Hi Christoph.  I love this idea, and I'm a subscriber, but my DoneThat app keeps turning off at the start of each day, and I can't work out how to stop it doing that.  I also can't see any way to contact support on your website.  Is there an email I can contact about this?

One of the reasons I no longer donate to EA Funds so often is that I think their funds lack a clearly stated theory of change.

For example, with the Global Health and Development fund, I’m confused why EAF hasn’t updated at all in favour of growth-promoting systemic change like liberal market reforms. It seems like there is strong evidence that economic growth is a key driver of welfare, but the fund hasn’t explained publicly why it prefers one-shot health interventions like bednets. It may well have good reasons for this, but there is absolutely no literature explaining the fund’s position.

The LTFF has a similar problem, insofar as it largely funds researchers doing obscure AI Safety work. Nowhere does the fund openly state: “we believe one of the most effective ways to promote long term human flourishing is to support high quality academic research in the field of AI Safety, both for the purposes of sustainable field-building and in order to increase our knowledge of how to make sure increasingly advanced AI systems are safe and beneficial to humanity.” Instead, donors are basically left to infer this theory of change from the grants themselves.

I don’t think we can expect to drastically increase the take-up of funds without this sort of transparency. I’m sure the fund managers have thought about this privately, and that they have justifications for not making their thoughts public, but asking people to pour thousands of pounds/dollars a year into a black box is a very, very big ask.

~80% of the applications are speculative, from people outside the EA community and don’t even really understand what we do...

Out of interest - do you folks tend to hire outside the EA community? And how much does EA involved-ness affect your evaluation of applications?

I ask as I know some really smart and talented people working on development outside of EA who could be great founders, and I'd like to know if it's worth encouraging them to apply.

I should clarify - by pocketing stuff, it ends up in the automatic queue for things to read. That way, I don't really have to think about what to read next, and the things I want to read just pop up anyway.

Not sure if you've already tried it, but I find Pocket and Audible really helps with this. It means I can just pop it on my headphones whenever I'm walking anywhere without needing to sit down and decide to read it.

Cuts back on the activation energy, which in turn increases how much I 'read'.