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Brought to you by Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega fish oil, GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, and Wealthfront high-yield savings account. Steve Jang (@stevejang) is the founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco. He is also a longtime friend and one of the founder-now-investor generation of VCs that arose out of the last technology cycle. Steve is one of the top 100 venture capital investors in the world, according to Forbes Midas List of top venture capital investors, and was ranked #45 in 2023. He is also a Korean-American, a gyopo, who is deeply invested and involved in both the technological and cultural worlds in the US and Asia. Previously, Steve was an early advisor to, and angel investor in, Uber, and then an early-stage investor in Coinbase, Postmates, Poshmark, Tonal, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Humane, the AI device platform. He helped Uber, Coinbase, and Blue Bottle Coffee, among others, to expand into Korea and Japan. As an entrepreneur, Steve co-founded companies in the consumer internet, mobile, and crypto space.In the film and music world, he is an executive producer, and his most recent film is Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, which tells the story of the greatest Korean artist, and father of digital video art, and which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. His next film is a documentary about Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 5% APY—that's the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That's more than ten times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you'll immediately start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you'll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started.*This episode is also brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the #1-selling fish-oil brand in the US! More than 80% of Americans don't get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body can't produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor-recommended Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. Ultimate Omega is made exclusively from 100% wild-caught sardines and anchovies. It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. All Nordic Naturals' fish-oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form—the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs.Go to Nordic.com and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U.S. Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order.*This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell.org! For over ten years, GiveWell.org has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. GiveWell spends over 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed charities they've found. In total, more than 100,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible.This year, support the charities that save and improve lives most, with GiveWell. Any of my listeners who become new GiveWell donors will have their first donation matched up to $100 when you go to GiveWell.org and select “PODCAST” and “Tim Ferriss” at checkout.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
David and Tamler board the train for Hayao Miyazaki's mystical dreamy coming of age masterpiece Spirited Away. This is a true VBW deep dive. Plus a study by our secret crush suggests we may not be optimizing the value of our conversations. Mastroianni, A. M., Gilbert, D. T., Cooney, G., & Wilson, T. D. (2021). Do conversations end when people want them to?. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(10), e2011809118. Spirited Away [wikipedia.org] Sponsored by: BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW Listening.com: Save time by listening to academic papers on the go. Very Bad Wizards listeners get 3 weeks free when signing up at listening.com/vbw Givewell.org: Make your charitable donations as effective as possible. If you've never donated through GiveWell before, you can have your donation matched up to before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to givewell.org, pick PODCAST, and enter VERY BAD WIZARDS at checkout.
On the aphorisms ("Diapsalmata") that begin Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), plus the essay also in the first volume, "Rotation of Crops." What is it to live your life as if it were a work of art? K thinks such a life is unserious and unsatisfying. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get two memberships for the price of one at MasterClass.com/PEL. Learn about St. John's College Winter Classics, starting this January, at sjc.edu/PEL. Have your donation matched up to $100 to a top-performing charity at GiveWell.org (enter "The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast" at checkout).
Here on the podcast we're always on the lookout for the biggest bang for our buck. Picture this: you, in the grocery store aisle, pondering the cosmic significance of toilet paper prices and whether the fancy stuff is going to be worth it! Or maybe you're weighing a couple job offers: you're not just negotiating salary, you're out there considering the 401k match, turning job hunting into a strategic sport! We're all about optimizing our lives for maximum value, but are we extending this same strategic approach to the dollars we give to charity? Maybe... or maybe not! That's why we've roped in the philanthropic virtuoso, Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder of GiveWell, a nonprofit committed to finding charities that perform life-saving and life-improving work without breaking the bank. It's financial optimization meets world-saving wisdom. Listen as we discuss the founding of GiveWell, the ways some charities have fallen short, SBF and his impact on effective altruism, Elie's rule of thumbs for how much to give, if it's OK to give locally even if it doesn't have the biggest impact, and plenty more! Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear' is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here. Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It's fun, free, & practical. Join a thriving community of fellow money in the HTM Facebook group. Find the best credit card for you with our new credit card tool! Massively reduce your cell phone bill each month by switching to a discount provider like Mint Mobile. During this episode we enjoyed a Chonk-ibal by Other Half Brewing- a big thanks to Jason for sending this one our way! And please help us to spread the word by letting friends and family know about How to Money! Hit the share button, subscribe if you're not already a regular listener, and give us a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Help us to change the conversation around personal finance and get more people doing smart things with their money! Best friends out!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It's News Day Tuesday! But first, Sam and Emma speak with Jacob Sugarman, lifestyle editor at the Buenos Aires Herald and writer at The Nation, to discuss Javier Milei's recent victory in Argentina's presidential election. Check out Jacob's writing at The Nation here: https://www.thenation.com/authors/jacob-sugarman/ Check out Sam on Movie Night Extravaganza tonight!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7vd843wcDo&ab_channel=MovieNightExtravaganza Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Givewell: If you've never donated through GiveWell before, you can have your donation matched up to ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to https://givewell.organd pick PODCAST and enter The Majority Report with Sam Seder at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Majority Report with Sam Seder to get your donation matched. Again, that's https://givewell.org to donate or find out more. Cozy Earth: Go to https://CozyEarth.com and enter my code MAJORITY REPORT at checkout to save up to 40%. That's https://CozyEarth.com code MAJORITY REPORT. Sunset Lake CBD: Starting today, all products on https://sunsetlakecbd.com will be 30% off with coupon code “BF.” But that's not all, if your order is over $125, you'll be prompted to pick a FREE 20-count of your choice of CBD gummies. Orders over $250 will also get a cozy new beanie just in time for the holiday season. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
Continuing with On the Concept of Irony, defined as "infinite absolute negativity." K criticizes his Romantic peers of taking irony too far. So what is healthy, well-grounded irony? Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and bonus content including a third part to this episode (coming soon). Sponsors: Learn about St. John's College at sjc.edu/pel. Have your donation matched up to $100 to a top-performing charity at GiveWell.org (enter "The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast" at checkout).
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the growing attacks by Donald Trump's GOP opponents like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis calling Trump out and letting voters know he will lose to President Biden. Thanks to GiveWell! To claim your match, go to https://givewell.org and pick PODCAST and enter MeidasTouch Podcast at checkout! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maximize your charitable giving by earning a great return while doing good in the world. From ways to give without causing your favorite charity to incur processing fees to ways to earn thousands of points for your donation, this week we talk about how to do your charitable deeds (better). 00:00 Intro 01:13 Giant Mailbag 03:32 Giant Mailbag #2: United Quest card details 07:22 Card Talk: Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card & Capital One Venture X Business Credit Card https://frequentmiler.com/venturex/ https://frequentmiler.com/VentureXBiz/#Goto 18:35 What crazy thing . . . did Marriott do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/apartments-four-points-express-more-details-about-these-2-new-marriott-brands/ 23:27 Award Talk 23:28 Alaska Mileage Plan March 2024 changes https://frequentmiler.com/huge-alaska-announces-unified-award-charts/ https://frequentmiler.com/new-alaska-award-chart-winners-losers-and-sweet-spots/ https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-us-anything-we-discuss-the-new-alaska-award-chart-video/ 37:06 Do you want to collect Alaska miles now? 39:06 Award Talk: Use JetBlue points to book Qatar flights https://frequentmiler.com/book-qatar-flights-with-jetblue-trueblue-points/ 42:15 Award Talk: Marriott free night certificate inside info https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-rules-for-extending-free-nights/ 46:55 Main Event: A good deed is its own reward, but we can do better. 47:15 How do you find charities that do good? (search tools) 48:20 GiveWell 50:03 PayPay Giving Fund 52:15 Kiva Microloans https://frequentmiler.com/why-i-love-kiva-for-earning-rewards-and-doing-good/ 55:29 How do you earn rewards on charitable gifts? 55:47 Ways to earn miles for donating through airline programs, etc 56:48 Credit Card Rewards 46:49 US Bank cards that earn 2x on charitable donations....meh 58:13 Bank of America 2.62% cash back 58:48 Credit Card Big Spend Bonuses https://frequentmiler.com/best-big-spend-bonuses/ 1:00:25 Buying Visa or Mastercard gift cards and using them to donate 1:03:17 Earn a new card welcome bonus https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-sign-up-offers/ 1:06:25 Donating miles and points 1:08:20 Earn Air France elite credit 1:09:38 Question of the Week: Is it worth it to travel to Australia for just a week? Music credit: Annie Yoder
Discussing On the Concept of Irony (1841). Kierkegaard builds up to telling us what irony is by showing how Socrates invented irony, as characterized by his wholly negative project of showing others that their beliefs inherited from society are wrong. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get $250 off the #1 meal kit for eating well at GreenChef.com/pel250 (code pel250). Start selling online with a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/pel. Have your donation matched up to $100 to a top-performing charity at GiveWell.org (enter "The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast" at checkout).
It's News Day Tuesday! Sam and Emma break down the biggest headlines of the day. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Israel's continued ethnic cleansing of Gaza, protests at US ports to shut down military aid, election day in the US, Donald Trump's fraud case, the upcoming GOP debate, SAG-AFTRA negotiations, labor action, and the global climate emergency, before watching CNBC grapple with UAW's incredible victory. Then, Sam and Emma jump into the start of Mike Johnson's speakership, highlighted by an incoming government shutdown and a massive influx of aid to Israel, before parsing through the more *personal* elements of his identity that have recently come to light. They also tackle the absurdity of recent attempts to paint the US as having a *lack* of leverage over Israel, walk through the practicalities of a ceasefire, and what an attempt to actually dismantle Hamas would look like (if Israel or Biden cared). And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma discuss recent bad-faith arguments about the call for Palestinian liberation “From the River to the Sea,” and Israel's absolute refusal to ever engage with any civil Palestinian liberation movement, before watching Simone Sanders' recent comments on Biden's candidacy moving forward. Ramsey, a Palestinian calling in from the DMV, reflects on the long history of the pain and occupation of the Palestinian people and why it is only just now getting acknowledged by the Western world, Abdul from Atlanta discusses Biden's failed promises to Black Americans, and Jay from Troy dives into some odd strategy from the GOP candidate in his local Mayoral race. Donald Trump's lawyer takes after the best, and Sam and Emma parse deeper into the FBI probe of Eric Adams' Chief Fundraiser, plus your calls and IMs! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Givewell: If you've never donated through GiveWell before, you can have your donation matched up to ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to https://givewell.org and pick PODCAST and enter The Majority Report with Sam Seder at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Majority Report with Sam Seder to get your donation matched. Again, that's https://givewell.org to donate or find out more. IAC Laser Engraving: Visit https://iaclasers.com and use Coupon Code MAJORITY10 at checkout to save 10% on your order. They have also updated their site recently, so if you've visited in the past, you'll want to visit again and check out the new products. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
TLDR: The best research we have shows that clean water may provide a 30% mortality reduction to children under 5. This might be the biggest mortality reduction of any single global health intervention, yet we don't understand why it works.Here, I share my journey exploring a life-saving intervention that we don't fully understand, but really should. I may err a little on the side of artistic license - so if you find inaccuracies please forgive me, correct me or even feel free to just tear me to shreds in the comments ;). Part 1: Givewell's Seemingly absurd numbersI first became curious after a glance at what seemed like a dubious GiveWell funded project. A $450,000 dollar scoping grant for water chlorination in Rwanda? This didn't make intuitive sense to me.In Sub-saharan Africa diarrhoea causes 5-10% of child mortality. While significant, the diarrhea problem continues to improve with better access to [...] ---Outline:(02:26) Part 2: A Nobel Prize winner's innovative math(04:27) Part 3. We already knew about this anomaly – 100 years ago(08:10) Part 5: What next for clean water?The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 4th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hFPbe2ZwmB9athsXT/clean-water-the-incredible-30-mortality-reducer-we-can-t --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Bob Elliott ( @BobEUnlimited), cofounder and CEO of Unlimited, which uses machine learning to create index replication ETFs of 2&20 style alternative investments like hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity, joins Julia La Roche on episode 114 to discuss the macro picture, why the odds of a recession are increasing, and why it might make sense to allocate 10% of a portfolio to gold. This episode was recorded on Friday, October 20. Prior to founding Unlimited, Bob was a Senior Investment Executive at Bridgewater Associates, where he served on the Investment Committee (G7) and created investment strategies across equities, fixed income, credit, exchange rates, and commodities, including many used in the flagship Pure Alpha fund. He also built and led Ray Dalio's personal investment research team for nearly a decade. He's the author of hundreds of Bridgewater's widely read Daily Observations and directly counseled some of the world's foremost policymakers and institutional investors on economic and investing issues. Bob has also served as an advisor and executive at several startups, including CircleUp, an investment company focused on early-stage consumer brands. He revamped the investment strategy for the company's $150mln venture funds leveraging big data approaches to improve decision-making. He was also the co-founder of GiveWell, a startup charity evaluator which now directs more than $500mln in annual contributions. 0:00 Welcome Bob Elliott 0:45 Macro picture 2:30 Probability of a recession has gone up 5:20 Bond market 8:30 Bond sell-offs are self-correcting 14:20 Higher for longer, but how much longer? 18:03 Fed's 2% target for inflation 20:20 Jamie Dimon's 7% rates comment 22:29 Allocated to gold and diversified commodities
I'm a grantmaker who previously spent a decade as a professional investor. I've recently helped some Open Phil, GiveWell, and Survival and Flourishing Fund grantees with their cash and foreign exchange (FX) management. In the EA community, we seem collectively quite bad at this. My aim with this post is to help others 80/20 their cash and FX management: for 20% of the effort (these 4 items below), we can capture 80% of the benefit of corporate best practices. This will often be a highly impactful use of your time: I think that for the median organization, implementing these suggestions will take 15 to 30 hours of staff time, but will be about as valuable as raising 5% more money.My suggestions are:have more than one bankinvest your cash in a government-guaranteed money market account, earning ~5%hold international currencies in the same proportions as your spending in those currencieswatch out for [...] ---Outline:(01:09) Have more than one bank(03:04) Invest your cash in a government guaranteed money market account, earning ~5%(06:59) Hold FX in the same proportions as your spending(08:58) Watch out for FX fees--- First published: October 14th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/akSr4YXHKZcK8EnQe/cash-and-fx-management-for-ea-organizations --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Last year, we committed $350 million to GiveWell's evidence-backed, cost-effective recommendations in global health and development.This year, we're committing $300M to support GiveWell's recommendations over the next three years. This returns our annual support to its 2020 level ($100M/year). And it brings us to more than $1 billion in funding for GiveWell's recommendations over the course of Open Philanthropy's existence.We're committing all of this funding now, but we anticipate that GiveWell will spend it at their discretion in whatever way they think helps beneficiaries the most. As they explain in this post, they've been spending carefully in anticipation of a potential decrease in our funding; we've been discussing this with them actively as we developed our plan for the next few years.The rest of this post:Shares examples of recent GiveWell recommendations we've funded.Discusses reasons we've increased our bar for funding in our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio.Explains how GiveWell's impressive [...] ---Outline:(01:32) Where our funding to GiveWell's recommendations ultimately goes(03:13) Our higher bar for Global Health and Wellbeing giving(05:42) How GiveWell's impressive growth and our higher Global Health and Wellbeing bar influence our current plans(13:28) This means that the marginal GiveWell opportunity will be at least as strong as in past years(13:59) Closing thoughtsThe original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 6th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KuByzfn6yiKMWBKmr/our-planned-allocation-to-givewell-s-recommendations-for-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
When then-hedge fund manager Elie Hassenfeld began his philanthropic journey in 2006, he knew that he wanted to get the most charitable bang for his buck. He quickly realized, however, that detailed data on charitable impact simply didn't exist. So he and Holden Karnovsky founded GiveWell, an organization inspired by effective altruism that identifies the charities that save or improve lives the most for every dollar given. Listen as Hassenfeld, GiveWell's CEO, explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how GiveWell determines the small number of charities they recommend to achieve optimal impact. They also discuss the dangers of an over-reliance on data and the case for bucketing our philanthropy to allow for local or personal giving.
Mike and Gary Gulman have been friends for a long time, but what kind of friends? Real friends or just work friends? Gary returns to the podcast and he and Mike evaluate the true level of their friendship. Plus they discuss vulnerability in comedy, unhappiness vs. depression, and the advice that Gary got from Larry David.Please consider donating to Give Well
TLDR: This post is part of a sequence we've prepared for the Career Conversations Week on the EA Forum. This article provides a concise overview of the traits that Charity Entrepreneurship deems most valuable for a career in nonprofit entrepreneurship. We intend to provide you with a deeper understanding of our criteria when evaluating applications for our Incubation Program. Additionally, we hope this post assists you in self-assessing whether this career path aligns with your aspirations and abilities.It's been five years since we started our Incubation Program. We've since incubated 27 charities, some of which are now GiveWell incubated or ACE recommended, with many others on a path to becoming leaders in their fields. This would be impossible without dedicated, smart, resilient, and ambitiously altruistic individuals like you. Of course, not everyone is suited to be a successful nonprofit entrepreneur, and so we've spent the last few years refining our [...] ---Outline:(02:39) Competence:(03:54) Personality Traits:(05:58) Upskilling as You Go:(07:48) Potential Obstacles in this Career Path--- First published: September 8th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y7hk2zABZ2nvqDs5z/who-is-a-good-fit-for-a-career-in-nonprofit-entrepreneurship --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
On Plato's mid-period dialogue from around 388 BCE. How do words relate to the things they represent? Socrates first argues that words represent things, and so doing etymology is a way of learning philosophical truths, then seemingly reverses himself. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion, including a supporter-exclusive part three to this episode coming out next week. Sponsors: Visit GreenChef.com/60pel (code 60pel) for 60% off and free shipping for the #1 Meal Kit for Eating Well. Maximize the power of your charitable giving at GiveWell.org (choose PODCAST and enter Partially Examined Life at checkout). Check out the U. of Portsmouth's Life Solved podcast.
Pure Earth is a GiveWell Grantee dedicated to reducing lead exposure in low- and middle-income countries. In collaboration with Stanford University and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) was performed to assess the effectiveness of an intervention in Bangladesh. The CEA presents an encouraging outlook, with a cost per disability-adjusted life year (DALY)-equivalent averted estimated at just under US$1. As this assessment is preliminary, it may contain methodological inconsistencies with GiveWell's. As such, we welcome any comments and corrections.In 2019, after investigations concluded that turmeric was the primary source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh, Stanford University and Bangladeshi non-profit icddr,b embarked on a mission to eliminate lead poisoning from turmeric. Stanford and icddr,b's investigations had revealed that lead chromate (an industrial pigment sometimes called “School Bus Yellow”) was being added to turmeric roots to make them more attractive for [...] --- First published: August 29th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aFYduhr9pztFCWFpz/preliminary-analysis-of-intervention-to-reduce-lead-exposure --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a selection of highlights from episode #153 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entertaining parts of the interview — and if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode:Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent workAnd if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing podcast@80000hours.org.Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript.Highlights put together by Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
On Michael Tomasello's "Language Is Not an Instinct" (1995) and Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003). With guest Christopher Heath. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Give more effectively via GiveWell.org (and let them know we sent you!). Try e-commerce for one-dollar-per-month at shopify.com/pel. It's not too late to sign up for Mark's fall Core Philosophy Texts class at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class.
Mark and Wes conclude with some close reading of Part 6 of System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), section 3: "Relation of Art to Philosophy." Schelling thinks that art enables us to do intuitively what philosophy tries to do with concepts. We're providing this typically supporter-exclusive content for all of you in anticipation of the new Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes project that we'll be unveiling next week. Sponsors: Get 50% off the #1 Meal Kit for Eating Clean (plus free shipping) at greenchef.com/pel50 (promocode pel50). Give more effectively via GiveWell.org (and let them know we sent you!). Check out the Articles of Interest podcast. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. There are still spots available in Mark's Core Philosophy Texts class this fall. See partiallyexaminedlife.com/class.
How does the broader context of history affect our personal lives on a daily basis? How does historical memory and narrative storytelling change the way we view the past and the present? This episode asks these questions in the context of the Mexican Dirty War by analyzing the conflict through the lens of the broader themes of Mexican history. Although history may be in the past, it's ghost lingers in the present. This episode is Part II in a series on the Mexican Dirty War. It gives a brief history of Mexico from the 1500's on-from the Spanish conquest, to colonialism, to revolution, to attempts at reform and democracy. It also looks at the key impact of the 1910 Mexican Revolution on history and the Dirty War. Who has the right to claim the legacy of the past? -Consider Supporting the Podcast!- Leave a rating or review on apple podcasts or spotify! Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory Check out my podcast series on Piranesi, Arcane, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart here: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/bonuscontent Try my audio course "Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart"-- Why do 'good' people support evil leaders? What allure does Fascism hold that enables it to garner popular support? And what lessons can history teach us about today? My audio course 'A Beginners Guide to Understanding & Resisting Fascism: Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart' explores these massive questions through the lens of Nazi Germany and the ordinary people who lived, loved, collaborated and even resisted during those times. Through exploring the past, I hope to unlock lessons that all learners on the course can apply to the present day - from why fascism attracts people to how it can be resisted. I'm donating 20% of the proceeds to Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund, and the course also comes with a 100% money back guarantee. Check it out at https://avid.fm/reflectinghistory or on my patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Try my audio course "Piranesi: Exploring the Infinite Halls of a Literary Masterpiece"-- This course is a deep analysis of Susanna Clark's literary masterpiece "Piranesi." Whether you are someone who is reading the novel for academic purposes, or you simply want to enjoy an incredible story for it's own sake, this audio course goes chapter by chapter into the plot, characters, and themes of the book...“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; it's kindness infinite.” Piranesi lives in an infinite house, with no long-term memory and only a loose sense of identity. As the secrets of the House deepen and the mystery of his life becomes more sinister, Piranesi must discover who he is and how this brings him closer to the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that the House contains. Touching on themes of memory, identity, mental health, knowledge, reason, experience, meaning, reflection, ideals, and more…Piranesi will be remembered as one of the great books of the 21st century. Hope you enjoy the course as much as I enjoyed making it. Check it out at https://learner.avid.fm/course/s/piranesi or at https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Subscribe to my newsletter! A free, low stress, monthly-quarterly email offering historical perspective on modern day issues, behind the scenes content on my latest podcast episodes, and historical lessons/takeaways from the world of history, psychology, and philosophy:https://www.reflectinghistory.com/newsletter.
Bob Elliott previously worked with Ray Dalio for 14 years, and was the head of his investment committee and was also involved in creating the largest hedge fund in the world with over 100 Billion Dollars! Bob recently co-founded the charity GiveWell and is now the co-founder and CEO of Unlimited, an investment start-up that uses propriety tech for alternative investments to give access to all. He joins Ryan to talk about what drove him to create such a company, the things he has learnt from his experience in the finance industry as well as what he sees for the future of tech and AI in how the economy operates and functions. KEY TAKEAWAYS Unlimited democratizes unique alternative investments that otherwise wouldn't be available to 99% of people. Unlimited isn't just democratizing access to the returns but bringing institutional equality and information to every investor. Utilising content platforms is a way to show proof that you have the expertise in the industry to help engage advisors and investors where they already are. Content creation in these places builds the credibility needed to convert them into clients. The thing that got Bob excited was not to create his own investment fund but how he could in fact bring unique investment opportunities to everyone, how he could create a start-up to make this possible. The problem with hedge funds and managers is they charge very high fees, if you can bring the fees down then it radically transforms the result for the investor. Using the right technology allows Unlimited to offer its services at a much lower cost than traditional avenues. The things we have learnt about the world in the past 40 years around finance are no longer going to work in the future and we need to be prepared for that. Advances in technology, including AI will help with company productivity which in turn helps employees, it won't be replacing everyone's jobs like some of the fear rhetoric out there. BEST MOMENTS “[We're] bringing that sort of institutional quality investment insight and making it freely available to everyone” “It nagged at me whether there was a way to bring those sophisticated asset management strategies and bring them to the everyday investor” “Weak growth and weak economic activity and falling stock prices isn't that bad if you can protect yourself from that by holding bonds in your portfolio” Do You Want The Closing Secrets That Helped Close Over $125 Million in New Business for Free?" Grab them HERE: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets Ryan Staley Founder and CEO Whale Boss 312-848-7443 ryan@whalesellingsystem.com www.ryanstaley.io EPISODE RESOURCES https://www.linkedin.com/in/ttoillebob/ ABOUT THE SHOW How do you grow like a VC-backed company without taking on investors? Do you want to create a lifestyle business, a performance business or an empire? How do you scale to an exit without losing your freedom?Join the host Ryan Staley every Monday and Wednesday for conversations with the brightest and best Founders, CEO and Entrepreneurs to crack the code on repeatable revenue growth, leadership, lifestyle freedom and mindset.This show has featured Startup and Billion Dollar Founders, Best Selling Authors, and the World's Top Sales and Marketing Experts like Terry Jones (Founder of Travelocity and Chairman of Kayak), Andrew Gazdecki (Founder of Micro Acquire), Harpal Sambhi (Founder of Magical with a previous exit to Linkedin) and many more. This is where Scaling and Sales are made simple in 25 minutes or less.Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecretsThis show was brought to you by Progressive Media
Discussing "On the Relation Between the Plastic Arts and Nature" (1807) and Part 6 of System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Is the goal of art to imitate nature? Only if that means showing the divine, ideal, dynamic aspect of the subject matter (and the artist)! Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Give more effectively via GiveWell.org (and let them know we sent you!). Get 15% off a newly cheaper annual membership at MasterClass.com/pel. Learn about the online Core Philosophy Texts course Mark is running this fall at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class.
Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it.What is this post?A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt:"What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?"I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program?That was a surprise.[1] It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how much it had helped them: maybe a dozen times over the last two years. From the emails alone, it seems to be the most important thing I've written.[2]So I'm sharing a lightly edited version on the Forum, in case it helps anyone else. Recovering from rejectionAfter I graduated from college, I took the most profitable job I could find, at a company in a cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good.I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn't nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs don't like extra meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”.Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process… and got rejected.Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I'm not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren't great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to do something else.(This is a story about a mistake. Do you see it?)I moved to San Diego and spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My local group met rarely and far away; I had no car, I was busy with family stuff, and I became less and less engaged with EA.Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran an EA-aligned foundation and lived nearby. I ended up doing part-time operations work for them — reading papers, emailing charities with questions, and other EA-flavored stuff.This boosted my confidence and led me to think harder about my career, though I kept running into limitations. For example, GiveDirectly's CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I'd totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn't a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work. There goes maybe the best opportunity I'll ever [...]--- First published: July 3rd, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDRBZNc2sBy5MC8Fw/recovering-from-rejection-my-piece-for-the-in-depth-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. Share feedback on this narration.
The Mexican Dirty War was fought from the 1960's into the 1980's between the Mexican government and geurrilla insurgents. Geurrilla warfare and government counter-insurgency would be a reality of life in many parts of Mexico for years-thousands would lose their lives, families and communities would be destroyed, and grief would linger for generations. This episode is Part I in a series on the Mexican Dirty War. It gives an overview of the conflict, analyzes the nature of geurrilla warfare in terms of it's impact on community and family, and discusses the way that history and collective memory impact the present. -Consider Supporting the Podcast!- Leave a rating or review on apple podcasts or spotify! Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory Check out my podcast series on Piranesi, Arcane, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart here: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/bonuscontent Try my audio course "Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart"-- Why do 'good' people support evil leaders? What allure does Fascism hold that enables it to garner popular support? And what lessons can history teach us about today? My audio course 'A Beginners Guide to Understanding & Resisting Fascism: Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart' explores these massive questions through the lens of Nazi Germany and the ordinary people who lived, loved, collaborated and even resisted during those times. Through exploring the past, I hope to unlock lessons that all learners on the course can apply to the present day - from why fascism attracts people to how it can be resisted. I'm donating 20% of the proceeds to Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund, and the course also comes with a 100% money back guarantee. Check it out at https://avid.fm/reflectinghistory or on my patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Try my audio course "Piranesi: Exploring the Infinite Halls of a Literary Masterpiece"-- This course is a deep analysis of Susanna Clark's literary masterpiece "Piranesi." Whether you are someone who is reading the novel for academic purposes, or you simply want to enjoy an incredible story for it's own sake, this audio course goes chapter by chapter into the plot, characters, and themes of the book...“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; it's kindness infinite.” Piranesi lives in an infinite house, with no long-term memory and only a loose sense of identity. As the secrets of the House deepen and the mystery of his life becomes more sinister, Piranesi must discover who he is and how this brings him closer to the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that the House contains. Touching on themes of memory, identity, mental health, knowledge, reason, experience, meaning, reflection, ideals, and more…Piranesi will be remembered as one of the great books of the 21st century. Hope you enjoy the course as much as I enjoyed making it. Check it out at https://learner.avid.fm/course/s/piranesi or at https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Subscribe to my newsletter! A free, low stress, monthly-quarterly email offering historical perspective on modern day issues, behind the scenes content on my latest podcast episodes, and historical lessons/takeaways from the world of history, psychology, and philosophy:https://www.reflectinghistory.com/newsletter.
I would like to thank Lant Pritchett, David Roodman and Matt Lerner for their invaluable comments.You can follow these links to comments from Lant Pritchett and David Roodman.A number of EA forum posts (1, 2) have pointed out that effective altruism has not been interested in education interventions, whether that is measured by funding from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy, or writing by 80,000 hours. Based on brief conversations with people who have explored education at EA organizations and reading GiveWell's report on the topic, I believe most of the reason for this comes down to two concerns about the existing evidence that drive very steep discounts to expected income effects of most interventions. The first of these is skepticism about the potential for years of schooling to drive income gains because the quasi-experimental evidence for these effects is not very robust. The second is the lack of RCT evidence linking specific interventions in low and middle income countries (LMICs) to income gains.I believe the first concern can be addressed by focusing on the evidence for the income gains from interventions that boost student achievement rather than the weaker evidence around interventions that increase years of schooling. The second concern can be addressed in the same way that GiveWell has addressed less-than-ideal evidence for income effects for their other interventions: looking broadly for evidence across the academic literature, and then applying a discount to the expected result based on the strength of the evidence. In this case that means including relevant studies outside of the LMIC context and those that examine country-level effects. I identify five separate lines of evidence that all find similar long-term income impacts of education interventions that boost test scores. None of these lines of evidence is strong on its own, with some suffering from weak evidence for causality, others from contexts different from those where the most cost-effective charities operate, and yet others from small sample sizes or the possibility of negative effects on non-program participants. However, by converging on similar estimates from a broader range of evidence than EA organizations have considered, the evidence becomes compelling. I will argue that the combined evidence for the income impacts of interventions that boost test scores is much stronger than the evidence GiveWell has used to value the income effects of fighting malaria, deworming, or making vaccines, vitamin A, and iodine more available. Even after applying very conservative discounts to expected effect sizes to account for the applicability of the evidence to potential funding opportunities, we find the best education interventions to be in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell's top charities.The argument proceeds as follows:I. There are five separate lines of academic literature all pointing to income gains that are surprisingly clustered around the average value of 19% per standard deviation (SD) increase in test scores. They come to these estimates using widely varying levels of analysis and techniques, and between them address all of the major alternative explanations. A. The most direct evidence for the likely impact of charities that [...]The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.--- First published: July 13th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8qXrou57tMGz8cWCL/are-education-interventions-as-cost-effective-as-the-top --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. Share feedback on this narration.
Manifund is launching a new regranting program! We will allocate ~$2 million over the next six months based on the recommendations of our regrantors. Grantees can apply for funding through our site; we're also looking for additional regrantors and donors to join.What is regranting?Regranting is a funding model where a donor delegates grantmaking budgets to different individuals known as “regrantors”. Regrantors are then empowered to make grant decisions based on the objectives of the original donor.This model was pioneered by the FTX Future Fund; in a 2022 retro they considered regranting to be very promising at finding new projects and people to fund. More recently, Will MacAskill cited regranting as one way to diversify EA funding.What is Manifund?Manifund is the charitable arm of Manifold Markets. Some of our past work:Impact certificates, with Astral Codex Ten and the OpenPhil AI Worldviews ContestForecasting tournaments, with Charity Entrepreneurship and Clearer ThinkingDonating prediction market winnings to charity, funded by the Future FundHow does regranting on Manifund work?Our website makes the process simple, transparent, and fast:A donor contributes money to Manifold for Charity, our registered 501c3 nonprofitThe donor then allocates the money between regrantors of their choice. They can increase budgets for regrantors doing a good job, or pick out new regrantors who share the donor's values.Regrantors choose which opportunities (eg existing charities, new projects, or individuals) to spend their budgets on, writing up an explanation for each grant made.We expect most regrants to start with a conversation between the recipient and the regrantor, and after that, for the process to take less than two weeks.Alternatively, people looking for funding can post their project on the Manifund site. Donors and regrantors can then decide whether to fund it, similar to Kickstarter.The Manifund team screens the grant to make sure it is legitimate, legal, and aligned with our mission. If so, we approve the grant, which sends money to the recipient's Manifund account.The recipient withdraws money from their Manifund account to be used for their project.Differences from the Future Fund's regranting programAnyone can donate to regrantors. Part of what inspired us to start this program is how hard it is to figure out where to give as a longtermist donor—there's no GiveWell, no ACE, just a mass of opaque, hard-to-evaluate research orgs. Manifund's regranting infrastructure lets individual donors outsource their giving decisions to people they trust, who may be more specialized and more qualified at grantmaking.All grant information is public. This includes the identity of the regrantor and grant recipient, the project description, the grant size, and the regrantor's writeup. We strongly believe in transparency as it allows for meaningful public feedback, accountability of decisions, and establishment of regrantor track records.Almost everything is done through our website. This lets us move faster, act transparently, set good defaults, and encourage discourse about the projects in comment sections.We recognize that not all grants are suited for publishing; for now, we recommend sensitive grants apply to other donors (such as LTFF, SFF, OpenPhil).We're starting with less money. The Future [...]--- First published: July 5th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RMXctNAksBgXgoszY/announcing-manifund-regrants Linkpost URL:https://manifund.org/rounds/regrants --- 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: Are education interventions as cost effective as the top health interventions? Five separate lines of evidence for the income effects of better education [Founders Pledge], published by Vadim Albinsky on July 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I would like to thank Lant Pritchett, David Roodman and Matt Lerner for their invaluable comments. You can follow these links to comments from Lant Pritchett and David Roodman. This post argues that if we look at a broad enough evidence base for the long term outcomes of education interventions we can conclude that the best ones are as cost effective as top GiveWell grants. I briefly present one such charity. A number of EA forum posts (1, 2) have pointed out that effective altruism has not been interested in education interventions, whether that is measured by funding from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy, or writing by 80,000 hours. Based on brief conversations with people who have explored education at EA organizations and reading GiveWell's report on the topic, I believe most of the reason for this comes down to two concerns about the existing evidence that drive very steep discounts to expected income effects of most interventions. The first of these is skepticism about the potential for years of schooling to drive income gains because the quasi-experimental evidence for these effects is not very robust. The second is the lack of RCT evidence linking specific interventions in low and middle income countries (LMICs) to income gains. I believe the first concern can be addressed by focusing on the evidence for the income gains from interventions that boost student achievement rather than the weaker evidence around interventions that increase years of schooling. The second concern can be addressed in the same way that GiveWell has addressed less-than-ideal evidence for income effects for their other interventions: looking broadly for evidence across the academic literature, and then applying a discount to the expected result based on the strength of the evidence. In this case that means including relevant studies outside of the LMIC context and those that examine country-level effects. I identify five separate lines of evidence that all find similar long-term income impacts of education interventions that boost test scores. None of these lines of evidence is strong on its own, with some suffering from weak evidence for causality, others from contexts different from those where the most cost-effective charities operate, and yet others from small sample sizes or the possibility of negative effects on non-program participants. However, by converging on similar estimates from a broader range of evidence than EA organizations have considered, the evidence becomes compelling. I will argue that the combined evidence for the income impacts of interventions that boost test scores is much stronger than the evidence GiveWell has used to value the income effects of fighting malaria, deworming, or making vaccines, vitamin A, and iodine more available. Even after applying very conservative discounts to expected effect sizes to account for the applicability of the evidence to potential funding opportunities, we find the best education interventions to be in the same range of cost-effectiveness as GiveWell's top charities.The argument proceeds as follows: I. There are five separate lines of academic literature all pointing to income gains that are surprisingly clustered around the average value of 19% per standard deviation (SD) increase in test scores. They come to these estimates using widely varying levels of analysis and techniques, and between them address all of the major alternative explanations. A. The most direct evidence for the likely impact of charities that boost learning comes from experimental and quasi-experimental studies...
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 we're funding clubfoot treatment through MiracleFeet, published by GiveWell on July 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Author: Miranda Kaplan, GiveWell Communications Associate For many people, GiveWell is practically synonymous with our short list of top charities. But the amount of money we've sent to other organizations, doing other important work, has been increasing. In 2021, we made or recommended about $190 million in grants to non-top charity programs, like water treatment and malnutrition treatment, and in 2022, we set up the All Grants Fund specifically so donors could contribute to programs in this category. Source: GiveWell, GiveWell Metrics Report - 2021 Annual Review, p. 9 We want to use this blog to give you more frequent, brief insights into these newer areas of our grantmaking before we publish our formal grant write-ups. Below we'll discuss, in light detail, a program that's well outside of our traditional wheelhouse, but that we think significantly improves children's lives - treatment for clubfoot with an organization called MiracleFeet. The grant Clubfoot is a congenital (i.e., present from birth) abnormality that causes one or both feet to twist inward and upward. Children born with clubfoot must walk on the sides or backs of their feet, which leads to pain, severely limited mobility, and, reportedly, social stigma. If not corrected, clubfoot is a lifelong condition.[1] In January 2023, we recommended a $5.2 million grant to MiracleFeet to expand its existing clubfoot treatment program in the Philippines and launch two new programs in Chad and Côte d'Ivoire.[2] In the countries where it works, MiracleFeet and its local NGO partners help health facilities diagnose and treat clubfoot, using a process called the Ponseti method. This generally requires placing the affected foot in a series of casts, performing a minor surgical procedure to improve the foot's flexibility, and bracing the foot during sleep for up to five years.[3] MiracleFeet and its partners provide supplies for casting and bracing, train government health care workers in the above procedures, build awareness of clubfoot, and help health systems collect data on treatment.[4] This makes it comparable to a "technical assistance" program: MiracleFeet doesn't perform clubfoot treatment itself; instead, along with its partners, it helps set health facilities up to successfully find and treat clubfoot cases themselves. The brace and custom shoes supplied by MiracleFeet for clubfoot treatment. Photograph courtesy of MiracleFeet. We were excited to recommend this grant because we think it will probably result in a lot more kids being treated for a serious, lifelong condition that nevertheless appears neglected. Clubfoot is debilitating but not life-threatening, and affects only about 1 in 800 babies born.[5] In resource-strapped countries, a relatively new and involved treatment like the Ponseti method may not be prioritized unless an NGO like MiracleFeet is there to advocate for and assist with it.[6] We estimate that MiracleFeet will support treatment of about 10,000 children with this grant, and that only about 10% of those children would get treated absent MiracleFeet,[7] though we don't feel very certain about this (more below, under "What we're still learning"). All in all, after adjustments, we think that this grant will lead to about 3,700 cases of clubfoot successfully treated that otherwise wouldn't have been, and that will result in lifelong mobility gains and pain relief for the children treated.[8] Why this grant is different MiracleFeet's program is different from our top charities for a few reasons:[9] The program is expensive compared with our top charities. The Ponseti method requires specialized equipment, training for medical staff, and a multi-step execution wit...
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 mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (David Thorstad), published by Global Priorities Institute on July 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Abstract Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation: focusing on cumulative risk rather than period risk; ignoring background risk; and neglecting population dynamics. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk: the importance of treating existential risk as an intergenerational coordination problem; a surprising dialectical flip in the relevance of background risk levels to the case for existential risk mitigation; renewed importance of population dynamics, including the dynamics of digital minds; and a novel form of the cluelessness challenge to longtermism. Introduction Suppose you are an altruist. You want to do as much good as possible with the resources available to you. What might you do? One option is to address pressing short-term challenges. For example, GiveWell (2021) estimates that $5,000 spent on bed nets could save a life from malaria today. Recently, a number of longtermists (Greaves and MacAskill 2021; MacAskill 2022b) have argued that you could do much more good by acting to mitigate existential risks: risks of existential catastrophes involving “the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development” (Bostrom 2013, p. 15). For example, you might work to regulate chemical and biological weapons, or to reduce the threat of nuclear conflict (Bostrom and Cirkovi ' c' 2011; MacAskill 2022b; Ord 2020). Many authors argue that efforts to mitigate existential risk have enormous value. For example, Nick Bostrom (2013) argues that even on the most conservative assumptions, reducing existential risk by just one-millionth of one percentage point would be as valuable as saving a hundred million lives today. Similarly, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill (2021) estimate that early efforts to detect potentially lethal asteroid impacts in the 1980s and 1990s had an expected cost of just fourteen cents per life saved. If this is right, then perhaps an altruist should focus on existential risk mitigation over short term improvements. There are many ways to push back here. Perhaps we might defend population-ethical assumptions such as neutrality (Naverson 1973; Frick 2017) that cut against the importance of creating happy people. Alternatively, perhaps we might introduce decision-theoretic assumptions such as risk aversion (Pettigrew 2022), ambiguity aversion (Buchak forthcoming) or anti-fanaticism (Monton 2019; Smith 2014) that tell against risky, ambiguous and low-probability gambles to prevent existential catastrophe. We might challenge assumptions about aggregation (Curran 2022; Heikkinen 2022), personal prerogatives (Unruh forthcoming), and rights used to build a deontic case for existential risk mitigation. We might discount the well-being of future people (Lloyd 2021; Mogensen 2022), or hold that pressing current duties, such as reparative duties (Cordelli 2016), take precedence over duties to promote far-future welfare. These strategies set themselves a difficult task if they accept the longtermist's framing on which existential risk mitigation is not simply better, but orders of magnitude better than competing short-termist interventions. Is it really so obvious ...
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: Recovering from Rejection (written for the In-Depth EA Program), published by Aaron Gertler on July 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it. What is this post? A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes. Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt: "What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?" I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program? That was a surprise. It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how much it had helped them: maybe a dozen times over the last two years. From the emails alone, it seems to be the most important thing I've written. So I'm sharing a lightly edited version on the Forum, in case it helps anyone else. Recovering from rejection Written in a bit of a rush. But I think that captures how it felt to be me in the throes of epistemic upheaval. After I graduated from college, I took the most profitable job I could find, at a company in a cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good. I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn't nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs don't like extra meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”. Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process. and got rejected. Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I'm not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren't great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to do something else. This is a story about a mistake. Do you see it? I moved to San Diego and spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My local group met rarely and far away; I had no car, I was busy with family stuff, and I became less and less engaged with EA. Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran an EA-aligned foundation and lived nearby. I ended up doing part-time operations work for them — reading papers, emailing charities with questions, and other EA-flavored stuff. This boosted my confidence and led me to think harder about my career, though I kept running into limitations. For example, GiveDirectly's CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I'd totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn't a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work. There goes maybe the best opportunity I'll ever get as a washed-up 24-year-old. Sigh. In early 2018, I got an email from someone at Open Philanthropy, inviting me to apply for a new research position. I was excited by the sudden opportunity and threw everything I had into the process. I made it to the last step. and got rejected. Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I'm still not qualified for an EA job. I'm not a kid with limitless potential anymore. I haven't learned anything important since college. I guess it's back to finding a coding bootcamp and trying to get a “real job”. Is the mistake standing out yet? This was a major setback; for a while, I was barely engaged in EA. But I did happen to see an 80,000 Hours page with a survey...
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...
TL;DR: We are excited to announce our Research Training Program. This online program is designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks. Apply here!Deadline for application: July 17, 2023The program dates are: October 2 - December 17, 2023So far, Charity Entrepreneurship has launched and run two successful training programs: a Charity Incubation Program and a Foundation Program. Now we are piloting a third - a Research Training Program, which will tackle a different problem. The Problem:People: Many individuals are eager to enter research careers, level up their current knowledge and skills from junior to senior, or simply make their existing skills more applicable to work within EA frameworks/organizations. At the same time, research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap. There is a scarcity of specific training opportunities for the niche skills required, such as intervention prioritization and cost-effectiveness analyses, which are hard to learn through traditional avenues. Ideas: A lack of capacity for exhaustive investigation means there is a multitude of potentially impactful intervention ideas that remain unexplored. There may be great ideas being missed, as with limited time, we will only get to the most obvious solutions that other people are likely to have thought of as well. Evaluation: Unlike the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector lacks clear metrics for assessing an organization's actual impact. External evaluations can help nonprofits evaluate and reorganize their own effectiveness and also allow funders to choose the highest impact opportunities available to them- potentially unlocking more funding (sometimes limited by lack of public external evaluation). There are some great organizations that carry out evaluations (e.g., GiveWell), but they are constrained by capacity and have limited scope; this results in several potentially worthwhile organizations remaining unassessed.Who Is This Program For?Motivated researchers who want to produce trusted research outputs to improve the prioritization and allocation decisions of effectiveness-minded organizationsEarly career individuals who are seeking to build their research toolkits and gain practical experience through real projectsExisting researchers in the broader Global Health and Well-being communities (global health, animal advocacy, mental health, health/biosecurity, etc.) who are interested in approaching research from an effectiveness-minded perspectiveWhat Does Being a Fellow Involve?Similar to our Charity Incubation Program, the program focuses on learning generalizable and specific research skills. It involves watching training videos, reading materials, and practicing by applying those skills to concrete mini-research projects. Participants learn by doing while we provide guidance and lots of feedback.You will also focus on applying skills, working on different stages of the research process, and producing final research reports that could be used to guide real decision-making.Frequent feedback on your projects from expert researchersRegular check-in calls with a mentor for troubleshooting, guidance on research, and your career Writing reports on selected topicsOpportunities to connect with established researchers and explore potential job opportunitiesAssistance with editing your cause area report for publication and disseminationWhat Are We Offering?11 weeks of online, full-time training with practical research assignments, expert mentoring, feedback, and published output "Shovel ready" research topics that are highly promising yet neglectedStipends to cover [...]--- First published: June 27th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AdouuTH7esiDQPExz/announcing-ce-s-new-research-training-program-apply-now --- 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: Announcing CE's new Research Training Program - Apply Now!, published by KarolinaSarek on June 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: We are excited to announce our Research Training Program. This online program is designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks. Apply here!Deadline for application: July 17, 2023The program dates are: October 2 - December 17, 2023 So far, Charity Entrepreneurship has launched and run two successful training programs: a Charity Incubation Program and a Foundation Program. Now we are piloting a third - a Research Training Program, which will tackle a different problem. The Problem: People: Many individuals are eager to enter research careers, level up their current knowledge and skills from junior to senior, or simply make their existing skills more applicable to work within EA frameworks/organizations. At the same time, research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap. There is a scarcity of specific training opportunities for the niche skills required, such as intervention prioritization and cost-effectiveness analyses, which are hard to learn through traditional avenues. Ideas: A lack of capacity for exhaustive investigation means there is a multitude of potentially impactful intervention ideas that remain unexplored. There may be great ideas being missed, as with limited time, we will only get to the most obvious solutions that other people are likely to have thought of as well. Evaluation: Unlike the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector lacks clear metrics for assessing an organization's actual impact. External evaluations can help nonprofits evaluate and reorganize their own effectiveness and also allow funders to choose the highest impact opportunities available to them- potentially unlocking more funding (sometimes limited by lack of public external evaluation). There are some great organizations that carry out evaluations (e.g., GiveWell), but they are constrained by capacity and have limited scope; this results in several potentially worthwhile organizations remaining unassessed. Who Is This Program For? Motivated researchers who want to produce trusted research outputs to improve the prioritization and allocation decisions of effectiveness-minded organizations Early career individuals who are seeking to build their research toolkits and gain practical experience through real projects Existing researchers in the broader Global Health and Well-being communities (global health, animal advocacy, mental health, health/biosecurity, etc.) who are interested in approaching research from an effectiveness-minded perspective What Does Being a Fellow Involve? Similar to our Charity Incubation Program, the first month focuses on learning generalizable and specific research skills. It involves watching training videos, reading materials, and practicing by applying those skills to concrete mini-research projects. Participants learn by doing while we provide guidance and lots of feedback. The second month is focused on applying skills, working on different stages of the research process, and producing final research reports that could be used to guide real decision-making. Frequent feedback on your projects from expert researchers Regular check-in calls with a mentor for troubleshooting, guidance on research, and your career Writing reports on selected topics Opportunities to connect with established researchers and explore potential job opportunities Assistance with editing your cause area report for publication and dissemination What Are We Offering? 11 weeks of online, full-time training with practical research assig...
"History is a dialogue between the past and the present." So how do we know anything about history? To what extent is our knowledge of history merely modern day historians projecting their own thoughts and interpretations on the past? How do we know that ancient peoples felt the same emotions we do? What role should emotion, feeling, and motivation play in the study of history? Archaelogist Guy Middleton's paper "I Will Follow You Into the Dark: Death and Emotion in a Mycenaean Royal Funeral" provides a reconstruction of an Ancient King's burial in order to give us insight into these complex questions. You can read the paper here: https://www.academia.edu/36792792/I_will_follow_you_into_the_dark_Death_and_emotion_in_a_Mycenaean_royal_funeral_ -Consider Supporting the Podcast!- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory Check out my podcast series on Piranesi, Arcane, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart here: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/bonuscontent Try my audio course "Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart"-- Why do 'good' people support evil leaders? What allure does Fascism hold that enables it to garner popular support? And what lessons can history teach us about today? My audio course 'A Beginners Guide to Understanding & Resisting Fascism: Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart' explores these massive questions through the lens of Nazi Germany and the ordinary people who lived, loved, collaborated and even resisted during those times. Through exploring the past, I hope to unlock lessons that all learners on the course can apply to the present day - from why fascism attracts people to how it can be resisted. I'm donating 20% of the proceeds to Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund, and the course also comes with a 100% money back guarantee. Check it out at https://avid.fm/reflectinghistory or on my patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Try my audio course "Piranesi: Exploring the Infinite Halls of a Literary Masterpiece"-- This course is a deep analysis of Susanna Clark's literary masterpiece "Piranesi." Whether you are someone who is reading the novel for academic purposes, or you simply want to enjoy an incredible story for it's own sake, this audio course goes chapter by chapter into the plot, characters, and themes of the book...“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; it's kindness infinite.” Piranesi lives in an infinite house, with no long-term memory and only a loose sense of identity. As the secrets of the House deepen and the mystery of his life becomes more sinister, Piranesi must discover who he is and how this brings him closer to the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that the House contains. Touching on themes of memory, identity, mental health, knowledge, reason, experience, meaning, reflection, ideals, and more…Piranesi will be remembered as one of the great books of the 21st century. Hope you enjoy the course as much as I enjoyed making it. Check it out at https://learner.avid.fm/course/s/piranesi or at https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Subscribe to my newsletter! A free, low stress, monthly-quarterly email offering historical perspective on modern day issues, behind the scenes content on my latest podcast episodes, and historical lessons/takeaways from the world of history, psychology, and philosophy: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/newsletter. Leave a rating or review on apple podcasts or spotify!
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: Rejection thread: stories and tips, published by Luisa Rodriguez on June 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Getting rejected from jobs can be crushing — but learning how to deal with rejection productively is an incredibly valuable skill. And hearing others' rejection stories can make us feel less alone and judged, and generally help us orient toward rejection in more productive ways. Let's use this thread to help each other with this. If you're up for it, comment and share: Rejection stories you might have Any lessons you've learned for coping with rejection What has helped in the past You can also message Lizka to share rejections that she will anonymize and add to the comments, or you can omit some details or just share tips without sharing the rejection stories themselves. Sharing rejections like this can be hard. Don't force yourself to do it if it stresses you out. And if you're commenting on this post, please remember to be kind. Luisa's experience — shared in the 80,000 Hours newsletter Rejection was the topic of this week's 80,000 Hours newsletter, where Luisa shared a lot about her experience and how she's learned to cope with it. (That prompted this thread!) She wrote the following: I've been rejected many, many times. In 2015, I applied to ten PhD programs and was rejected from nine. After doing a summer internship with GiveWell in 2016, I wasn't offered a full-time role. In 2017, I was rejected by J-PAL, IDinsight, and Founders Pledge (among others). Around the same time, I was so afraid of being rejected by Open Philanthropy, I dropped out of their hiring round. I now have what I consider a dream job at 80,000 Hours: I get to host a podcast about the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them. But before getting a job offer from 80,000 Hours in 2020, I got rejected by them for a role in 2018. That rejection hurt the most. I still remember compulsively checking my phone after my work trial to see if 80,000 Hours had made me an offer. And I still remember waking up at 5:00 AM, checking my email, and finding the kind and well-written — but devastating — rejection: "Unfortunately we don't think the role is the right fit right now." And I remember being so sad that I took a five-hour bus ride to stay with a friend so I wouldn't have to be alone. After a few days of wallowing, I re-read the rejection email and noticed a lot of specific feedback — and a promising path forward. "We're optimistic about your career in global prioritisation research and think you should stay in the area and build experience," they said. "We're not going anywhere, and could be a good career transition for you further down the line." I took their advice and accepted a job offer at Rethink Priorities, which also does global priorities research. And a year and a half later, 80,000 Hours invited me to apply for a job again. It's hard to say what would've happened had I not opened myself to rejection in 2018, but it seems possible I'd be in a pretty different place. While that rejection was really painful, the feedback I got was a huge help in moving my research career forward. I think there's an important lesson here. For me, rejection is one of the worst feelings. But whether you're like me, looking to work in global priorities research at small nonprofits, or interested to work in another potentially impactful path, getting rejected can come with unexpected benefits: When you get rejected from a role you thought was a good fit, you get more information about your strengths and weaknesses. It can indicate whether you need more career capital or should perhaps consider different types of roles or paths altogether. When applying for roles in an ecosystem you want to work in, you grow the number of people in that field who know you and who might reach out to you for futu...
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: Five Years of Rethink Priorities: What We've Learned, published by Peter Wildeford on June 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The post contains a reflection on our journey as co-founders of Rethink Priorities. We are Peter Wildeford and Marcus A. Davis. In 2017, we were at a crossroads. We had been working on creating new global health and development interventions, co-founding an organization that used text message reminders to encourage new parents in India to get their children vaccinated. However, we felt there was potentially more value in creating an organization that would help tackle important questions within cause and intervention prioritization. We were convinced that farmed and wild animal welfare were very important, but we didn't know which approaches to helping those animals would be impactful. Hits-based giving seemed like an important idea, but we were unsure how to empirically compare that type of approach to the mostly higher-certainty outcomes available from funding GiveWell's top charities. So, we chose to create a research organization. Our aim was to take the large amount of evidence base and strong approaches used to understand global health interventions and apply them to other neglected cause areas, such as animal welfare and reducing risks posed by unprecedented new technologies like AI. We wanted to identify neglected interventions and do the research needed to make them happen. Five years later, Rethink Priorities is now a research and implementation group that works with foundations and impact-focused non-profits to identify pressing opportunities to make the world better, figures out strategies for working on those problems, and does that work. Reflecting on everything the organization has accomplished and everything we want to happen in the next five years, we're proud of a lot of the work our team has done. For example, we went from being unsure if invertebrates were capable of suffering to researching the issue and establishing invertebrate welfare as a proposition worth taking seriously. Following through, we helped create some of the first groups in the effective animal advocacy space working on interventions targeting invertebrates. Our team did the deep philosophical work and the practical research needed to establish specific interventions, and we incubated groups to implement them. Building on this work, our ambitious Moral Weight Project improved our understanding of both capacity for welfare and intensity of valenced experiences across species, and the moral implications of those possible differences. By doing so, the Moral Weight Project laid the foundation for cross-animal species cost-effectiveness analyses that inform important decisions regarding how many resources grantmakers and organizations should tentatively allocate towards helping each of these species. We have also produced dozens of in-depth research pieces. Our global health and development team, alone, has produced 23 reports commissioned by Open Philanthropy that increased the scope of impactful interventions considered in their global health and development portfolio. This work has influenced decisions directing millions of dollars towards the most effective interventions. Our survey and data analysis team also worked closely with more than a dozen groups in EA including the Centre for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy, 80,000 Hours, and 1 Day Sooner to help them fine-tune their messaging, improve their advertising, and have better data analysis for their impact tracking. RP has provided 23 fellowships to aspiring researchers, building a robust talent pipeline. Many talented people have remained in successful careers at Rethink Priorities. RP staff have gone on to work at Open Philanthropy, Founders Pledge, the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,00...
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: We can all help solve funding constraints. What stops us?, published by Luke Freeman on June 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a personal reflection that follows my journey to effective altruism, my experiences within it, the concerns I've developed along the way and my hopes for addressing them. It culminates in my views on funding constraints — the role we can all play in solving them and a key question I have for you all: What stops us? (Please let me know in the comments). My journey While this starts with a reflection on my personal journey, I suspect it might feel familiar, it might strike a chord, at times it might rhyme with yours. I was about eight years old when I was first confronted with the tragic reality that an overwhelming number of children my age were suffering and dying from preventable diseases and unjust economic conditions. It broke my heart. I knew that I had done nothing to deserve my incredibly privileged position of being born healthy to a loving, stable, middle-income family in Australia (a country with one of the highest standards of living). Throughout my early years, I took many opportunities to do what I could to right this wrong. In school, that meant participating in fundraisers and advocacy. As a young professional, that meant living frugally but still giving a relatively meagre amount to help others. When I got my first stable job, I decided it was time to give 10% to help others... But when I calculated that that would be $5,000, this commitment began to feel like a pretty big deal. I wasn't going to back down, but I wanted to be more confident that it'd actually result in something good. I felt a responsibility to donate wisely. Some Googling quickly led me to discover Giving What We Can, GiveWell, and Julia Wise's blog Giving Gladly. From this first introduction to what would soon be known as the effective altruism (EA) community, I found the information I needed to help guide me, and the inspiration I needed to help me follow through. I also took several opportunities to pursue a more impact-oriented career, and even tried getting involved in politics. These attempts had varying success, but that was okay: I had one constant opportunity to help others by giving. Around this time, the EA community started expanding their lines of reasoning beyond effective giving advice to other areas like careers and advocacy. I was thrilled to see this. We all have an opportunity to use various resources to make a dent in the world's problems, and the same community that had made good progress on philanthropy seemed to me well-positioned to make progress on other fronts too. By 2016, effective altruism was well and truly “a thing” and I discovered that there was an EA group and conference near me. So, I ventured out to actually meet some of these "effective altruism" people in person. It hit me: I'd finally found "my people." These were people who actually cared enough to put their money where their mouths were, to use the best tools they could find to make the biggest possible difference, and to advocate for others to join them. None of these things were easy, but these people really owned the stakes and did the work. I admired the integrity and true altruism that I found. It motivated me to do better. How I saw effective altruism change As time went on, however, I noticed some changes that concerned me. The EA community's expanded focus started to feel less like a "yes, and" message — supporting both effective giving and pursuing other effective paths to impact — and more like a "no, instead" message: giving began to feel a bit passé within the community. Above: My response to the shift away from effective giving It started slow, but the change became overwhelming: 2015: 80,000 Hours started to advocate to focus on talent...
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: Question and Answer-based EA Communities, published by Joey on June 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The EA community has expanded to encompass a broad spectrum of interests, making its identity and definition a hotly debated topic. In my view, the community's current diversity could easily support multiple distinct communities, and if we were building a movement from scratch, it would likely look different from the current EA movement. Defining sub-communities within the EA movement can be approached in numerous ways. One proposed division that I believe captures much of what people appreciate about the EA community, is as follows: Question-based communities An Effective Giving Community An Impactful Career Community Answer-based communities An AI X-Risk Community An Effective Animal Advocacy Community Question-based communities An Effective Giving Community The concept of effective giving is where EA originated and remains a significant component of the community. Notable organizations such as GWWC, Effektiv Spenden, One for the World, Founders Pledge, and others, share a common mission and practical outcomes. The primary metric for this community is directing funds towards highly impactful areas. GiveWell, for instance, is perhaps the first and most recognized organization within this effective giving community outside the EA movement. This community benefits from its diversity and plurality, as many people could, for example, take the 10% pledge, and an even larger number could enhance their giving effectiveness using EA principles. Key concepts for this community could include determining the best charities to donate to, identifying the most effective charity evaluators, and deciding how much one should donate. This, in many ways, echoes the fundamentals of the EA 1.0 community. An Impactful Career Community In addition to funding, individuals can contribute to the world through their careers. Much like the effective giving community, there's the question of how to maximize the impact of one's career across multiple cause areas. Organizations such as Probably Good, High Impact Professionals, or Charity Entrepreneurship focus on this area (I intentionally exclude career-focused organizations with a narrow cause area focus, like 80,000 Hours or Animal Advocacy Careers). The objective of this community would be related to career changes and enhancing understanding of the most impactful career paths. Although this is a broadly inclusive community benefiting from cause plurality, it's likely less extensive than the effective giving community, as a smaller percentage of the population will prioritize impact when considering a career switch. Relevant topics for this community could include identifying high absorbency, impactful careers, assessing the most impactful paths for individuals with specific value or skill sets, and determining underrated careers. Answer-based communities, e.g., AI X-Risk Community The second community category that is a bit different from these others is anwer-based communities. I think there are two somewhat distinctive answer-based communities in EA: AI and animals. I think AI X-risk is a better example as it's more often mixed with the other above two communities and has significantly grown as a unique area within EA. This community consists of meta-organizations like Longview, Effective Giving and 80,000 Hours as well as the organizations working directly on the problem. It has begun to hold separate forums, conferences, and events. Its shared goal is to mitigate existential risks from AI, a specific objective that doesn't necessarily require members to embrace effective giving or prioritize impact in their careers. However, it does require specific values and epistemic assumptions, leading to this cause being prioritized over 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: Update on task force on reforms at EA organizations, published by Julia Wise on June 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is an update on the task force on reforms EA organizations might make.Currently the people on the task force are me (employee at Centre for Effective Altruism, board member at GiveWell), Ozzie Gooen (president at Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, board member at Rethink Charity, former board member at Rethink Priorities), and Sam Donald (strategy fellow at Open Philanthropy, former staff at COVID taskforce at UK Cabinet Office, former staff at McKinsey). We also have a discussion space with a larger group of about a dozen people (experts in related fields, EA organization staff, and community members). Currently the total time on this project is about 1 full-time equivalent, mostly from Julia. We realize a small group of people isn't going to reflect all the views or types of expertise useful for a project like this. Our goal is to draw on that expertise, often from people who don't have time to participate in frequent meetings about EA reforms, and to synthesize views and practical information from a range of sources. If you have suggestions for people it would be useful for us to get input from (including yourself!) we're happy to hear ideas at this form. So far the process has included: Reading and cataloging the problems identified and possible solutions proposed in posts about institutional reform that have been written up on the Forum. Speaking to ~25 people about which areas they see as most important for possible reforms in EA, and what best practices they think EA should be adapting from other fields. We're trying to speak with a mix of people with significant experience in EA institutions, and people with significant work history in non-EA institutions (nonprofits, finance, government, management consulting.) Researching existing whistleblowing platforms and laws Next steps: Better defining possible reforms based on the ideas collected and discussed. Getting more advice from people with professional experience in those areas. Understanding the pros and cons of a possible change Understanding what's legally feasible (e.g. given how different countries regulate nonprofit boards) As we get closer to specific recommendations, discussing them with relevant staff at organizations, to learn more about barriers and feasibility of the possible changes. Spelling out concrete recommendations to organizations. We expect this might be in the form of 5- to 15-page reports, with different reports for different organizations. A further public update about the project, though this likely won't include all the specifics of the recommendations made to organizations. Shapes that our recommendations might take: “Here's a change we think organization X should make.” (Likely to focus on Open Philanthropy and Effective Ventures.) “Here's a change we think any organization in situation Y should make — we think there are a dozen organizations in that situation.” (Likely to focus on basic governance practices for small organizations, like having a staff handbook if there isn't one.) “Here's a function/service that doesn't currently exist in EA; we think it's probably good for it to be created and funded.” After we have proposals clearly spelled out, we'll present them to the various organizations. These will be recommendations, not requirements. We hope that doing this as a general effort across EA can save effort for organizations, rather than each of them doing this sort of project independently. But we expect organizations will think through the recommendations critically and will get independent advice as needed. 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: Family Empowerment Media: track record, cost-effectiveness, and main uncertainties, published by Rethink Priorities on June 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Editorial note and disclaimer This report assesses the nonprofit Family Empowerment Media (FEM). The project was commissioned and supported by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. It was conducted in February 2023 over two weeks. This report attempts to estimate the cost-effectiveness of FEM, mainly relying on two existing cost-effectiveness analyses (from GiveWell and Founders Pledge). We were asked to look into the cost-effectiveness of the organization in an unbiased way, and we started the research without a prior for whether this organization would be cost-effective or not. In this report, we express cost-effectiveness as a function of the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers (like the original models mentioned above). We did not analyze the cost-effectiveness of any other family planning interventions, so we cannot and do not make any claims about how FEM compares to other family planning interventions. In addition to looking at the cost-effectiveness of FEM's program, we describe their track record to date, and try to determine the main uncertainties about the program and its (cost-)effectiveness. We relied on four expert interviews to attempt to answer some of the questions: We interviewed Anna Christina Thorsheim (Executive Director and cofounder of FEM), Andrew Martin (Senior Research Analyst at GiveWell), Rosie Bettle (Applied Researcher at Founders Pledge), and Dr. Mukhtar Muhammad (medically trained expert in social and behavior change communication with a historical focus on family planning programming). We have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report and are open to revising our views as more information becomes available. We would like to mention that Melanie Basnak previously worked at Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), the nonprofit organization that incubated FEM. Melanie did not overlap with Anna Christina Thorsheim during her time at CE and believes she oversaw this research in an unbiased manner. Executive summary In a randomized controlled trial in Burkina Faso from 2016-2018, a family planning mass media campaign led by the nonprofit Development Media International (DMI) led to a 5.9 percentage point (20%) increase in the modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR), leading the study authors to estimate a cost effectiveness of $7.70 per couple-year protection, albeit with uncertainty. The nonprofit Family Empowerment Media (FEM) ran a pilot family planning mass media campaign in Kano, Nigeria, and they observed a 6 percentage point (75%) increase in mCPR using less rigorous pre- and post-pilot data comparisons. GiveWell conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of DMI's intervention, finding it to be 1.1-5.4x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers, depending on the context. FEM altered the model to pertain to its pilot intervention in Kano, finding that their intervention was ~27x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers. Founders Pledge conducted a separate CEA, finding a cost-effectiveness of ~22x that of cash transfers, complete with a full (unpublished) report. We used the original models as a starting point to conduct our own cost-effectiveness estimation, tweaking certain values. In most cases, our adjustments would tend to increase these existing cost-effectiveness estimates, so we are confident that the cost-effectiveness of FEM's intervention beats that of cash transfers, and we believe that their cost-effectiveness might be higher than GiveWell's and Founders Pledge's estimates. However, we would like to see several remaining uncertainties resolved before we would feel confident putting a bound on cost-effectiveness, and we discuss these uncertainti...
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: Seeking important GH or IDEV working papers to evaluate, published by ryancbriggs on June 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I am a Global Health and Development editor at The Unjournal. In brief, our mission is to organize and fund public, journal-independent evaluation and rating of working papers. Right now we are focusing on quantitative work informing global priorities, and my area focuses on global health and international development. I am writing because I want people to send me working papers (pre-publication) that are decision-relevant to organizations working in global health and international development. Anyone can submit paper suggestions to rbriggs@uoguelph.ca. If you prefer, authors can submit work through our quick submission form HERE, and others can suggest work using this form. I think two especially useful cases are: Authors sending their own papers so that they can get high quality feedback before submission. This feedback will be public, but we are open to discussing delaying or embargoing feedback on a case-by-case basis. Grant-making staff in orgs like GiveWell or OpenPhil sending in papers that are relevant to their work so that they can read expert reviews before they use the results to inform decisions. The rest of this post explains in more detail: what The Unjournal is, our review process, why we're doing this, what we're looking for in a paper, and who can submit. The Unjournal The Unjournal (evaluations are here) is the brainchild of David Reinstein. Its mission is to offer clear, public pre-publication expert review of working papers. There are two motivations behind this project. The first is that researchers can do better work if they are able to more easily get high quality feedback on their work. The second is that the entire research ecosystem can benefit from these reviews being public. We pay expert reviewers for their time and we give awards for especially high quality research that we evaluate. The initial focus of The Unjournal is on quantitative work that informs global priorities, especially in economics, policy, and social science. I'm an editor for global health and international development. The process While our process runs similarly to an academic journal, we do not publish articles. Instead, we link to working papers and publish reviews (which we call 'evaluations') and author responses. The process starts with editors screening lists of working papers created from submissions or based on our knowledge of the research area. Once a working paper is selected, we contact the authors to ask if they would like to be involved in the process. Author involvement allows authors to converse with reviews and/or respond to reviews. It is not mandatory, but we prefer if authors are involved. We then aim to find two reviewers per paper. Reviewers are experts in the research area and are paid for their reviews. Reviewers have the choice to remain anonymous or not. They read the work and fill out standardized review forms. We then publish the reviews of the work on our webpage (see here) alongside brief comments from the editor and responses from the authors if they so wish. Why do this? If the journal system already exists, then why have something that looks kind of like a journal and offers sort of similar evaluations? We think The Unjournal adds value to the existing journal system in a number of important ways. For example: Unlike most academic journals, we have no bias against null results. This means that we're just as likely to review important work that “fails” to find an effect as important work that rejects the null. We're transparent. We publish reviews online so that anyone can see not only the working paper but also what expert reviewers thought of it. Most social science journals do not do this. We're experiment...
"Sometimes I burn barns." Things aren't always what they seem in Haruki Murakami's surreal and incredible short story "Barn Burning." What could be read on the surface as the tale of a love triangle and a little arson actually offers insight into the banality of evil, the ambiguity of responsibility, the power of memory, the nature of disappearance, and the reality of metaphor. Much like the narrator, after reading this story "...just now and then, in the depths of the night, I'll think about barns burning to the ground." Read the story here (not the translation I used, but it works in a pinch...You could also watch the movie "Burning" on Netflix-it is great):https://www.mrflamm.com/uploads/2/2/0/0/2200902/barnburningbyharukimurakami.pdf -Consider Supporting the Podcast!- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory Check out my podcast series on Piranesi, Arcane, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart here: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/bonuscontent Try my audio course "Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart"-- Why do 'good' people support evil leaders? What allure does Fascism hold that enables it to garner popular support? And what lessons can history teach us about today? My audio course 'A Beginners Guide to Understanding & Resisting Fascism: Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart' explores these massive questions through the lens of Nazi Germany and the ordinary people who lived, loved, collaborated and even resisted during those times. Through exploring the past, I hope to unlock lessons that all learners on the course can apply to the present day - from why fascism attracts people to how it can be resisted. I'm donating 20% of the proceeds to Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund, and the course also comes with a 100% money back guarantee. Check it out at https://avid.fm/reflectinghistory or on my patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Try my audio course "Piranesi: Exploring the Infinite Halls of a Literary Masterpiece"-- This course is a deep analysis of Susanna Clark's literary masterpiece "Piranesi." Whether you are someone who is reading the novel for academic purposes, or you simply want to enjoy an incredible story for it's own sake, this audio course goes chapter by chapter into the plot, characters, and themes of the book...“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; it's kindness infinite.” Piranesi lives in an infinite house, with no long-term memory and only a loose sense of identity. As the secrets of the House deepen and the mystery of his life becomes more sinister, Piranesi must discover who he is and how this brings him closer to the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that the House contains. Touching on themes of memory, identity, mental health, knowledge, reason, experience, meaning, reflection, ideals, and more…Piranesi will be remembered as one of the great books of the 21st century. Hope you enjoy the course as much as I enjoyed making it. Check it out at https://learner.avid.fm/course/s/piranesi or at https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Subscribe to my newsletter! A free, low stress, monthly-quarterly email offering historical perspective on modern day issues, behind the scenes content on my latest podcast episodes, and historical lessons/takeaways from the world of history, psychology, and philosophy: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/newsletter. Leave a rating or review on apple podcasts or spotify!
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In a dystopian future, humanity is faced with a choice: upload your consciousness into a machine and live forever in paradise, or stay behind and continue being human as we've come to know it. In his short story "Staying Behind," Ken Liu explores a possible future that feels all too real. In the process the story asks big questions about the nature of humanity: what does it mean to be human? What makes life meaningful? Is progress a virtue or vice? Read the story here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu_10_11/ -Consider Supporting the Podcast!- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory Check out my podcast series on Piranesi, Arcane, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart here: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/bonuscontent Try my audio course "Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart"-- Why do 'good' people support evil leaders? What allure does Fascism hold that enables it to garner popular support? And what lessons can history teach us about today? My audio course 'A Beginners Guide to Understanding & Resisting Fascism: Nazi Germany and the Battle for the Human Heart' explores these massive questions through the lens of Nazi Germany and the ordinary people who lived, loved, collaborated and even resisted during those times. Through exploring the past, I hope to unlock lessons that all learners on the course can apply to the present day - from why fascism attracts people to how it can be resisted. I'm donating 20% of the proceeds to Givewell's Maximum Impact Fund, and the course also comes with a 100% money back guarantee. Check it out at https://avid.fm/reflectinghistory or on my patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Try my audio course "Piranesi: Exploring the Infinite Halls of a Literary Masterpiece"-- This course is a deep analysis of Susanna Clark's literary masterpiece "Piranesi." Whether you are someone who is reading the novel for academic purposes, or you simply want to enjoy an incredible story for it's own sake, this audio course goes chapter by chapter into the plot, characters, and themes of the book...“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; it's kindness infinite.” Piranesi lives in an infinite house, with no long-term memory and only a loose sense of identity. As the secrets of the House deepen and the mystery of his life becomes more sinister, Piranesi must discover who he is and how this brings him closer to the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that the House contains. Touching on themes of memory, identity, mental health, knowledge, reason, experience, meaning, reflection, ideals, and more…Piranesi will be remembered as one of the great books of the 21st century. Hope you enjoy the course as much as I enjoyed making it. Check it out at https://learner.avid.fm/course/s/piranesi or at https://www.patreon.com/reflectinghistory. Subscribe to my newsletter! A free, low stress, monthly-quarterly email offering historical perspective on modern day issues, behind the scenes content on my latest podcast episodes, and historical lessons/takeaways from the world of history, psychology, and philosophy: https://www.reflectinghistory.com/newsletter. Leave a rating or review on apple podcasts or spotify!
Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with Holden Karnofsky about effective altruism, a movement flung into public scrutiny with the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange, FTX. They discuss EA's approach to charitable giving, the relationship between effective altruism and the moral philosophy of utilitarianism, and what reforms might be needed for the future of the movement. Note: In August 2022, Bankman-Fried's philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox's Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause. Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, Vox Guest: Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell; CEO of Open Philanthropy References: "Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it's facing a moral reckoning" by Sigal Samuel (Vox; Nov. 16, 2022) "The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (New Yorker; Aug. 8, 2022) "Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself" by Kelsey Piper (Vox; Nov. 16, 2022) "EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous" by Holden Karnofsky (Effective Altruism Forum; Sept. 2, 2022) "Defending One-Dimensional Ethics" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Feb. 15, 2022) "Future-proof ethics" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Feb. 2, 2022) "Bayesian mindset" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Dec. 21, 2021) "EA Structural Reform Ideas" by Carla Zoe Cremer (Nov. 12, 2022) "Democratising Risk: In Search of a Methodology to Study Existential Risk" by Carla Cremer and Luke Kemp (SSRN; Dec. 28, 2021) Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support The Gray Area by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by: Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This time around, we have a very special edition featuring Dr. Mark Plotkin and Brian C. Muraresku. Mark takes over my duties as host and interviews Brian for an episode of the Plants of the Gods podcast. You, my dear listeners, are hearing the audio before anyone else, so this is a Tim Ferriss Show exclusive. I've previously featured some of my favorite episodes from that podcast at tim.blog/plantsofthegods. These episodes cover a lot of fascinating ground.So, who is Dr. Mark Plotkin? Mark (@DocMarkPlotkin) is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which has partnered with ~80 tribes to map and improve management and protection of ~100 million acres of ancestral rainforests. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know. You can find my interview with Mark at tim.blog/markplotkin. And the guest today is Brian C. Muraresku. Who is Brian? Brian (@BrianMuraresku) graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name is Brian's debut book. In 2020, it became a New York Times bestseller, and Audible named it “Best of 2020” in the History category. His website is brianmuraresku.com. You can also find him on Instagram @brian_muraresku.This is a tightly packed 55-minute interview. Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of “tikkun olam”—repairing and improving the world as we go—and much, much more. Please enjoy! *This episode is brought to you by GiveWell.org ! For over ten years, GiveWell.org has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. GiveWell spends over 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations and only recommends a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed charities they've found. In total, more than 100,000 people have used GiveWell to donate as effectively as possible.This year, support the charities that save and improve lives most, with GiveWell. Any of my listeners who become new GiveWell donors will have their first donation matched up to $100 when you go to GiveWell.org and select “PODCAST” and “Tim Ferriss” at checkout.*This episode is also brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I've found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I've dug up from around the world.It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving, Athletic Greens all-in-one supplement, and Allform premium, modular furniture. Technologist, serial entrepreneur, world-class investor, self-experimenter, and all-around wild and crazy guy Kevin Rose (@KevinRose) rejoins me for another episode of The Random Show.*This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That's up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.*This episode is also brought to you by Allform! If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. They also launched a company called Allform that makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home.Allform arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa and receive 20% off all orders, check out Allform.com/Tim.*This episode is also brought to you by GiveWell.org! For over ten years, GiveWell.org has helped donors find the charities and projects that save and improve lives most per dollar. GiveWell spends more than 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations. Then, they direct funding to a few of the highest-impact, evidence-backed opportunities they've found. More than 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than one billion dollars, which includes $678,000 donated by you, my dear listeners.If you've never donated to GiveWell's recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to one hundred dollars before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org, and when you get to checkout, pick “PODCAST” and enter “Tim Ferriss Show.” Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell on the The Tim Ferriss Show to get your donation matched.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.