Earlier this month, we sent an announcement to our Giving What We Can Pledge members about our new pledge pin. This pin will be given to all Giving What We Can Pledge members who have been pledgers for over a year and are on track with their donations.
It’s an honour to be a part of a community that cares deeply about giving and improving the world, and this is a small way for us to thank our members for displaying an ongoing commitment to their pledge.
We’ve launched our yearly Giving Review and have been collecting data about the donations our community made in 2021.
If you could spend 5 minutes reporting your donations before the 31st July, please do so. It helps us measure our impact and hopefully provide better experiences for our members in the future.
We’d like to remind you that although your contribution may feel like a drop in the bucket, it means quite a lot to the people, animals and planet it benefits.
By giving effectively, you are part of a community of donors who — together — are drastically increasing the size of that drop, making a meaningful, concrete difference to the lives of others and helping to normalise giving to those who need it. That’s incredibly important, because even with generous donations from large philanthropists, there's much more to be done.
The meetups team is hosting an EA Forum “Show and Tell.” Come and tell us about a forum post that you found interesting, didn’t agree with, didn’t understand, want to learn more about, etc., and we’ll discuss it together! Feel free to choose any post (old or new) on any topic or cause. Just come along and we can spend some time learning something new or debating something fun!
Aug 6: 22:00 UTC (New York: Sat, Aug. 6, 6:00 pm; Sydney: Sun, Aug. 7, 8:00 am)
Tony Senanayake from IDInsight will join this session to answer some Q&A about his work with multiple organisations in the global health and development sector. Tony is a goldmine of knowledge and this is sure to be a fascinating discussion.
Aug 7: 09:30 UTC (London: 10:30 am, Munich: 11:30 am, Mumbai: 3:00 pm, Singapore: 5:30 pm)
Our open forum is an event where you can come along with questions about effective giving and/or to meet others interested in effective giving. This event alternates between different timezones each month.
Next Open Forum (Europe/Americas)
Aug 18: 19:00 UTC (London 8:00 pm, Berlin 9:00 pm, New York 3:00 pm, Los Angeles 12:00 pm)
Peter McIntyre (formerly of 80,000 Hours) has launched a free online learning platform called non-trivial, which introduces some foundational EA concepts aimed to help young adults (particularly teenagers) increase their impact on the world. Peter encourages the EA community to share the first course, How to (actually) change the world, with others.
A community member is developing a course on forecasting. If you’re interested, you can join the waitlist to participate in this new online class.
Evaluators, grantmakers and incubators
GiveWell published an update on its funding projections for 2022, stating that it doesn’t expect to have enough funding this year to fill all the cost-effective grant opportunities it has been able to identify. As a result, it is raising its cost-effectiveness bar for funding and increasing its fundraising efforts.
GiveWell has published several new research materials, including a report on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of programs that train health workers to deliver maternal and neonatal health interventions, a page about two recent grants (totaling $562,000) supporting IRD Global’s tuberculosis team in Karachi, Pakistan, and notes from a conversation with Drs. Edward Miguel and Michael Walker about a possible follow-up to a randomised controlled trial of GiveDirectly's unconditional cash transfer program in Kenya.
Animal Charity Evaluators announced a special giving opportunity in which donations to its Movement Grants program will be matched dollar-for-dollar up to $300,000.
The EA Infrastructure Fund published an organisational update with information about the grants they made between September-December 2021
“Is it really useful to ‘teach a person to fish’ or should you just give them the damn fish already?” asks Sigal Samuel in his Vox article discussing the evidence behind ‘ultra-poor graduation programs,’ which are aimed at lifting the ultra-poor out of poverty through a combination of training and cash/assets. Samuel explores how these combo programs compare to simple cash transfer initiatives, and how the gap between “teach a man to fish” and “give a man to fish” is narrowing.
Kelsey Piper, Vox journalist and GWWC member, writes about The return of the “worm wars” and how the controversy over the value of deworming interventions shows the need for effective altruists to reason under uncertainty.
Rational animations have posted a well researched video on how we could be living in the most important century and explores the development of advanced AI.
Centre for the Governance of AI has opened submissions for their 2022 Student Essay Prizes, and are seeking promising pieces of research with relevance to AI governance. Eligible submissions include undergraduate and master’s theses, journal articles, and essays. Winners will be awarded monetary prizes and be eligible for mentoring.
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...
