This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences.
Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts:
* Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they do
* NEST is an opinionated ideas-fi...
If you put a substantial amount of time into something, I think it’s worth considering whether there’s an easy way to summarize what you learned or repurpose your work for the EA Forum.
I find that repurposing existing work is quick to write up because I already know what I want to say. I recently wrote a summary of what I learned applying to policy schools, and I linked to the essays I used to apply. The process of writing this up took me about three hours, and I think the post would have saved me about five hours had I read it before applying. And I’m just one reader!
I get the sense that there are a lot of Forum readers who don’t vote or comment on posts, but still get value from what they read. Benefits from Forum posts are diffuse, and I think authors can find it difficult to internalize the full social value of their writing. I also expect that the residual value of certain posts (e.g., those with timeless, original, practical advice) may be underrated. I’ve been sending this post (and its previous iteration) to friends for years, and I’m pretty confident that next year it will still be my favorite piece of writing encouraging perseverance in pursuit of impactful work.
I find it handy to be able to send a bunch of people a link, rather than having the same conversation multiple times. For example:
Finally, it feels really cool to have a collection of your writing out in the world! EA is a pretty tight-knit professional community, and putting your writing out there can be a great way to build a reputation.[1]
I feel unabashedly proud when someone I meet asks “wait, are you the guy from the sportsbetting post?”