One underrated field-building idea for EA is to have an intro fellowship specifically for congressional staffers in DC that don't have an EA background.
My hunch is these people are unusually likely to hold levers of bureaucratic power further in their careers. With EA being in the news more often, it also serves EA well to have staffer's first experience with EA ideas come from a welcoming, non-partisan perspective.
I'm not a student, but I'm surprised UC Law SF(formerly UC Hastings) doesn't have an EA club or AI safety club. Seems like an interesting spot for people interested in AI governance work that could be well-served by UC Berkeley or Stanford pitching people to join their club meetings.
do you have any connections there? I'm happy to help if you know anyone who wants to lead it. I've helped start up multiple clubs and think it's actually not so hard if there are one or two people who actually care
Unfortunately, I don't. Will keep an eye out though.
I believe there is immense untapped potential in narrative change through the applications of "short-form video marketing tactics" to the Animal Welfare movement.
What do I mean by "short form video marketing tactics".
Specifically I mean clipping campaigns the likes of which have helped launched the career of some of the 2020's most popular musicians including Sombr, Alex Warren, Geese, and Oklou.
Clipping campaigns essentially pay people on a per view basis for tiktok, instagram reel, and youtube shorts. Anyone can create a clipping campaign and usually they use a combination of Adobe After Effects and other video editing software to create a "Narrative Campaign" to bring the creator into the zeitgeist. Plenty of twitch streamers do this too including IShowSpeed who grew to becoming the most watched streamer of all time and performing at the World cup. The beauty of this marketing strategy is that it creates the feeling of "tons of people are posting about this person and its infiltrating my foryoupage so it must be a big deal."
I believe the same could be done for clips from animal rights documentaries that highlight the atrocities of factory farming conditions. One example is this video with over 9k upvotes on r/moralityscaling showing a U.S. Factory Farm: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoralityScaling/comments/1w22qlo/morality_of_the_us_factory_farm_practices/
The beauty of a clipping campaign is you're essentially creating an incentive for video editors from around the world to find the best ways to bring the content to the forefront of people's fyp. I understand awareness is not the epitome of change, but I do wonder if people would care as much about Israel and Gaza if there was no short-form photo or video of the situation.
I think short-form video has heavily contributed to people on the right and left shifting their political positions on the issue.
Do High Impact Charity founders have an equivalent to Hampton. Hampton is a private members community for founders doing $3mil+ in revenue. Every month they meet in a group of 8 with a facilitator and go over there biggest bottlenecks in the business and what can be helpful to each other. This seems like it could be helpful for founders/Executive Directors of high-impact charities after being incubated by AIM or other ways.
I'm curious how the Effective Altruism community addresses fiscal substitution in the "global health and development" cause area? Do any of the top GiveWell recommended charities find ways to track how their impact applies to government spending in their host countries?
I found this via Tyler Cowen's Marginalrevolution.com -
"While donor-driven programs undoubtedly saved millions of lives, they also created unintended distortions in national health priorities.
Many governments in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia actually scaled back domestic health investments, as donor program filled key gaps in HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and infectious disease control.
In some cases, domestic health budgets shrank in real terms, even as external funding increased. This phenomenon, often referred to as “fiscal substitution,” led to national health systems that were heavily donor-dependent, externally managed, and vulnerable to funding shocks.
Notably, this reliance emerged despite countries pledged to allocate at least 15% of their national budgets to health.
More than two decades later, only a handful has met this target." (this is from Redefining Global Health in the 21st Century by Michael John Alastair Reid and Eric Paul Goosby).
GiveWell accounts for government spending through quantitative adjustments for 'fungibility' and 'leverage', estimating both the probability that their funding alters government budgets and the comparative value of those displaced funds. These adjustments are explicitly included in their cost-effectiveness models. You can go through their spreadsheets and check out their inputs and assumptions.
What about new charities?
Charities incubated by the main EA global health incubator, Ambitious Impact (AIM), view government adoption not just as a bonus, but as their primary strategy for massive, cost-effective scaling.
Unlike established organisations that often run parallel to public systems, AIM’s incubation model heavily favours non-profits designed to systematically plug 'execution gaps' in public health. Their goal is to build, prove, and hand over the playbook to state and national governments.
Lafiya might be a good example. They distribute modern contraceptives in northern Nigeria through a network of community health workers called "Lafiya Sisters". They do not view themselves as a permanent, independent health provider; their explicitly stated scaling strategy is to "work with governments to execute, pay for, and take ownership of the model".
Disclaimer: I knew this info but was feeling lazy so got AI to write it up.
Thank you for taking the time to reply! I'm curious what your prompt was? Before posting here I asked claude the same question and got something that was more confusing to me than your answer.
I can't remember, to be honest, nothing fancy...