity, and Encens by Rag & Bone. Use our code to get 50% off the first month. Neil is drinking Milk Oolong from Cup & Leaf Tea (a tea that tastes milky but doesn’t have milk!). You can reinfuse Oolong up to 5 times! Try it iced too. Cup & Leaf will give a 10%  lifetime discount to its first 100 customers. The Cream Earl Grey is great too. Replace-your-coffee and MYT kits coming soon. 1:03:11 – #7 Hidden motives in everyday life. Body Language. Cue is like a signal but it only provides value to the receiver. Catching cues reading other people while playing poker. Eye contact ratio while speaking and listening is a sign dominance. 1:06:12 – #8 Laughter. “We laugh far more often in social settings than when we’re alone—30 times more often”. Laughter is a social way of initiating play with each other. Flirting with the edges of acceptable behavior. Comedians can talk things in ways no one else can talk in public. Laughing seems to come from an instinct. Great apes laugh too. Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you”. Making offensive statements in a playful manner with friends. 1:11:39 – Theory that laughter relieves nervous energy. Comedians make jokes about things they really don't believe, but many people extrapolates them wrongly. Laughter to test relationships with new people. Argument that humor normalizes bad behavior. Rape jokes. Jokes in the wrong audience. 1:22:49 – #9 Conversation. Conversation is not primarily an exchange of information, but mainly we do it to prove we are a reliable and good source of information. The backpack full of tools analogy. Reading and curiosity. Staying on topic, but not repeating ourselves. 1:27:43 – #10 Consumption. We buy things to look good. Prius example: it was designed ugly on purpose. Lifestyle ads. Corona beer theories: the first, Pavlovian, associating Corona and the beach, the second, one would buy Corona worrying about what others may associate the brand with. Super Bowl ads. BMW have to show their ads to poor people as well, so rich people associate the brand with luxury. Car ads reinforcing owners' believes. Products can be marketed for utility or lifestyle. Guinness and Budweiser have the same amount of calories, but they are marketed and perceived differently (surprisingly, Guinness is very keto-friendly). 1:33:33 – #11 Art. We find waste sexually attractive, because wasting resources is kind of a proof of wealth. People that hold a group in conversation are attractive. We tend to value art because we associate effort and skill with it. Mona Lisa's ashes and replicas survey. Is it the real Mona Lisa in the Louvre? Motivations behind mass shooters. Dinosaurs bones in museums. Conspiracies. 1:39:54 – #12 Charity. People donate in very inefficient ways. Donating for malaria vs high schools. Ivy League schools as hedge funds with an educational side. Comparing malaria deaths with other diseases that lower the quality of life. Is it dollar-to-lifes the best metric to look at when donating? The problem with Red Cross and other famous non-profits. Hollywood movies as non-profits. 1:49:34 – #13 Education. Kids don't learn much in class compared to unschooled ones. National GDP does not rise with education, but individual earning does. School seems more a filtering mechanism where, if you graduate from Harvard it doesn't mean you learned a ton but that you survived it. School as domestication. The most performant students are those more domesticated. 1:52:08 – Required attendance shows that the teacher is insecure of being interesting. Learning topics through other mediums than class subjects. School is more a signalling tool to show conformity to society and employment. For parents, it's a tool to brag that “made it”. School may be useful from a network standpoint. Why we haven't franchised the Ivy League. 2:01:54 – #14 Medicine. We get much more medicine than we need mostly as a way to show we take care of each other. Medicine is great for saving lives, but doesn't perform well on life and quality of life extension. 2:03:21 – #15 Religion. Proving you are a member of the community by sacrificing part of your freedom, time, resources and even identity. 2:04:10 – #16 Politics. We often vote to show loyalty to a community. You’d better don't want everyone to participate in an election, especially if they'll vote the opposite candidate you'll vote. Cheering for your party, as in sports.   2:06:31 – #17 Conclusion. It's easy to spot others doing it, it's difficult to pick up ourselves doing it. “The biggest lesson from Part I is that we ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. We have a gaping blind spot at the very center of our introspective vision. If we’re going to second-guess our coworkers and friends, we shouldn’t give ourselves an easy pass. In fact, knowing about our own blind spots should make us even more careful when pointing fingers at others”. 2:07:56 – Support us by buying the book through our Amazon affiliate link. Support us by buying stuff from our sponsors, Perfect Keto for all your keto diet needs, Kettle & Fire for grass fed bone broth, Four Sigmatic for delicious mushroom coffee and other low caffeine drinks. If you enjoyed this episode and want to read along with us, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

This episode features Rob Mather from Against Malaria Foundation. Against Malaria foundation is a top-ranked charity by Givewell and other organizations and strongly emphasizes efficiency, transparency and demonstrating impact.

Yopics Pod #15 - We speak to Rob Mather (CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation) about his work abroad and how he founded the charity. Presented By Luke Ambrose

On April 1, 2017, All-in for Africa (AIFA) VI was held at Canterbury Park in Shakopee, Minnesota. The event raised over $13,000 for the Against Malaria Foundation as part of an effort between Our Response and REG-Charity. AIFA VI had 129 unique entries and featured more than 40 different bounty players. This episode shares some highlight and includes audio captured at the event by Pete Troolin who is the co-host of the Pete & Steve Show which includes RecPoker host Steve Fredlund, who is also the volunteer director of Our Response, the group coordinating AIFA. If you have questions about the tournament or charity, reach out directly to stevefredlund@gmail.com or 651.587.5435.

Any update on the project manager position?Sam addresses questions about conversation with Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who was a guest on the podcast.What are your views on the so-called Muslim ban?Sam addresses questions about Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley.How do you think we can reasonably expect to break the echo chamber mentality and social media and online information? Do you think it's possible or do you expect our conversation to grow increasingly factionalized?Are you still giving $3,500 each month from the podcast to the Against Malaria Foundation as you spoke about in your podcast with Will MacAskill?One argument I've heard from someone who believes in God and an afterlife is that "energy can never be destroyed." I assume what is meant by this is that consciousness survives the body, as a soul perhaps. I think this is nonsense, but I don't really have a good enough comeback for it. What would your response be?What would you say to someone who claims that the humanities are an unnecessary waste of money because they have no immediate practical purpose and thus should not be taught at universities or given funds for research? I refer to subjects such as history, sociology, or philosophy.I'd like to hear your thoughts about the ethics of the anti-aging movement led by organizations such as the Sens Foundation, Human Longevity Inc., and so on.Have you read the criticisms on the Cogito [ergo sum]? You seem pretty obsessed with the fact that one can't argue with the existence of consciousness. Is consciousness really the best choice for an irrefutable proof?Would having a rational conversation about Islam still empower Islamists the same way the Trump-style rhetoric would?How much of morality–in your view–do we inherit from evolution?With large portions of society already arguing about what constitutes fake news, how will we handle future technology that makes these lines even more murky–for example, voice manipulating software or computer-generated facial expressions?I've heard you use the term zero-sum game when talking to guests on different subjects. Would you say that letting refugees into our country is not a zero-sum game?Are you open to doing a podcast with someone who voted for Trump?What should our policy be with respect to Muslim immigration?

Thanks to http://www.givewell.org/ for sponsoring this video! To learn more about the Against Malaria Foundation, visit: http://www.givewell.org/AMF or https://www.againstmalaria.com. Thanks also to our supporters on https://www.patreon.com/MinuteEarth ___________________________________________ FYI: We try to leave jargon out of our videos, but if you want to learn more about this topic, here are some keywords to get your googling started: Malaria - a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. Parasite - an organism that benefits by living in/on a host organism and deriving nutrients at the host's expense. Host - an organism in/on which another organism lives. Protozoa - a group of single-celled microscopic animals (not bacteria or viruses) that includes the Plasmodium species. Plasmodium - a genus of parasitic protozoa, many of which cause malaria in their hosts. Four species regularly infect humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, & P. ovale. P. falciparum - the Plasmodium species that kills the most people, by causing malignant malaria, the most dangerous form of malaria. Anopheles gambiae - a ‘complex' of at least seven species of mosquitoes that are the main vectors of P. falciparum in sub-Saharan Africa. Species complex - a group of closely related species that look so similar that the boundaries between them are often unclear. Hunting and gathering - depending primarily on wild foods for subsistence Paleontology - the study of fossils and what fossils tell us about the past, about evolution, and about how humans fit into the world. ___________________________________________ Credits (and Twitter handles): Script Writer: Alex Reich (@alexhreich) Script Editor: Emily Elert (@eelert) Video Illustrator: Qingyang Chen Video Director: Emily Elert (@eelert) Video Narrator: Kate Yoshida (@KateYoshida) With Contributions From: Henry Reich, Ever Salazar, Peter Reich, David Goldenberg Music by: Nathaniel Schroeder: http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder _________________________________________ Like our videos? Subscribe to MinuteEarth on YouTube: http://goo.gl/EpIDGd Support us on Patreon: https://goo.gl/ZVgLQZ Also, say hello on: Facebook: http://goo.gl/FpAvo6 Twitter: http://goo.gl/Y1aWVC And find us on itunes: https://goo.gl/sfwS6n ___________________________________________ If you liked this week’s video, we think you might also like: Amazing animation of seasonal temperature suitability for malaria https://goo.gl/63pYGt Americapox CGPGrey video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk The History of Malaria, an Ancient Disease http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/ ___________________________________________ References: Carter, R., & Mendis, K. N. (2002). Evolutionary and historical aspects of the burden of malaria. Clinical microbiology reviews, 15(4), 564-594. http://cmr.asm.org/content/15/4/564.full Gething, P. W., et al. (2011). A new world malaria map: Plasmodium falciparum endemicity in 2010. Malaria journal, 10(1), 1. http://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2875-10-378 Gething, P. W., et al. (2011). Modelling the global constraints of temperature on transmission of Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax. Parasites & Vectors, 4(1), 1. http://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1756-3305-4-92 Hay, S. I., et al. (2004). The global distribution and population at risk of malaria: past, present, and future. The Lancet infectious diseases, 4(6), 327-336. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145123/ Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). (2016). GBD Compare Data Visualization. Seattle, WA: IHME, University of Washington. Retrieved from http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare. Liu, W., et al. (2010). Origin of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in gorillas. Nature, 467(7314), 420-425. doi: 10.1038/nature09442 Malaria: Fact sheet (April 2016). Retrieved from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/ Packard, R. M. (2007). The making of a tropical disease: a short history of malaria (pp. 1-66 ). Baltimore. Rich, S. M., et al. (2009). The origin of malignant malaria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(35), 14902-14907. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0907740106 Shah, S. (2010). The Fever: how malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years (pp. 1-33). Macmillan. Sundararaman, S. A., et al. (2016). Genomes of cryptic chimpanzee Plasmodium species reveal key evolutionary events leading to human malaria. Nature communications, 7. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11078 Webb, J. L. (2009). Humanity's burden: a global history of malaria (pp. 1-91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Health Organization. (2015). World malaria report 2015. World Health Organization. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/world-malaria-report-2015/report/en/

tbs eFM Highlights Interview with Peter Singer tbs eFM This Morning interviews the legend, Peter Singer 2016.9.29 [Bringing and Bearing the Moral Law] Peter Singer is a philosophy Professor at Princeton University and considered controversial for not shying away from today's tough issues, from abortion to burkinis. Hear what he has to say on This Morning. Now, influential, controversial, practical, some words to describe the philosopher Peter Singer who's pioneered discussions in the world of ethics on very sensitive topics from coming to the rescue of children in peril to abortion, from animal rights to global poverty. To celebrate our new fall or autumn season at tbs eFM, we can now bring in professor Singer. Good morning to you from Seoul. -Good morning, good to talk to you. Wonderful to have you on the line. Just a quick bit of background, you are a professor of bioethics at Princeton University in the United States, laureate professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne Australia, and your books include ‘Animal Liberation' and ‘The Most Good You Can Do'. And that's keeping it brief, so it's a great honor to have you on the line with us. I mean, this book, ‘The Most Good You Can Do' the title in itself sends a clear message to us, doesn't it? That we should perhaps be doing what we can to help others? -Yes, certainly. But not only just something to help others, but whatever we are doing to help others, whether it's giving our time or our money, that we should be thinking about will it be doing the most good we can? Because there are many different choices that we face and some of them are much better than others, and very often people just make emotional choices on this without a lot of thought. I'm arguing we should combine the head and the heart to make sure that we do the most good that we can. Now it I may venture just a little into the way of philosophy, why should we help others? I'm sure many of us do have the urge to do so, but why? -Well, I think one way of looking at it would be to say that other people are like us in a very important way and that is that their lives can go well or badly, and if we look at the world as the whole, if we detach ourselves a little from our own interests, I think we can see from that larger perspective we should be caring about the welfare of others as well as ourselves. We are not that different from others and if we think that our pain is a bad thing, that our suffering is a bad thing and conversely that it is a good thing when we are happy, then I think it's very hard for us to deny that the pain of others is a bad thing and the happiness of others is a good thing. No doubt, but for example, some of us will have a religion, have a divine belief that will help us along with that, help us solidify this need to help others, perhaps knowing or suspecting that there will be some sort of retribution if we are not as good as we can be or at least if we are evil, that there could be very negative effects. For those who have no such belief system, as long as things are going well for them, how can they rationally turn around and not help others? -I mean I don't have the kind of belief system that you mentioned. I think that we can do this simply on the basis of using our reason to see that we are one person among others, and that if we care about our own wellbeing, then to not care about the wellbeing of others, especially when we can quite easily make a big difference to their well being at either no cost or a very modest cost to ourselves. But that's just a kind of a bias, just as we reject biases on the grounds of race or sex or something like that. I don't think we should say this is me and that's you or that's them. I don't think that that's a good enough reason for saying their welfare doesn't count. And again, that scenario we could probably devote a long time to, but it's interesting to hear your thoughts on it. Another area, for example that you've urged people to help children when you are able to help them, but by the same token, you do not oppose abortion, as somebody who has several children myself, I think, imagine if we had gone down the abortion route, this lovely child of mine would never exist today. How do you square that? -Well, I mean it's true that that child would never exist, equally that child would never have existed if you had not had sex in the particular occasion when that child was conceived. You might have had sex on a different occasion and a different child might have been conceived. Just as if a pregnancy had been at an inconvenient time, you might have not had that child but you might have later on had another child, perhaps just as many children as you now have. So I mean to me the point is that, when you have an abortion, you end a life before it's really got going from the subjective point of view of that life, that is there is no being who is aware of it's own life, who wants to go on living, who has plans. In fact, for the overwhelming majority of abortions there isn't even a being who can feel pain; the brain is not developed enough for a sense of pain. So I see that as a stage at which it is ethically acceptable to decide that that life has not begun well, it has not begun at a convenient time and that it doesn't have to continue at that point. Once you have a being who has all those capacities, who is more aware of their own life, then you have a very different sort of situation, and that's the point at which I think you do want to protect life and save life and especially of course if the baby is a cherished one whose parents love and care for that baby. And if that baby then dies from some preventable cause, let's say malaria, that's a tragedy, both for the child and for the parents. And if a relatively modest donation to the Against Malaria Foundation for example would have enabled that child to be protected by a bed net and not to get malaria, not to die, that would have been money very well spent. I mean, self-awareness is a controversial issue, but one might argue that even a newborn has very little self-awareness compared with an embryo. -Well one might, certainly, and one might therefore argue that the death of a newborn is not the same as the death of an older child. Of course it may still be a tragedy for the parents who want that child, but I don't, you know, perhaps for legal purposes we need to have a clear line and birth is the line that is mostly used. But that's not the case in all cultures. Some cultures have had some ceremony at some stage after birth to accept the child into the community, and I think there's some area there, there's some margin where you could say that decision is a tolerable one because there isn't a life in the same sense as there is later on. Yeah. And I just want to clarify for the record, when we speak of existence before, that in itself is a whole area that would warrant further discussion, but professor Singer, one thing that is already coming out in this discussion is that you don't shy away from sensitive topics. In fact, we can bring you into the sphere of current affairs, because you have weighed in on the whole burkini argument, this idea of Muslim women being able to wear certain clothes, whatever they want really when they go to the beach. It's a discussion that has gone from France to Australia and beyond, what are your thoughts, can you clarify them for us? -Yes, I think that we should not try to prevent people from, women in this case, from participating in all areas of life on the grounds that they may have certain beliefs that they don't want to go out in public with certain parts of their body uncovered. And if we have a law that says you can't wear this garment known as a burkini on the beach, which is a kind of a swimsuit that is designed to cover the parts of a woman's body that according to her religion she believes she may not display in public, then you affectively are preventing her from going to the beach. And I think that that's a penalty that we ought not to impose. The burkini actually developed in Australia, which is where I'm from originally, precisely because an immigrant from a Muslim background felt that it was a pity that girls could not participate in Australia's beach culture. It's important to Australians in the summer that the beach is a place where you socialize with your friends, where kids play. If Muslim girls are excluded from that, then that's going to create a lack of integration in society. And if we want different groups with different cultures and different beliefs to actually integrate and come together in the community, it's a mistake to say you have to expose the same parts of you body as other people from different religions or no religions. Yes. -I don't see why we should enforce that. Well, it was your article on this that drew you today to our attention, but of course you are renowned in the world of philosophy and its been fascinating to look at your work, it's a shame we don't have more time to go through some of that. One quick not on the burkini, of course in Australia you also have some swimsuits to protect from the sun that aren't so different, don't you? Which gives us some pause for thought. -Absolutely, because we are worried about skin cancer and a lot of kids who are not Muslims cover up as well. And rightly so. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. -Good. Your welcome. Thank you. As I said, renowned professor Peter Singer joining us on the line. You can have your say right now on this topic, on any of those topics we've discussed there and more, pound or sharp 1013 for 50 won per message, you can tweet us @efmthismorning.

Elie Hassenfeld and Sean Conley discuss GiveWell's #1 ranked top charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. (Music: 8bit Five by Cullah.)

En este episodio hablamos de cuántos dedos tienen los perros y gatos, de Bitcoin, su historia y cómo funciona, Satoshi Nakamoto, la deep y dark web, Dogecoin, Against Malaria Foundation, el libro Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain y aprender a dibujar. Podés donar a nuestra causa de salvar una décima de vida humana en againstmalaria.com/pizzelpodcast

What Are You Doing, Movie? - Harry Potter and the 24 Hour Malariathon - Movie #1 - Sorcerer's / Philosopher's Stone - Our 200th episode. We partnered up with MuggleNet.com in a giant 24-hour livestream "Malariathon" to raise money for Against Malaria Foundation. This is the, uh, beginning.

What Are You Doing, Movie? - Harry Potter and the 24 Hour Malariathon - Movie #1 - Sorcerer's / Philosopher's Stone - Our 200th episode. We partnered up with MuggleNet.com in a giant 24-hour livestream "Malariathon" to raise money for Against Malaria Foundation. This is the, uh, beginning.

What Are You Doing, Movie? - Harry Potter and the 24 Hour Malariathon - Movie #1 - Sorcerer's / Philosopher's Stone - Our 200th episode. We partnered up with MuggleNet.com in a giant 24-hour livestream "Malariathon" to raise money for Against Malaria Foundation. This is the, uh, beginning.

What Are You Doing, Movie? - Harry Potter and the 24 Hour Malariathon - Movie #1 - Sorcerer's / Philosopher's Stone - Our 200th episode. We partnered up with MuggleNet.com in a giant 24-hour livestream "Malariathon" to raise money for Against Malaria Foundation. This is the, uh, beginning.