This is a small appreciation post for the deep and prompt community engagement from the 80k team after their announcement of their new strategic direction. No organization is under any obligation to respond to comments and criticisms about their strategy, and I've been impressed by the willingness of so many 80k staff members to engage in both debate and reassurance - at least 5 people from the organization have weighed in.  It has both helped me understand their decision better and made the organization feel more caring and kind then if they had just dropped the announcement without follow up. Although engaging to this degree has costs, I think this shows that if this kind of engagement is done well it might help both the reputation of the org and smooth over misunderstandings as well.

The World Happiness Report 2025 is out! I bang this drum a lot, but it does genuinely appear that once a country reaches the upper-middle income bracket, GDP doesn’t seem to matter much more. Also featuring is a chapter from the Happier Lives Institute, where they compare the cost-effectiveness of improving wellbeing across multiple charities. They find that the top charities (including Pure Earth and Tamaika) might be 100x as cost-effective as others, especially those in high-income countries.

Counting people is hard. Here are some readings I've come across recently on this, collected in one place for my own edification:  1. Oliver Kim's How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP? is full of sobering quotes. Here's one: "Hollowed out by years of state neglect, African statistical agencies are now often unable to conduct basic survey and sampling work... [e.g.] population figures [are] extrapolated from censuses that are decades-old". The GDP anecdotes are even more heartbreaking 2. Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on Earth? Quote: "Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics. To investigate, they used data on 307 dam projects in 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia and Poland, all completed between 1980 and 2010, taking the number of people reported as resettled in each case as the population in that area prior to displacement. They then cross-checked these numbers against five major population datasets that break down areas into a grid of squares and estimate the number of people living in each square to arrive at totals... According to their analysis, the most accurate estimates undercounted the real number of people by 53 per cent on average, while the worst was 84 per cent out." 3. David Nash's Nigeria's Missing 50 Million People argues that (quote) "Nigeria's official population (~220-230 million) may be significantly inflated and could be closer to 170-180 million (another article claims 120 million) likely driven by political and financial incentives for states". The comments are insightful too, e.g. David's comment that Uganda and Burkina Faso have the opposite problem ("in Burkina Faso the issue was that GDP per capita numbers were calculated from industrial output divided by po

Sharing https://earec.net, semantic search for the EA + rationality ecosystem. Not fully up to date, sadly (doesn't have the last month or so of content). The current version is basically a minimal viable product!  On the results page there is also an option to see EA Forum only results which allow you to sort by a weighted combination of karma and semantic similarity thanks to the API! Final feature to note is that there's an option to have gpt-4o-mini "manually" read through the summary of each article on the current screen of results, which will give better evaluations of relevance to some query (e.g. "sources I can use for a project on X") than semantic similarity alone.   Still kinda janky - as I said, minimal viable product right now. Enjoy and feedback is welcome! Thanks to @Nathan Young for commissioning this! 

Over the years I've written some posts that are relevant to this week's debate topic. I collected and summarized some of them below: "Disappointing Futures" Might Be As Important As Existential Risks The best possible future is much better than a "normal" future. Even if we avert extinction, we might still miss out on >99% of the potential of the future. Is Preventing Human Extinction Good? A list of reasons why a human-controlled future might be net positive or negative. Overall I expect it to be net positive. On Values Spreading Hard to summarize but this post basically talks about spreading good values as a way of positively influencing the far future, some reasons why it might be a top intervention, and some problems with it.