EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Open Philanthropy (OP) is the largest grantmaker who is moving money to the

things I think are most valuable, including (disclosure!)

my work at the NAO. There's

been a lot of discussion in the effective altruism community about

where this leaves smaller donors, and where they might have a

comparative

advantage. For example:

announced that due to changes in Good

Ventures' (GV) strategy that they'd be recommending less funding

in several areas. This seems

to have included work on wild animal welfare, invertebrate

welfare, digital minds, and gene editing, though I'm not aware of a

public list. If you trust OP's prioritization more than GV's and/or

you think these are valuable neglected areas, you could help make up

for this shortfall.

other grantees. Many individuals are [...]

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First published:

November 6th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oFcLqTETnC8rajxeg/advisors-for-smaller-major-donors

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: The shortest version of this argument is very simple: your expectations for an organization should be higher where their budget and staff size are higher. In other words, we should have different expectations for a 20-person organization with a $1.5 million budget than a 2-person $150,000 budget organization.

While this seems pretty clear in the abstract, I find that people tend not to update nearly enough on this when they should. For example, I often see people comparing the total research output of two organizations, yet when I ask about it, they will not know the yearly budget or staff size of either. This is a big problem. As a movement, we want to support efficient and effective organizations, not just organizations that are the biggest, most salient or currently the highest funded.

Budgets and staff

When considering how impressive an organization's output is, one [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Budgets and staff

(02:47) Comparative size

(04:46) Why this matters

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First published:

November 6th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5wXGLbqQ3cchjogB5/expectations-scale-with-scale-we-should-be-more-scope

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hi! We're researchers from Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), a 501(c)(3) non-profit that uses evidence and reason to help people help animals. We conduct charity evaluations to identify the organizations that will likely make the most significant difference for animals. We publish a list of recommended charities to promote organizations that can do the most good for animals with additional donations. We are transparent about our evaluation methods and processes and actively improve them each year.

On November 12, we will be releasing our 2024 charity recommendations and on November 19, we will be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Event on the FAST Forum between 8-10am PT.

The AMA is your chance to ask our Researchers about our new charity recommendations and the process behind our selections. We will prioritize responding to questions about our recommendations, but feel free to ask us (almost) anything.

Our team answering questions [...]

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6SMbErZjZWNCpEFmu/animal-charity-evaluators-is-hosting-a-live-ama

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Joseph Rotblat was born in Warsaw on November 4, 1908.

He is one of the advisors I’d like to have on my shoulder, so on his birthday, I want to share a bit about his life and reflect on it.

As a brief overview, Rotblat:

• Was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on moral grounds
• Founded and led the Pugwash Conferences, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995
• Was the youngest of the 11 signatories of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto
• Spent decades advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament

(I'm provisionally viewing November 4th as “Rotblat Day”, but if someone wants to organize a different date and event, I’d probably be happy to join.)

Photo of Rotblat in his office. Source.

As with a similar post I wrote about Benjamin Lay, I want to flag that I’m not an expert; these notes come [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Rotblat's life

(10:36) Some reflections

(10:44) Why was Rotblat the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project (on moral grounds)?

(13:49) Quotes from Rotblat

The original text contained 15 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 5th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MRkqBrokab8iqKnuH/remembering-joseph-rotblat-born-on-this-day-in-1908

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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In June this year, Good Ventures announced that it would stop supporting certain sub-causes, and not expand into new cause areas by default. Neither Good Ventures nor Open Philanthropy included a public list of the sub-causes or organisations they were no longer supporting.

Both Good Ventures, and Alexander Berger, on behalf of Open Philanthropy, expressed (as they have before) that they would like to see more diversity of funding across the cause areas that they support.

From the Good Ventures blog: “Our hope is that other donors will be in a position to take on some of these opportunities and that, over the longer term, this will lead to healthier and more resilient ecosystems with more diversified bases of funding.”

It's been a few months now. Wild Animal Initiative have shared the effect that the funding shift had on them, and later announced that their funding gap was being [...]

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AFMRWvCCgRyys9JXP/has-your-organisation-lost-funding-due-to-the-good-ventures

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: I think funding diversification is an easy thing to pitch as positive, but it comes with real tradeoffs to growth and time spent fundraising. In this post, I go into why I think these trades are not obvious but still end up thinking they are worth making. Mainly because I think it's good practice not to aim for the maximum amount of money you can get, but instead the sweet spot of where you produce the most impact per dollar.

Funding Diversification is Good

I think the first but pretty uncontroversial point is that both funders and charities prefer having funding diversification for practical and psychological reasons. I suspect other posts have and will continue to cover this point well, so I will not really dive into it deeper here.

Funding Diversification has Heavy Tradeoffs

Broadly, I think aiming for more diversification is virtually never free [...]

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZAMZh3D48NLsjJuJm/funding-diversification-is-a-tradeoff

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: I think funding diversification is an easy thing to pitch as positive, but it comes with real tradeoffs to growth and time spent fundraising. In this post, I go into why I think these trades are not obvious but still end up thinking they are worth making. Mainly because I think it's good practice not to aim for the maximum amount of money you can get, but instead the sweet spot of where you produce the most impact per dollar.

Funding Diversification is Good

I think the first but pretty uncontroversial point is that both funders and charities prefer having funding diversification for practical and psychological reasons. I suspect other posts have and will continue to cover this point well, so I will not really dive into it deeper here.

Funding Diversification has Heavy Tradeoffs

Broadly, I think aiming for more diversification is virtually never free [...]

---

First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZAMZh3D48NLsjJuJm/funding-diversification-is-a-tradeoff

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team is sharing research agendas that provide overviews of some key research areas as well as projects in those areas that we would be keen to pursue. This is the first of three such agendas to be posted in November 2024.

If we want to do the most good per dollar, then we need to measure the value of various outcomes on a common scale. In some contexts, however, those outcomes include benefits to members of different species, forcing a question about the relative value of human and nonhuman welfare. Unsurprisingly, any answer involves taking stances on a host of controversial claims about which there's deep uncertainty.

As Holden Karnofksy once observed, this uncertainty matters:

Some people think that animals such as chickens have essentially no moral significance compared to that of humans; others think that they should be considered comparably important, or at [...]

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Outline:

(01:56) Differences in Capacity for Welfare

(05:29) Can we dodge the question?

(07:56) The challenge of estimating chickens’ capacity for welfare

(08:38) Selecting a theory of welfare

(11:53) Identifying what would count as evidence of variation

(13:12) Finding evidence of variation

(14:15) Producing overall estimates

(14:59) How important is each challenge?

(16:14) The challenge of assessing welfare

(17:11) The need for a cardinal scale

(20:01) Adapting existing welfare assessment frameworks

(22:59) How important is it to refine our welfare assessment methods?

(23:58) Questioning our two starting assumptions

(25:03) Uncertainty about EV maximization

(26:54) Uncertainty about simple aggregation

(29:38) The significance of uncertainty about our two starting options

(31:07) Project proposals

(31:16) Beyond hedonism

(32:28) Stated and revealed preferences

(34:44) Scalar Proxies

(36:05) Pain Category Aggregation

(37:27) Animal Welfare in Benefit-Cost Analysis

(38:42) Welfare Propensities

(40:01) Alternatives to Welfare Ranges

(41:12) States Worse than Death?

(42:23) Moral Weights Under Uncertainty

(43:10) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

November 4th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bNDPXRELHZjJoHhMs/valuing-impacts-across-species-a-research-agenda

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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This is a link post.

Tuberculosis still kills over 1.2 million people a year. In a two-part essay by Kamal Nahas for Asimov Press, we explore why and how to change that.

In the 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes a sanatorium patient named Anton Ferge as he undergoes a painful tuberculosis (TB) treatment. “I lie there with my face covered, so I can’t see anything,” Anton says. “I feel myself being pinched and squeezed, that is the flesh they are laying back and pegging down.”

Ferge's harrowing treatment is a lung-flattening artificial pneumothorax, an outmoded practice involving the injection of nitrogen gas into the chest cavity to compress a TB-ridden lung. The goal of the procedure is to crush cavities hollowed out by the bacteria. And although Mann includes some literary flourishes, he accurately captures the crudeness of the procedure: “Then he begins, with a [...]

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Outline:

(03:16) Making a Vaccine with Ox Bile and Potato Essence

(11:12) Antibiotics From the Ground Up

(18:35) A Rival Vaccine

(23:08) OK, Computer. Find Antibiotics

(30:45) Can We Lay This Scourge to Rest?

The original text contained 11 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

November 3rd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4q4xLFs7Ha8GSYmWv/on-ending-tb

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Tl;dr

doebem's latest research identifies the distribution of portable micromembrane water filters as a top donation opportunity in Brazil. This solution demonstrates a cost of USD 306 per DALY and USD 12.5k per life saved, making it 5-10 times more cost-effective than other evaluated options and achieving 40% of the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities.

Context

Over the past few months, we have shared significant progress from doebem on this forum, aiming to encourage effective giving in Brazil and maximize the social impact of donations (see: doebem's new phase presentation; cause prioritization study; research methodology).

Today, we're thrilled to share with the Effective Altruism community our first recommendation in this new institutional phase, which also marks the full implementation of our research process.

After prioritizing and conducting an in-depth study on the issue of access to clean water — examining it through the lenses of importance, neglectedness, and tractability [...]

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Outline:

(00:36) Context

(01:38) About the Donation Opportunity

(03:17) About the Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

(04:12) Conclusion

(05:14) Ongoing Research and Opportunities

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First published:

November 1st, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a4pT2Q8gxb4WP6QTm/a-new-top-donation-opportunity-in-brazil-save-a-life-for-usd

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.