Epistemic status: A bit sad (I know that's not an epistemic status)
The best development Forum on the internet?
Three years ago a headline which went something like “FTX SBF EASUX” triggered my memory “oh that’s right, that effective altruism thing”.
A few years earlier I had read “Doing Good Better” in our Northern Ugandan hut, and was excited by how the ideas matched my experience seeing the BINGOs [1] on the ground here doing not-much-good at all. Soon after my wife dragged me to Cambridge for a year and I joined an EA group. I was drawn in to a beautiful crew of good, ernest people trying to do the best they could with their lives -[2] something I’d only seen before among a few people at church. I was most impressed by their veganism, practising what they preached.
After going back to Uganda I forgot about the whole EA thing. But 3 years later the FTX headline and a google search led me to the EA forum, which to my delight was the best place on the internet to discuss global health and development. My first foray was a not-very-good post about cash benchmarking (there are now much better ones), but the iron-sharpens-iron forum feedback soon whipped my writing into better shape.
I had found the best place to discuss Global Health and Development on the internet.
A steady decline
Since then I’ve had many a rewarding GHD chat in these hallowed forum halls. But the chats have been in a state of gradual decline. Although there remains the same proportion of GHD posts (about 1 in 20), engagement with these posts has dropped by over 60% and quality has dropped as well. Even the good posts don’t have the same vibrant discussion as of auld. These two graphs tell part of the story.
1. Engagement has plummeted. While the number of GHD posts has remained consistent, the number of comments per post is through the floor. A reduction from over 6 when I joined in December 2022 to only 2 today!
2. Post quality seems to have dropped too. Only 2 GHD posts curated in the last year is pretty dire. I don’t think quality it’s quite as dire as this indicates though, a few decent quality GHD related posts may have been missed ;).
Why?
Here are my best guesses why engagement might have dropped. I’m not at all sure though, and I might have missed the most important reasons.
- GHD discussion has moved to other places. Substack has exploded, Charity entrepreneurship slack is buzzing. There remains however no central high quality GHD hub.
- EA focus has shifted towards AI and longtermism
- Animal advocacy post number, quality and discussion vibrancy has greatly increased which might drown out GHD a little.
- Much GHD "thought" might have consolidated within Givewell, CoGi and AIM, so often doesn't need to reach the forum.
- Much GHD prioritisation has been "solved", so there's less to discuss? I don't buy this so much as there have been many large funding shifts within GHD, for example a big shift towards more speculative / systems change work. Plenty to discuss here!
- (Minor gripe) The admins aren’t obliged to, but I think they could do a little more to encourage GHD chat. They could maybe curate a few more posts. We were also about to have a great discussion about democracy in debate week, which wasn’t allowed ;).
- (Very uncertain) Perhaps Global welfare folks might feel less welcome here than in the past? I feel this a little myself. When I look at the front pages I behold a sea of AI and animal welfare, it doesn’t feel like my intellectual “home” any more.
Is this fine?
Perhaps the forum is more useful as an EA community/AI safety/Animal welfare forum and GHD chat has enough avenues elsewhere? Post-quality and engagement remains high on the forum. Priorities change and as favoured causes change, so perhaps the “front page of EA” should reflect that as well. I don't think it would be a disaster if GHD discussion dropped of completely. But....
Is this less fine?
I still don’t think there’s anywhere else on the internet where I can have a GHD discussion as good as I can here]. Besides that, there's other reasons we might want more GHD vibrancy.
1) A higher proportion of the EA community works on/ gives to GHD than is reflected on the forum. I would guess maybe 10%-20% of the EA community spends more of their money/time on GHD than anything else, which might be 2x-10x the GHD percent of forum content. Even with the shift in focus to other causes, GHD is still underrepresented here.
2) Truckloads of EA money still goes to GHD causes, so its probably good for the community to openly discuss the pros, cons, ins and outs of where that money goes. Without GHD chat on the forum, we'll lose some transparency and scrutiny on a good chunk of EA-related cash.
3) GHD remains a strong entry point into EA. We may shoot ourselves in the foot if we cut this public entry point off. With 80,000 hours, silicon valley and Oxford switching focus from GHD, a forum bereft of “lets-help-humans-now” might make EA even harder for some folks to understand and engage with. In the long run this might even mean less people working on animal welfare and AI safety as well.
How to Boost GHD discourse?
If we did aimto boost GHD discourse here, how could we do that? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer here which doesn’t just ask people to write more. My suggestions here are weak and I'd love some help...
1) A cohort of GHD folks (for example CE) decide to prioritise the forum more
2) Mods make sure there is a balanced amount of highlighted GHD curated content and debates
3) Those of us who remain put in a bigger effort to write and respond more.
Make no mistake the forum is still a great place, and will remain so even if GHD discussion does die a dignified slow death :).
There's actually quite a bit of GHD discussion that going on among people in EA orgs, but not on the forum. For instance, just yesterday, the Unjournal hosted a workshop on using wellbeing and how to do WELLBY vs DALY trade-offs, which had EG org staff and various academics in attendance (thanks to David for doing that!).
Based on that, and other conversations, I am considering writing some things in the area, so maybe your wish will come true, Nick...
To me wellbeing is the most exciting topic in EA GHD at the moment, because with some serious engagement from the kinds of players attending that workshop, it has the greatest potential to credibly upend the currently accepted wisdom in EA GHD. There are a lot of questions that you and others have been chipping away at for some time that many people assume are either solved or unlikely to yield field-altering results, and I think that impression is wrong!
I think the simple answer is that it's become less prioritised by the central orgs (the EA GHD fund is on indefinite hiatus, GHD is a diminishing part of CoGi's budget, 80k moved away from it almost entirely, Rethink seem to have shifted towards animal welfare, CEA seem to have an increasingly longtermist/AI focus, etc). This gives a top-down cultural impetus away from the subject, and just means there's less money in it.
It's also, for better or worse, as an evidence-oriented field, a subject that's harder to have amateur conversations about. I've been consistently supportive of it in my time here, but have had very little to contribute to conversations about what actually works, and felt that there was little value in contributing to any others.
I would love to see this reverse - I think EA is much richer for spanning multiple cause areas, and especially those which are well-evidenced. I don't have any good solutions though :\
I agree that the depth of the evidence conversations doesn't lend itself to amateur discussion on the forum and I also feel like there's not much I have to add to the GHD discussions here because of that.
Don't think it's fair to say it's not prioritised among the orgs. My understanding is that Coefficient Giving still gives huge amounts to GiveWell charities and grants.
Last I heard it was something like 10% of their GCR budget.
It's also basically impossible to apply for GHD funding. I recently decided to put my money where my mouth is and get involved in an early stage GHD project, but there's basically no EA-aligned funder who's willing to let you approach them.
SFF are exclusively longtermist, EA GHD as mentioned basically shut down, and Givewell and CoGi don't accept unsolicited applications. So as far as I can see if you think you have an idea in the GHD space and need funding for it you basically have to look outside the EA world (someone tell me if I missed something!)
Yep this is a legitimate concern, its hard for new projects that aren't being incubated through CE for sure. I think there are decent arguments for bigger funders not funding new initiatives though. I think its not the worst for friends/family/non EA funds to help starting new initiatives before official funders get involved. Also (I could be wrong) if you made a very strong argument here on the forum there might be people willing to help.
The Global Health Funding circle is another EA avenue for newer ventures :). Also Scott Alexander's yearly giveaway is open to new ideas and they fund a bunch of GHD stuff
Love this @Arepo and i largely agree. I think there's plenty of uncertainty and space for amateur- ish discussions about GHD stuff. Yes even taking about specific interventions it helps to have specific knowledge but mostly it's figure-out-able for a switched on person. i would say a lot of Technical AI discussion is harder- i struggle to understand some of the threads on lesswrong!
One other thing that feels missing from these comments, is that a more mature field has a bunch of other interesting discussion points. If all the philosophical questions in EA GHD were one day solved, we could still have invigorating debates about how to develop and manage interventions, about who the payer should be, etc. etc.
So I’m not sure this is all just a dearth of topics to discuss—perhaps the nuance is that this forum tends to like those more philosophical or intellectual discussions and those aren’t generally the kinds of debates most GHD practitioners I know are having?
Thanks for raising this. I agree strongly with your sentiment.
Sharing some of my quick opinions on the topic: The forum is like any other marketplace, requiring both sufficient demand and supply to drive meaningful engagement and discourse. To drive interest, there need to be incentives on both sides. Here I consider demand to be those reading and engaging with material, and supply to be those seeding new ideas and pushing the discourse forward.
My sense is that GHD has seen systematic shifts over the past couple of years from both the supply and demand side, as the data-driven or evidence-backed component of global health and development has become more mainstream. On the supply side, many organizations that would formerly be considered EA global health and development organizations are becoming more mainstream. Also from a supply side perspective, my anecdotal experience is that a lot of engagement is associated with building eminence, often related to seeking funds or finding jobs, and both of these purposes have found newer, more targeted spaces elsewhere. Seeing the plethora of organizations supporting impact-focused job searches and new, more professionalized funding mechanisms.
Finally, the level of philosophical discourse around GHD has shifted in the past couple of years, especially as the philanthropic sector has seen massive changes, combined with a relative increase in marginal EA funding being directed towards other cause priority areas, particularly AI safety.
All this being said, I personally hope to engage more with GHD on this forum, both on the demand and supply side. I find it an incredibly intellectually stimulating area with values-aligned individuals, and I hope that this kind of seeding, as you've suggested, can drive more engagement with global health and development within EA.
While I don't work in GHD, I still enjoy reading GHD content on the Forum and on Substack. I agree that interesting questions in GHD are far from solved, but I wonder if a lot of the low-hanging intellectual fruit has been picked (your number 5)? I wasn't around in early GiveWell days but I imagine that would have been an amazing time to be thinking about GHD and coming up with lots of new approaches and ideas. I haven't found GiveWell's research to be that surprising or interesting lately for instance (vibes-based, I don't engage that closely with them anymore).
I would be keen to hear more from CE charities about what things they are learning and what questions they are facing!
Re your solution #2, I think I probably wouldn't want the Forum team to show 'favouritism', but the decline of GHD curated posts is interesting, and maybe that should change.
That all makes sense. You are right that all of these have been discussed before on one level, but there's so so much to get into I still feel we've barely scratched the surface of many of these
- The value of orgs that do one thing vs. those that do many (GiveWell funds both somewhat evenly)
- How AI will transform of GHD
- Growth/Development strategies vs. Randomista stuff
- Wellbeing vs. other measures
- "Hits based approach" vs. more solid research
- Support of Govt. vs. Vertical solutions
Yeah I agree I'd love to hear more from CE charities, they are surprisingly silent on the forum! Re solution 2, have changed the post on that one
Maybe its up to people like me to convince people like you that its still interesting, will keep that it mind :)
It does seem like some of the "serious" GHD discussion is moving off the forum, e.g. later today I'm attending this online workshop (more info) that touches on your 3rd bullet. This seems part of the wider trend of decision-influencing discussion becoming internalised due to the professionalisation of EA GHD, which probably absorbed some of the best early commenters into these orgs. Holden's 2014 writeup on the challenges of transparency seems loosely related if not exactly the same.
Maybe a fortnightly poll on each of those X vs Y topics? Or more cross-posting from GHD substacks like yours, Hannah Ritchie's, David Nash's, Lant Pritchett's etc.
This was an extremely interesting post to me, and I hope it gets more comments, partly because I'm interested and partly because of the topic at hand. 😅 I think I probably originally found out about EA through GHD, and this all seems very important. I wonder if a GHD fellowship could help. Also, a group I'm part of called Effective Mental Health runs a Global Mental Health fellowship and runs some other programming in the space, and if you have any thoughts of how we could encourage EA Forum engagement through these, please do reach out or post here. We'd love to help build engagement, it seems very important and I don't know if anyone is taking it upon themself.
This seems to rhyme with a concern I've had when planning programmes for EAGxAustralasia - what talks and workshops make sense under the "global health and development" banner?
A very naive categorisation of GHD content that's easy to put on at EAGx:
It's quite difficult to figure out what content would be exciting to EAGx attendees, and actually pushes their thinking beyond "here is information about another type of intervention".
From my position, it seems like other cause areas are grappling with bigger, more fundamental and less "solved" questions that make it easier to find relevant content for an EAGx audience.
But, one thing I'm taking from this post - there are still GHD topics to grapple with (systems change vs direct delivery, cash benchmarking, other career paths, funding transparency / scrutiny). Going to take inspo from this when planning our 2026 conference programme.
What a great article! I'm glad to see you putting Claude skills to use :-)
Nice one. Interestingly I tried to pull the forum data through Claude online and apparently it couldn't access the API. But on Claude code smashed it out no problem, so timing was good with the tutorial a day or two before haha.
Curious -- for people reading this, my sense is that Claude Code can currently achieve certain things that other instances of Claude struggles to do