"The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical." - Albert Camus, The Plague
Altruism is the rational response to an irrational world.
Thank you for doing this really important work, I'm really looking forward to the results.
From your list of organizations I would suggest small edits for ALLFED: the actual value raised from SFF over the years is around $3 million not $1.5 million if my estimates are correct. And the link to the research outputs is actually this one. The value of grants from OP is zero.
ALLFED has published peer-reviewed cost-effectiveness analyses estimating that this work is likely to be more cost-effective than GiveWell interventions for saving lives in the present generation, and potentially more cost-effective than artificial general intelligence safety for improving the long run future (resilient foods and resilience to loss of electricity/industry).
Independent evaluations of cost-effectiveness of the type of work that ALLFED does can be found here:
Interesting post. Just a quick comment on the effectiveness of "research and dissemination" and "Spreading “we’re all in this together” frames" type interventions. These sound similar to interventions that policymakers try time and again in response to disasters because they're intuitive, despite the fact that they don't work very well or at all.
The source I linked describes a comparison of interventions for pandemic response in the general public, so it's not directly applicable, but I worry a similar issue may be at hand here. The interventions aimed at changing minds generally have negligible effects, especially compared to other interventions such as providing social support and tapping into individuals’ behavioral skills and habits as well as removing practical obstacles to behavior.
I don't know what the equivalent on the "nuclear war prevention" area is of these other interventions that work well for pandemic response, but I do worry that the "knowledge and beliefs" type interventions proposed would also be negligible like they are in this other field.
Thank you both for your interest. OpenPhil recently responded to us on this, here's what we know:
Different OpenPhil teams have discussed ALLFED's appeal for support that to see if there would be a fit, and they have concluded that there currently isn't a fit for ALLFED.
To clarify further, ALLFED has never received any grants from Open Philanthropy. No direct reason for this has been offered.