Quick takes

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 think there is a good chance Gavi's marginal cost per life saved is still cheap enough to clear GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar. GiveWell hasn't made grants to Gavi, though. Why? ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/investing/funding/resource-mobilisation/Gavi-Investment-Opportunity-2026-2030.pdf, pp. 20 & 43 ↩︎ 2. https://www.devex.com/news/gavi-s-board-tasked-with-strategy-shift-in-light-of-3b-funding-gap-110595 ↩︎ 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02270-x ↩︎

Super sceptical probably very highly intractable thought that I haven't done any research on: There seem to be a lot of reasons to think we might be living in a simulation besides just Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, like: * All the fundamental constants and properties of the universe are perfectly suited to the emergence of sentient life. This could be explained by the Anthropic principle, or it could be explained by us living in a simulation that has been designed for us. * The Fermi Paradox: there don't seem to be any other civilizations in the observable universe. There are many explanations for the Fermi Paradox, but one additional explanation might be that whoever is simulating the universe created it for us, or they don't care about other civilizations, so haven't simulated them. * We seem to be really early on in human history. Only about 60 billion people have ever lived IIRC but we expect many trillions to live in the future. This can be explained by the Doomsday argument - that in fact we are in the time in human history where most people will live because we will soon go extinct. However, this phenomenon can also be explained by us living in a simulation - see next point. * Not only are we really early, but we seem to be living at a pivotal moment in human history that is super interesting. We are about to create intelligence greater than ourselves, expand into space, or probably all die. Like if any time in history were to be simulated, I think there's a high likelihood it would be now.  If I was pushed into a corner, I might say the probability we are living in a simulation is like 60%, where most evidence seems to point towards us being in a simulation. However, the doubt comes from the high probability that I'm just thinking about this all wrong - like, of course I can come up with a motivation for a simulation to explain any feature of the universe... it would be hard to find something that doesn't line up with an explanation that the simu

* Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: "The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]" 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree. * This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong. * (Charitable interpretation) It's also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they're being contrarian about because they're trying to maximize the the expected value of information (often justified with something like: "usually contrarians are wrong, but if they are right, they are often more valuable for information than average person who just agrees"). * If this is the case, though, I fear that some of us are confusing the norm of being contrarian instrumental reasons and for "being correct" reasons.  Tho lmk if you disagree. 

Is there a running list of small, impactful & very capacity-constrained giving opportunities somewhere?

An informal research agenda on robust animal welfare interventions and adjacent cause prioritization questions Context: As I started filling out this expression of interest form to be a mentor for Sentient Futures' project incubator program, I came up with the following list of topics I might be interested in mentoring. And I thought it was worth sharing here. :) (Feedback welcome!) Animal-welfare-related research/work: 1. What are the safest (i.e., most backfire-proof)[1] consensual EAA interventions? (overlaps with #3.c and may require #6.) 1. How should we compare their cost-effectiveness to that of interventions that require something like spotlighting or bracketing (or more thereof) to be considered positive?[2] (may require A.) 2. Robust ways to reduce wild animal suffering 1. New/underrated arguments regarding whether reducing some wild animal populations is good for wild animals (a brief overview of the academic debate so far here). 2. Consensual ways of affecting the size of some wild animal populations (contingent planning that might become relevant depending on results from the above kind of research). 1. How do these and the safest consensual EAA interventions (see 1) interact? 3. Preventing the off-Earth replication of wild ecosystems. 3. Uncertainty on moral weights (some relevant context in this comment thread). 1. Red-teaming of different moral weights that have been explicitly proposed and defended (by Rethink Priorities, Vaso Grilo, ...). 2. How and how much do cluelessness arguments apply to moral weights and inter-species tradeoffs? 3. What actions are robust to severe uncertainty about inter-species tradeoffs? (overlaps with #1.) 4. Considerations regarding the impact of saving human lives (c.f. top-GiveWell charities) on farmed and wild animals. (may require 3 and 5.) 5. The impact of agriculture on soil nematodes and other numerous soil animals, in terms of total population. 6. Evaluating the backfir

I sometimes say, in a provocative/hyperbolic sense, that the concept of "neglectedness" has been a disaster for EA. I do think the concept is significantly over-used (ironically, it's not neglected!), and people should just look directly at the importance and tractability of a cause at current margins. Maybe neglectedness useful as a heuristic for scanning thousands of potential cause areas. But ultimately, it's just a heuristic for tractability: how many resources are going towards something is evidence about whether additional resources are likely to be impactful at the margin, because more resources mean its more likely that the most cost-effective solutions have already been tried or implemented. But these resources are often deployed ineffectively, such that it's often easier to just directly assess the impact of resources at the margin than to do what the formal ITN framework suggests, which is to break this hard question into two hard ones: you have to assess something like the abstract overall solvability of a cause (namely, "percent of the problem solved for each percent increase in resources," as if this is likely to be a constant!) and the neglectedness of the cause. That brings me to another problem: assessing neglectedness might sound easier than abstract tractability, but how do you weigh up the resources in question, especially if many of them are going to inefficient solutions? I think EAs have indeed found lots of surprisingly neglected (and important, and tractable) sub-areas within extremely crowded overall fields when they've gone looking. Open Phil has an entire program area for scientific research, on which the world spends >$2 trillion, and that program has supported Nobel Prize-winning work on computational design of proteins. US politics is a frequently cited example of a non-neglected cause area, and yet EAs have been able to start or fund work in polling and message-testing that has outcompeted incumbent orgs by looking for the highest-v

Incidentally, ‘flipping non-EA jobs into EA jobs’ and ‘creating EA jobs’ both seem much more impactful than ‘taking EA jobs’. That could be e.g. taking an academic position that otherwise wouldn’t have been doing much and using it to do awesome research / outreach that others can build on, or starting an EA-aligned org with funding from non-EA sources, like VCs. (excerpt from https://lydianottingham.substack.com/p/a-rapid-response-to-celeste-re-e2g) 

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 the ITN framework: it is highly neglected; it affects many people (indoor tanning is surprisingly popular: over 10 percent of adults around the world have tanned indoors[2]), and thus has the potential to have a big impact; and also, I think it could be quite tractable (passing laws is never easy, but is should be doable, because the indoor tanning lobby appears to be much less powerful than, say, the tobacco or alcohol lobbies). ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/surprising-facts-about-indoor-tanning ↩︎ 2. https://www.aad.org/media/stats-indoor-tanning ↩︎