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...
The US democracy may be at risk. It is only "our democracy" for 4.25% of the world's population.
(Apologies for focusing on a single word of your post, but I think this seemingly trivial semantic difference reflects a more substantive and widespread issue. How many concerned posts about the political situation in, say, India have you seen in the Forum recently? How many "action items" for protecting democracy in, say, Brazil have you encountered? It is depressing and, yes, irritating to see a community that supposedly values all people equally concentrate their attention so overwhelmingly on a single country when it comes to politics and "current affairs".)
I agree. Just as the EA movement has been pushing against the bias towards philanthropy in rich countries, so we should also try to resist the urge to pay attention only to political crises in rich countries like the United States.
Though surely you both would also agree that the stability of the democracy in the United States is much more valuable both in the short and long term, compared to say Brazil's or India's, no? I don't know what a reasonable allocation of attention is, but the headcount seems to be just one of many factors, e.g. along things like contribution to scientific and technological innovation, wealth creation, military power, political influence, cultural influence, and ethical and human rights standards.
Of course in general US politics seem much less neglected. But then again, there are also comparative advantages because so many EAs are US citizens and consequently have more knowledge of and influence over that system. And the non-EAs who pay attention to US politics do not necessarily have the same goals as EAs (making their tribe win vs. averting instability).
(Status: unsure) Preserving democracy in the United States is more valuable insofar as the world perceives the U.S. as the "leader" or "guarantor" of the liberal world order, particularly global democracy. But I don't think this outweighs the importance of democracy in the rest of the world, especially large democracies like India.
I think EAs' comparative advantages in promoting democracy in our own countries is the more important factor here.
Luke Muehlhauser mentions another argument that we didn’t mention yet: who would replace the US in its global leadership roles? China seems most likely to me, given economic and military growth, and also seemingly much worse in terms of human rights standards.
http://lukemuehlhauser.com/one-billion-americans/