I am writing this to reflect on my experience interning with the Fish Welfare Initiative, and to provide my thoughts on why more students looking to build EA experience should do something similar.  Back in October, I cold-emailed the Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) with my resume and a short cover letter expressing interest in an unpaid in-person internship in the summer of 2025. I figured I had a better chance of getting an internship by building my own door than competing with hundreds of others to squeeze through an existing door, and the opportunity to travel to India carried strong appeal. Haven, the Executive Director of FWI, set up a call with me that mostly consisted of him listing all the challenges of living in rural India — 110° F temperatures, electricity outages, lack of entertainment… When I didn’t seem deterred, he offered me an internship.  I stayed with FWI for one month. By rotating through the different teams, I completed a wide range of tasks:  * Made ~20 visits to fish farms * Wrote a recommendation on next steps for FWI’s stunning project * Conducted data analysis in Python on the efficacy of the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture’s corrective actions * Received training in water quality testing methods * Created charts in Tableau for a webinar presentation * Brainstormed and implemented office improvements  I wasn’t able to drive myself around in India, so I rode on the back of a coworker’s motorbike to commute. FWI provided me with my own bedroom in a company-owned flat. Sometimes Haven and I would cook together at the residence, talking for hours over a chopping board and our metal plates about war, family, or effective altruism. Other times I would eat at restaurants or street food booths with my Indian coworkers. Excluding flights, I spent less than $100 USD in total. I covered all costs, including international transportation, through the Summer in South Asia Fellowship, which provides funding for University of Michigan under

My new book, Altruismo racional, is now on presale. It is my attempt at presenting a compelling case for a particular strand of "classical EA"[1]: one that emphasizes caring deeply about global health and poverty, a rational approach to giving, the importance of cost-effectiveness, and the 🔸10% Pledge. In this post, I provide some context on my reasons for writing this book and what I hope to achieve. If “new EA-themed book in Spanish” was all you needed to know, feel free to skip to How you can help or preorder now. Why write a book Imagine you wake up one morning and discover the world has changed in a few peculiar ways. There has been no 10th anniversary edition of Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save—it was last edited more than a decade ago and has been out of print for years. Will MacAskill has not written Doing Good Better nor any of his pieces for The Guardian. And that’s not all. You ask around about EA and get mostly confused looks. Someone mentions a blog called “Codice Stellare Something” that later changed its name. You look it up but it's written in some foreign language that's hard to understand. “Toby who?” He seems to be associated with something called Geben Was Wir Können that you cannot pronounce, let alone remember. Welcome to Spain—or, I dare say, the Spanish-speaking world—where language friction[2] curbs the potential of most of the ways people first hear about EA. This is true for many other topics, of course. In Spain, people usually don't hear directly from those doing cutting-edge work in the English-speaking world, but rather from local explainers or commentators. Top non-fiction books like Sapiens or Antifragile are read, overwhelmingly, in translation. I have been close to some attempts to translate key EA-themed books into Spanish. The problem? Publishers are quite uninterested because only a handful of English-speaking public intellectuals have the global name recognition to guarantee sales. The Scout Mindset and What We Owe T

Summary * 🤰🏽 A randomized study in Kenya found that giving families a $1,000 GiveDirectly cash transfer immediately cut infant deaths by 48%. → * 🏥 Deaths dropped most for mothers living near physician-staffed health facilities and those who received cash in the weeks before they gave birth. → * 🩺 GiveDirectly is launching a new program to maximize these life-saving impacts, partnering with a Kenyan community health provider to get cash to more expectant mothers. → ---------------------------------------- In rural Kenya, giving poor families a one-time $1,000 transfer cut infant deaths nearly in half, one of the largest reductions ever recorded for a poverty program. With global aid budgets shrinking and funders under pressure to do more with less, the findings point to cash as a powerful, underused tool to reduce preventable deaths. Cash cut infant deaths by 48% The study, led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Oxford, tracked over 100,000 births and found that infant mortality fell by 48% in the years families received a one-time $1,000 transfer from GiveDirectly. It’s a striking result, reinforcing what decades of research have already shown: poverty itself is one of the biggest risk factors for a child’s survival. As the researchers note, “infant and child mortality appears highly sensitive to economic conditions.” Cash saved lives by helping new moms rest, eat, and deliver safely The biggest gains were among newborns: deaths within the first 30 days of a baby’s life fell by 63%, with drops in maternal and newborn causes of death accounting for more than half of the overall decline in infant deaths.  This drop was driven by a 45% increase in hospital deliveries and a 51% drop in work (often physically strenuous) during the third trimester and postpartum. Less work in late pregnancy coincided with fewer deaths from complications at birth.  When mothers have cash, they get care, proving that sometimes, the best way to save a child’s life is to simp