Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Summary
1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...
The US midterm elections have now occurred. There was extensive discussion about the OR-06 primary, where many EA’s tried to help Carrick Flynn win the nomination.
While I cannot find an online link, I was told that Flynn’s supporters were extremely confident of a general election win if he won the primary. It is not clear to me why this would be so. Metaculous bears this out, his odds of winning the general were barely below his odds of winning the primary:
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9700/carrick-flynn-to-win-or-6-democratic-primary/
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9701/carrick-flynn-to-win-or-6-general-election/
538’s model showed the GOP candidate ahead in the lead up to the election: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/2022/oregon/6/
Democrats somewhat outperformed their polling nationwide; OR-6’s returns aren’t yet in, but Andrea Salinas, the Democrat, currently holds a 2.4% lead. Given how narrow the race is, and how Flynn lost the primary despite his financial advantage, it’s likely that he would have lost the general election had Salinas decided not to run.
Protect our Future PAC spent unprecedented levels on Carrick's campaign, and they seem to have spent $1.75M on attack ads against Salinas, which maybe biggest 'within party' attack ad budget in a primary. Seems understandable this can be seen as a norm violation (attack ads are more sticky) and perhaps it's poor 'cooperation with other value systems'.
On the other hand, SBF donated to the House Majority PAC, which financed John Fetterman's campaign.