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It seems that part of the reason communism is so widely discredited is the clear contrast between neighboring countries that pursued more free-market policies. This makes me wonder— practicality aside, what would happen if effective altruists concentrated all their global health and development efforts into a single country, using similar neighboring countries as the comparison group?
Given that EA-driven philanthropy accounts for only about 0.02% of total global aid, perhaps the influence EA's approach could have by definitively proving its impact would be greater than trying to maximise the good it does directly.
This is a really interesting idea and would obviously need a relatively uncorrupt country that is on board with the project.
To some extent this kind of thing already happens, with aid organisations focusing their funding on countries which use it well. Rwanda is an interesting example of this over the last 20 years as they have attracted huge foreign funding after their dictator basically fixed low level corruption and organized the country surprisingly well. This has led to dis proportionate improvements in healthcare and education compared with surrounding countries, although economically the jury is still out.
The big problem in my eyes then is how do you know it's your interventions baking the difference, rather than just really good governance - very hard to tease apart.
Superficially, it sounds similar to the idea of charter cities. The idea does seem (at face value) to have some merit, but I suspect that the execution of the idea is where lots of problems occur.
So, practically aside, it seems like a massive amount of effort/investment/funding would allow a small country to progress rapidly toward less suffering and better life.
My general impression is that "we don't have a randomized control trial to prove the efficacy of this intervention" isn't the most common reason why people don't get helped. Maybe some combination of lack of resources, politics & entrenched interests, and trade-offs are the big ones? I don't know, but I'm sure some folks around here have research papers and textbooks about it.
Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.
Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.
Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.
Y-Combinator wants to fund Mechanistic Interpretability startups
"Understanding model behavior is very challenging, but we believe that in contexts where trust is paramount it is essential for an AI model to be interpretable. Its responses need to be explainable.
For society to reap the full benefits of AI, more work needs to be done on explainable AI. We are interested in funding people building new interpretable models or tools to explain the output of existing models."
Link
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs (Scroll to 12)
What they look for in startup founders
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/64-what-makes-great-founders-stand-out
It's often easier to get responses from the most senior people in a field.
1. Most people are too intimidated to get in touch with them
2. They're senior for a reason - they tend to be way more productive and opportunity seeking
3. They have VAs, secretaries, and other people to bring serious requests to their attention.
I work in global mental health, and am looking for charities to refer clients to me. The two best-connected people in my field (according to GPT-4) are Dr Vikram Patel and Dr Shekhar Saxena. I sent out ~50 identical cold emails to people I thought could connect me to relevant charities / hospitals etc. Vikram and Saxena were the only two people to reply!
I've also seen this argued by Tim Ferris and other highly productive people, but it resonated so poorly with my prior beliefs that I didn't update sufficiently. The implications here are huge - it could be way easier to gain access to influential people than the average EA perceives, and influence is power-law distributed!
I've strongly had this experience. I have written 5 NYT bestsellers a cold email, and 3 replied. I get good rates with C-levels and I get the poorest rates at lower levels.
But it strongly does depend on your story or organisation in my experience. Your org has a strong story so it warrants a reply. But I did a lot of marketing and some PR for dime in a dozen companies and if you lack a strong story, you can expect reply rates of senior people to be close to zero.
Curated and popular this week
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By Jim Chapman, Linkedin.
TL;DR: In 2023, I was a 57-year-old urban planning consultant and non-profit professional with 30 years of leadership experience. After talking with my son about rationality, effective altruism, and AI risks, I decided to pursue a pivot to existential risk reduction work. The last time I had to apply for a job was in 1994. By the end of 2024, I had spent ~740 hours on courses, conferences, meetings with ~140 people, and 21 job applications. I hope that by sharing my experiences, you can gain practical insights, inspiration, and resources to navigate your career transition, especially for those who are later in their career and interested in making an impact in similar fields. I share my experience in 5 sections - sparks, take stock, start, do, meta-learnings, and next steps. [Note - as of 03/05/2025, I am still pursuing my career shift.]
Sparks – 2022
During a Saturday bike ride, I admitted to my son, “No, I haven’t heard of effective altruism.” On another ride, I told him, “I'm glad you’re attending the EAGx Berkely conference." Some other time, I said, "Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality sounds interesting. I'll check it out." While playing table tennis, I asked, "What do you mean ChatGPT can't do math? No calculator? Next token prediction?" Around tax-filing time, I responded, "You really think retirement planning is out the window? That only 1 of 2 artificial intelligence futures occurs – humans flourish in a post-scarcity world or humans lose?" These conversations intrigued and concerned me.
After many more conversations about rationality, EA, AI risks, and being ready for something new and more impactful, I decided to pivot my career to address my growing concerns about existential risk, particularly AI-related. I am very grateful for those conversations because without them, I am highly confident I would not have spent the last year+ doing that.
Take Stock - 2023
I am very concerned about existential risk cause areas in ge
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[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
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Written anonymously because I work in a field where there is a currently low but non-negligible and possibly high future risk of negative consequences for criticizing Trump and Trumpism.
This post is an attempt to cobble together some ideas about the current situation in the United States and its impact on EA. I invite discussion on this, not only from Americans, but also those with advocacy experience in countries that are not fully liberal democracies (especially those countries where state capacity is substantial and autocratic repression occurs).
I've deleted a lot of text from this post in various drafts because I find myself getting way too in the weeds discoursing on comparative authoritarian studies, disinformation and misinformation (this is a great intro, though already somewhat outdated), and the dangers of the GOP.[1] I will note that I worry there is still a tendency to view the administration as chaotic and clumsy but retaining some degree of good faith, which strikes me as quite naive.
For the sake of brevity and focus, I will take these two things to be true, and try to hypothesize what they mean for EA. I'm not going to pretend these are ironclad truths, but I'm fairly confident in them.[2]
1. Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party (GOP) is no longer substantially committed to democracy and the rule of law.
1. The GOP will almost certainly continue to engage in measures that test the limits of constitutional rule as long as Trump is alive, and likely after he dies.
2. The Democratic Party will remain constrained by institutional and coalition factors that prevent it from behaving like the GOP. That is, absent overwhelming electoral victories in 2024 and 2026 (and beyond), the Democrats' comparatively greater commitment to rule of law and democracy will prevent systematic purging of the GOP elites responsible for democratic backsliding; while we have not crossed the Rubicon yet, it will get much worse before things get better.
2. T
Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.
Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.
Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.