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Quick takes

I wanted to flag an upcoming Netflix limited series, The Altruists, which dramatises the collapse of FTX and centres on Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Filming wrapped late last year, and the series is expected to release in 2026.

Regardless of how carefully or poorly the show handles the facts, the title and premise alone are likely to renew public association between effective altruism, crypto, and the FTX collapse. Given Netflix’s reach, this will almost certainly shape first impressions for many people encountering EA-adjacent ideas for the firs... (read more)

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JoshYou4h1

i doubt it will be very consequential for EA either way. I think what matters is the discursive impact (effect on prevailing social opinion) not total viewers. and people don't care very much about Netflix specials. would be different if it was a movie that got traction.

barkbellowroar

15h

I brought this up a few months ago in a larger comment on optics and it did not go over well. Glad to see people upvoting this (your phrasing of the issue is much better than mine!). Another element I've thought of since, is that we're continuing to evolve our understanding and approaches of altruism - so to label the one approach/one attempt of FTX as representative of all "altruists" is potentially limiting the entire space. They could have called it just FTX or "Consequential" (similar to the Uber series being called "Superpumped" and Wework show called "wecrashed") the fact that altruists is in the name suggests they will center that in the storyline. To be fair, all groups go through this, and I'm not sure what direct interventions can be done at this point barring legal action...which typically has strong negative connotations associated with it.

Mihkel Viires 🔹

This is probably not a great idea, but throwing it out here anyway: since Netflix now has ads, we could buy commercials that run before the start of each episode. We could use this to give viewers a very brief intro to what effective altruism really is.

peterbarnett's Quick takes

peterbarnett13h12

(Half baked and maybe just straight up incorrect about people's orientations)

I worry a bit about groups thinking about the post-AGI future (e.g., Forethought) will not want to push for something like super-optimized flourishing because this will seem weird and possibly uncooperative with factions that don't like the vibe of super-optimization. This might happen even if these groups thinking about the future do believe in their hearts that super-optimized flourishing is the best outcome.

It is very plausible to me that the situation is "convex" in the ... (read more)

Zach Stein-Perlman

Two hours before you posted this, MacAskill posted a brief explanation of viatopianism. I think I'm largely on board. I think I'd favor doing some amount of utopian planning (aiming for something like hedonium and acausal trade). Viatopia sounds less weird than utopias like that. I wouldn't be shocked if Forethought talked relatively more about viatopia because it sounds less weird. I would be shocked if they push us in the direction of anodyne final outcomes. I agree with Peter that stuff is "convex" but I don't worry that Forethought will have us tile the universe with compromisium. But I don't have much private info.

peterbarnett8h1

I should read that piece. In general, I am very into the Long Reflection and I guess also the Viatopia stuff.

Yarrow's Quick takes

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸1d7

AI safetyShow more

The economist Tyler Cowen linked to my post on self-driving cars, so it ended up getting a lot more readers than I ever expected. I hope that more people now realize, at the very least, self-driving cars are not an uncontroversial, uncomplicated AI success story. In discussions around AGI, people often say things along the lines of: ‘deep learning solved self-driving cars, so surely it will be able to solve many other problems'. In fact, the lesson to draw is the opposite: self-driving is too hard a problem for the current cutting edge in deep learning (an... (read more)

ClimateDoc's Quick takes

ClimateDoc11d*61

There is a new "Forget Veganuary" campaign, apparently part-funded by the EA Animal Welfare Fund:
https://www.forgetveganuary.com/
https://www.farmkind.giving/about-us/who#transparency (the "Transparency" link on the campaign page)

Reddit link to news article that calls this a "meat-eating campaign" and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1px018m/veganuary_champion_quits_to_run_meateating/

The idea seems to be to promote a message to not give up animal products, but rather donate to organisations that effectively campaign to... (read more)

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Mark Westcombe4d3

I could imagine that at this point this is quite a rough place to be in and to navigate going forward for FarmKind. One potential way might be:

apologise to the veganuary founders, CEO, and team for the impact on their brand, decades work, current campaign, and adding to their stresses on the dawn of veganuary 2026. Acknowledging that the campaign may have hurt many within the team at a personal level, and that undermining another org in the movement and their campaign is in hindsight unethical;
Really own and extend that apology to any offence and upset cau

... (read more)

Alistair Stewart

This seems to be contradicted by Wendy's comment above. I'm pretty concerned (and confused) about the lack of alignment between FarmKind's perspective and Veganuary's on the extent of cooperation between the two ahead of the campaign launch. EDIT: Thom says at 34:50 in this YouTube interview:

gkcv

Given the pitfalls of mass communication, I am worried that the "forget Veganuary" piece of this will be a bigger takeaway for most people than "donate to help farmed animals"

Mihkel Viires 's Quick takes

Mihkel Viires 🔹10d*28

Global healthShow more

Gavi's investment opportunity for 2026-2030 says they expect to save 8 to 9 million lives, for which they would require a budget of at least $11.9 billion^[1]. Unfortunately, Gavi only raised $9 billion, so they have to make some cuts to their plans^[2]. And you really can't reduce spending by $3 billion without making some life-or-death decisions.

Gavi's CEO has said that "for every $1.5 billion less, your ability to save 1.1 million lives is compromised"^[3]. This would equal a marginal cost of ~~$1,607~~ $1,363 per life saved, which seems a bit low to me. But I... (read more)

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NickLaing4d*7

I don't think it makes sense to think of these these statements by big NGOs about "lives saved" in the same way as a GiveWell analysis. These numbers are often grossly overestimated often 10x or more. They don't do proper, rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis before making these statements. The CEO's of these huge orgs also can't be expected to understand cost-effectiveness analysis properly. Their job is to be public figureheads and to manage behemoth orgs, not to understand numbers deeply.

Also they say "Your ability to save 1.1 million lives is compromis... (read more)

David Mathers🔸

Gavi do vaccines, something that governments and other big bureaucratic orgs sure seem to handle well in other cases. Government funding for vaccines is how we eliminated smallpox, for example. I think "other vaccination programs" are a much better reference class for Gavi than the nebulous category of "social programs" in general. Indeed the Rossi piece you've linked to actually says "In the social program field, nothing has yet been invented which is as effective in its way as the smallpox vaccine was for the field of public health." I'm not sure it is even counting public health stuff as "social programs" that fall under the iron law. That's not to say that Gavi can actually save a life for $1600, or save millions at $1600 each, or that GiveWell should fund them. But impact of literally zero here seems very implausible.

[Draft]

Mihkel Viires 🔹

1. Gavi is clearly more optimistic about its cost-effectiveness than I think GiveWell would be. 2. Here are some facts and thoughts about Gavi's budget cuts. * Gavi cut staff levels at its secretariats in Washington, D.C. and Geneva, letting go of about 203 out of 643 staff[1]. Assuming $200k payroll per year per employee[2], the layoffs will help save $30 million every year going forward. But this is actually only a small part of the cuts Gavi has to make. And it might actually have a negative impact, because Gavi now has fewer people to do everything it does. There is also probably less time for the organization to work on innovation, process improvement; these remaining 440 employees will probably be very busy just trying to keep the day-to-day operations going. * Gavi has said they plan to minimize the impact of cuts on the countries and the people at the greatest risk. I would assume this means that funding for tried-and-tested vaccination campaigns in the poorest of countries probably won't see many cuts. Lower-middle-income countries, though, will likely be expected to pay more for their own health, with reduced support from Gavi. * Gavi will also have to slow down the introduction of new vaccines. One concrete example is the HPV vaccine. Gavi says that if they get fully funded, they want to vaccinate 120 million girls against HPV from 2026 to 2030[3]. Gavi estimates this would save 1.5 million lives. That might be a bit optimistic. Here is an article that found it takes 87 to 101 vaccinations to avert one death (more specifically, 87 vaccinations per death averted among 9-year-old girls and 101 vaccinations per death averted among 10-14-year-old girls)[4]. If we are conservative and assume 101 vaccinations per death averted for girls of every age, then Gavi's HPV rollout could save 1.19 million lives, about 300,000 less than its own estimate. * Obviously, we would need to adjust for more things. For example, counterfactual funding. How much would gove

Yanni Kyriacos's Quick takes

[anonymous]2y7

I expect (~ 75%) that the decision to "funnel" EAs into jobs at AI labs will become a contentious community issue in the next year. I think that over time more people will think it is a bad idea. This may have PR and funding consequences too.

Showing 3 of 8 replies (Click to show all)

OllieBase

I had a reminder to check back on this. I had a quick scan, and I don't think this happened. Joe's post probably meets the bar, and does suggest it's still a contentious issue, but I can't find 9+ more so not as contentious as you predicted :)

ClaireZabel6d2

Quick thank you for checking in on old predictions. I really appreciate when people do that kind of thing

OllieBase

Seems reasonable :)

Jason's Quick takes

Jason3y2

Based on some recent discussions of "passive philantrophy," I am wondering if there are circumstances in which people spend money at cross purposes and might be agreeable to offset their monies and donate them to an effective charity instead. One possible example follows.

In any US political campaign where the candidates/parties have roughly equal funding resources, the utility of donating $1 to my preferred candidate is roughly equal to the utility of depriving the opposing candidate of $1. Stated another way, if I donate $100 to a SuperPAC boosting Candid... (read more)

Lizka

Have you seen this post? Getting money out of politics and into charity

Jason3y4

Hadn't to my knowledge (but I can't rule out the possibility that I had seen it in previous forum lurking a while ago and just don't remember). One conscious trigger, at least, was hearing about how SBF and others at FTX gave tens of millions to different parties and shaking my head at the waste (this was before the origin of those funds was fully known).

Caveat: I am a lawyer but am not speaking with any real assessment of the merits beyond a skim of the FEC letter back in 2015. The viewpoint below is based on general principles of civil litigation strateg... (read more)

Annika Burman's Quick takes

Annika Burman 🔸1mo23

Global health

The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines?

huw1mo4

A few points:

There is still a lot of progress to be made in low-income country psychotherapy, which I think many EAs find counterintuitive. StrongMinds and Friendship Bench could both be about 5× cheaper, and have found ways to get substantially cheaper every year for the past half decade or so. At Kaya Guides, we’re exploring further improvements and should share more soon.
Plausibly, you could double cost-effectiveness again if it were possible to replace human counsellors with AI in a way that maintained retention (the jury is still out here).
The Hap

... (read more)

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

1mo

My gut feeling based on knowledge, reasoning, and experience is that the low-hanging fruit like diet and lighting is quite low-impact and probably has like low to middling cost-effectiveness — but I haven’t done any math, nor any experiments. If I had research bucks to spend on experimental larks, I would try to push the psychotherapeutic frontier. For example, I might fund grounded theory research into depression. Or I might do a clinical trial on the efficacy of schema therapy for depression — there have been some promising results, but not many studies. I think Johann Hari’s core point is correct — or at least a core point can be extracted from what he’s saying that is correct. Anti-depressants are very helpful for some people and moderately helpful for most people. Medical clinics that give ketamine to patients with treatment-resistant depression are helpful. Treatments that stimulate the brain with magnets and electricity are helpful. Neurofeedback may be helpful. But what all these approaches have in common is they’re trying to treat the brain like the engine in a car. This kind of argument often gets mixed in with people who say that anti-depressants don’t work or are against them for some reason. Or people who advocate for non-evidence-based, woo woo "treatments". But that’s not what I’m saying. Everyone who’s depressed should talk to a doctor about anti-depressants because the evidence for their efficacy is good and, even better, the side-effects for most people most of the time are fairly minor (providing they don’t mix them with the wrong drugs or substances), so the risk of trying them is low. And if one anti-depressant doesn’t work, the standard approach doctors will take is try 3-5 (over time, not all at once), to maximize the chance of one of them working. Other treatments like medical ketamine may be helpful or even life-changing for some people. But I also think pharmacological and other biologistic approaches only take us so far. Depression is

NickLaing

1mo

i think this is a good idea, but perhaps better excecutrd even by "non mental health" people. if your expertise is in psychotherapy why ditch that enormous competitive advantage? i also think the evidence base on this stuff isn't yet quite there? but I'm not up to date...

Jason's Quick takes

Jason8d13

If you're in the US and dropping checks in the mail today, I would not rely on the assumption that they would be postmarked today. Effective December 24, the postmark date is no longer the date on which mail is deposited with USPS (although it sounds like postmark date may not have been fully reliable even before this policy change).

Under Treasury Regulation 1.170A-1, "[t]he unconditional delivery or mailing of a check which subsequently clears in due course will constitute an effective contribution on the date of delivery or
mailing." I have usually filmed... (read more)

Linch's Quick takes

Linch8d-2

I often see people advocate others sacrifice their souls. People often justify lying, political violence, coverups of “your side’s” crimes and misdeeds, or professional misconduct of government officials and journalists, because their cause is sufficiently True and Just. I’m overall skeptical of this entire class of arguments.

This is not because I intrinsically value “clean hands” or seeming good over actual good outcomes. Nor is it because I have a sort of magical thinking common in movies, where things miraculously work out well if you just ignore tradeo... (read more)

Amy Becker's Quick takes

Amy Becker9d6

Anybody heard from Meta Charity funding circle which announced their applications for fall 2025 around October? Decisions were to be communicated mid December as I read on their forum post. @Ambitious Impact would appreciate an update:)

Mihkel Viires 's Quick takes

Mihkel Viires 🔹10d9

Global healthShow more

Indoor tanning is really bad for people's health; it significantly increases one's risk of getting skin cancer.^[1] Many countries already outlaw minors from visiting indoor tanning salons. However, surprisingly, there are only two countries, Australia and Brazil, that have banned indoor tanning for adults, too. I think that doing policy advocacy for a complete ban on indoor tanning in countries around the world has the potential to be a highly cost-effective global health intervention. Indoor tanning ban policy advocacy seems to check all three boxes of th... (read more)

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Jason

I'm initially skeptical on tractability -- at least of an outright ban, although maybe I am applying too much of a US perspective. Presumably most adults who indulge in indoor tanning know that it's bad for you. There's no clear addictive process (e.g., smoking), third-party harms (e.g., alcohol), or difficulty avoiding the harm -- factors which mitigate the paternalism objection when bans or restrictions on other dangerous activities are proposed. Moreover, slightly less than half of US states even ban all minors from using tanning beds, and society is more willing to support paternalistic bans for minors. That makes me question how politically viable a ban for adults would be. "[T]he indoor tanning lobby" may not be very powerful, but it would be fighting for its very existence, and it would have the support of its consumers. On the other side of the equation, the benefits don't strike me as obviously large in size. Most skin-cancer mortality comes from melanomas (8,430/year in the US), but if I am reading this correctly then only 6,200 of the 212,200 melanomas in the US each year are attributed to indoor tanning. The average five-year survival for melanoma in the US is 94%. So the number of lives saved may not be particularly high here.

Mihkel Viires 🔹9d1

Yeah, it looks like the impact is probably not that big, if compared to say lives that could be saved via alcohol or tobacco control policy advocacy.

Mihkel Viires 🔹

Yes, indoor tanning is worse for your health than outdoor tanning. Indoor tanning beds beam UV radiation that can be as much as 10 to 15 times stronger than what you get from the sun.[1] It is worth mentioning that people who use indoor tanning are also more likely to not use sun protection when outdoors[2]. This means that we really would not want to ban indoor tanning if the result is people just spending more time outside in the sun and getting the same dose of exposure. I did not find any studies that have looked at to what extent this is what people do after indoor tanning is banned. My guess, though, is that a ban would be significantly net positive, even after accounting for a potential increase in outdoor tanning. ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/12/14/nx-s1-5640088/tanning-bed-users-are-at-higher-risk-of-skin-cancer-especially-in-unusual-places ↩︎ 2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2565799 ↩︎

ClaireZabel's Quick takes

ClaireZabel12d82

After a few years of missing the mark, this year I've exceeded my goal of giving 10% of my income away by a substantial margin (I never took the Giving What We Can pledge, but I still aspire at this point in my career to exceed the 10% bar).

It's bittersweet, because I think that the reason I succeeded is that it seems like there's more funding gaps than there were a few years ago - insofar as that's about there being more good giving opportunities (which I think it partly is) that's exciting but I also think it's partly due to there being more promis... (read more)

Jeff Kaufman 🔸9d*18

Thanks for sharing this! @Julia_Wise🔸 and I also decided to give more in 2025 (or early 2026), from a combination of pressing funding gaps and wanting to pull giving forward because of Anthropic donors.

Will Bradshaw

11d

Thanks Claire! Are you able to point to some newer opportunities you think are especially promising?

Yadav's Quick takes

Yadav9d26

Feels like a resurgence is going on with giving in EA

MichaelDello's Quick takes

MichaelDello9d1

A lot of people are talking about data centres in space in the last few weeks. Andrew McCalip built a model to see what it would take for space compute to get cheaper than terrestrial compute.

This quote stood out:

we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to bur

... (read more)

WillPearson's Quick takes

WillPearson16d1

Existential risk

I'm trying to create a website/organisation/community around exploring difficult problems and improving the decisions people make.

I've currently got an alpha website where people can interact with AI in different scenarios and record the decisions and reasoning they make, to inform others.

I'm curious how others would approach this endeavour (I don't have a broad network)

JamesN

12d

I think that’s quite a broad remit. What’s the focus of improving the decisions? Better problem identification/specification? Better data analysis and evidence base? Better predictive accuracy? Better efficiency/Adaptiveness/robustness?

WillPearson9d1

I'm taking decision making under deep uncertainty as a base. So being comfortable with making decisions under many view points. So trying to avoid any one dominant view point or analysis paralysis.

JessMasterson's Quick takes

JessMasterson10d13

This paper shows how strategic menu manipulation in a university canteen achieved a 30.7% reduction in carbon footprint without anyone noticing the nudge. It's such a simple idea that could be implemented in universities, schools, hospital and prison cafeterias etc. It seems harmless and the gains seem disproportionately large when we look at the relative simplicity of carrying this out. The impact could be substantial for animal welfare (cutting down on the consumption of animal-based foods) and climate change.

I don't know what would be needed to get measures like this to be implemented more widely, but it seems promising.

Noah Birnbaum's Quick takes

Noah Birnbaum2mo15

Opportunities

Idea for someone with a bit of free time:

While I don't have the bandwidth for this atm, someone should make a public (or private for, say, policy/reputation reasons) list of people working in (one or multiple of) the very neglected cause areas — e.g., digital minds (this is a good start), insect welfare, space governance, AI-enabled coups, and even AI safety (more for the second reason than others). Optional but nice-to-have(s): notes on what they’re working on, time contributed, background, sub-area, and the rough rate of growth in the field (you pr... (read more)

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

Ben Stevenson

10d

One reason a comprehensive version of this would be difficult for insect welfare is that a couple of projects are 'undercover'. Rethink Priorities have guidance on donating to insects, shrimp and wild animals that might be relevant. Separately, I understand @JordanStone has a pretty comprehensive sense of who's who in space governance, and would be a good person to contact if you're thinking about getting into this field.

JordanStone10d1

Yeah, lists exist for all the people working on space governance from a longtermist perspective, and they tend to list about 10-15 people. I'm like 90% sure I know of everyone working on longtermist space governance, and I'd estimate that there are the equivalent of ~3 people working full time on this. There's not as much undercover work required for space governance, but I don't like to share lists of names publicly without permission.

At the moment, the main hub for space governance is Forethought and most people contact Fin Moorhouse to learn more about ... (read more)

Saul Munn

23d

Started something sorta similar about a month ago: https://saul-munn.notion.site/A-collection-of-content-resources-on-digital-minds-AI-welfare-29f667c7aef380949e4efec04b3637e9?pvs=74

Aaron Bergman's Quick takes

Aaron Bergman10d15

I made a tool to play around with how alternatives to the 10% GWWC Pledge default norm might change:

How much individuals are "expected" to pay
1. The idea being that there are functions of income that people would prefer to the 10% pledge behind some relevant veil of ignorance, along the lines of "I don't want to commit 10% of my $30k salary, but I gladly commit 20% of my $200k salary"
How much total donation revenue gets collected

There's some discussion at this Tweet of mine

Some folks pushed back a bit, citing the following:

The pledge isn't supposed to

... (read more)

InTheSky's Quick takes

InTheSky10d1

Animal welfareShow more

FarmKind is openly hostile towards veganism, which makes no sense. See this stunt here: https://www.gbnews.com/news/veganuary-actvist-meat-eating-campaign and this social media video in which they refer to people being "tricked into going vegan": https://www.instagram.com/p/DQuPg0VjMJf/

Obviously discouraging veganism is completely antithetical to reducing animal suffering, because: the vegan movement is the best pool we have for effective animal advocates; opposing veganism while ostensing to advocate for animals sends a weak moral message that reduces mor... (read more)