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...
We just launched a free, self-paced course: Worldbuilding Hopeful Futures with AI, created by Foresight Institute as part of our Existential Hope program.
The course is probably not breaking new conceptual ground for folks here who are already “red-pilled” on AI risks — but it might still be of interest for a few reasons:
It’s designed to broaden the base of people engaging with long-term AI trajectories, including governance, institutional design, and alignment concerns.
It uses worldbuilding as an accessible gateway for newcomers — especially those who aren’t in technical fields but still want to understand and shape AI’s future.
We’re inviting contributions from more experienced thinkers as well — to help seed more diverse, plausible, and strategically relevant futures that can guide better public conversations.
Guest lectures include:
Helen Toner (CSET, former OpenAI board) on frontier lab dynamics
Anton Korinek (Brookings) on economic impact of AI
Anthony Aguirre (FLI) on existential risk
Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data) on grounded progress
Glen Weyl (RadicalxChange) on plural governance
Ada Palmer (historian & sci-fi author) on long-range thinking
If you’re involved in outreach, education, or mentoring, this might be a good resource to share. And if you're curious about how we’re trying to translate these issues to a wider audience — or want to help build out more compelling positive-world scenarios — we’d love your input.
👉 https://www.udemy.com/course/worldbuilding-hopeful-futures-with-ai/
Would love feedback or questions — and happy to incorporate critiques into the next iteration.