We usually act as though the future matters less than today. Many institutions apply "discount rates" to the future as a way to formalize that view. But strange things happen if we assume even a 1% annual discount rate for social benefits. This would mean that saving a life this year is as valuable as saving roughly two lives in the year 2100 — and is also as valuable as saving more than one million lives in the year 3400.
This paper examines the arguments for applying social discount rates, argues that none of them work, and calls for treating the future as though it matters as much as the present. (35 mins.)
Political institutions generally operate on 2-to-4-year timescales, which aren’t long enough to address global issues (as the issue of climate change has shown). This talk analyzes sources of political short-termism and describes institutional reforms to align government incentives with the interests of all generations. (Video - 30 mins.)
A researcher from the Global Priorities Institute explains how investing resources, instead of spending them immediately, can allow us to do much more good. (Podcast - 2.5 hours)
TL;DR
NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.
We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership wi...
TL;DR
* The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund with a new full-time team.
* The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital...
The current Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) fund managers and I have decided to step back from our work on the LTFF. Because we believe LTFF donors trusted the fund managers to ensure that the funds would be used in line with the purposes of their donation, we've decided the right move is to close the fund.
While LTFF is closing, note that EA Funds has launched a new fund...