Kestrel🔸
Bio
I work as a researcher in statistical anomaly detection in live data streams. I work at Lancaster University and my research is funded by the Detection of Anomalous Structure in Streaming Settings group, which is funded by a combination of industrial funding and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ultimately the UK Government).
There's a very critical research problem that's surprisingly open - if you are monitoring a noisy system for a change of state, how do you ensure that you find any change as soon as possible, while keeping your monitoring costs as low as possible?
By "low", I really do mean low - I am interested in methods that take far less power than (for example) modern AI tools. If the computational cost of monitoring is high, the monitoring just won't get done, and then something will go wrong and cause a lot of problems before we realise and try to fix things.
This has applications in a lot of areas and is valued by a lot of people. I work with a large number of industrial, scientific and government partners.
Improving the underlying mathematical tooling behind figuring out when complex systems start to show problems reduces existential risk. If for some reason we all die, it'll be because something somewhere started going very wrong and we didn't do anything about it in time. If my research has anything to say about it, "the monitoring system cost us too much power so we turned it off" won't be on the list of reasons why that happened.
I also donate to effective global health and development interventions and support growth of the effective giving movement. I believe that a better world is eminently possible, free from things like lead pollution and neglected tropical diseases, and that everyone should be doing at least something to try to genuinely build a better world.
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I agree with this.
It seems to me that people are spending a lot of time (as in months and months!) applying for extremely oversubscribed things that they hope will gain them experience and a track record. EA is getting bottlenecked by application evaluation.
The huge personal resource investment needed to make you look good and succeed on a really competitive resume, interview, application process etc - can probably be better spent on effective volunteering, assuming you're *actually* relatively good at the work. The counterfactual difference in world impact is huge - rather than being a resource investment you're a resource contributor. And it will also gain you experience and a track record.
On a related note re: CEEALAR, anyone who wants to do some fundraising for effective charities is welcome to come upskill, connect, and get productive at CEEALAR for the Effective Giving Organiser Retreat 6th-9th February 2026 at the EA Hotel, Blackpool, UK. This retreat is free, with all meals and accommodation included. Run by me, with appearances from One for the World and Giving What We Can. https://forms.gle/E4Kqp32TUnG4DcVa7 to sign up. Disclaimer: I paid CEEALAR for this event out of my pledge money because it's part of the work I'm doing to get effective giving volunteer fundraising back on the EA community map.
Lastly I want to agree that CEEALAR is amazingly cost-efficient and impactful, and the fact that they have to go through this song and dance every single year it seems (thereby distracting their organisers from cracking on with the object-level work of training and incubating EAs and EA organisations) is clearly a major red flag about the short-termist nature of EA's grantmaking systems for anyone looking to set up physical EA infrastructure in future. I would like CEEALAR to be able to stop applying and get to work.
I see this take a lot.
My immediate response is fourfold:
a) a lot of EA's core worldview philosophy is about doing boring stuff (that works), and so we attract people with an aesthetic repulsion to overmarketing that stick here and contribute highly. It's not clear that standard marketing strategies work for something like EA without making such people more likely to leave, so I would be hesitant to propose changes to the current setup.
b) the School of Moral Ambition is already doing essentially a more marketed version of EA. I highly recommend anyone interested in this hop over to their platforms to check it out.
c) Cause area marketing is going fairly well I think? You may wish to consider voting for One for the World in our donation election.
d) We're about to have a 3000-person conference this weekend, our largest ever. "Increasing irrelevance" EA is decidedly not. Clearly our current approach is doing something right.
Some points:
- With e.g. DMI there are reputational considerations for interventions when your intervention is "convince people to get healthcare via mass radio" - as by doing it you put costs on the health system that you don't cover. There are similar things with any kind of partnership scaling. So you can't say it's the most effective thing ever and therefore dump $50m on it, as it can't absorb that in the system. Individual small donors don't have this issue though.
- The evidence for e.g. AMF is just really, really solid. And many donors prefer solid evidence over effectiveness. That's why GiveWell separates out the Top Charities Fund and the All Grants Fund. I believe many of the "more effective than AMF" charities receive All Grants Fund grants. They're just also separately fundraising because why wouldn't they.
- You may have noticed our Donation Election is for a comparatively tiny amount of money, and is really more of a community engagement exercise than an attempt to disperse large amounts. It's probably also functioning as a survey of community priorities, and some donors or grantmakers may take these into account when dispersing other funding, while retaining the ability to decide on their own evaluation criteria.
Just did a quick scan and Lafiya https://lafiyanigeria.org/ has Gates Foundation on its sponsor list, so yes I do believe Bill Gates has saved lives for under $2k.
You may be interested in our donation election! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YqYSGpRbLa7ppkuWs/meet-the-candidates-donation-election-2025 - all organisations on it have legitimate funding gaps.
I believe that Lafiya ($900ish), Development Media International ($600ish), and a few others on there are under estimated $2k per life saved. Some estimates are more certain than others, and estimates of past programs may not translate to future programs.
Away from the current candidates, there's also Taimaka for which future donations may well get a lot under $2k per life saved due to partnership scaling, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (which doesn't necessarily *save* lots of lives but has very cost-effective DALYs). I don't know if these have funding gaps though.
There's also One for the World which will get under $2k per life saved by using your money to raise several times more for the Against Malaria Foundation (probably) than you donate to it.
Overall, the answer is yes - saving a life is cheaper and cheaper.
I put Lafiya. I think they're doing amazing work, and their cost-effectiveness numbers for saving the life of an adult are possibly the most cost-effective I've seen.
(They also prevent a lot of newborn deaths, have substantial income benefits, and promote choice around children and women's empowerment, all generally good stuff on the side)
I just want to say thanks for all the orgs posting for marginal funding week for not having really donor-grabby messaging in their posts. No guilt trips, no exploitative photos of people in distress, etc. Just genuine explanations of what could be done with extra money.
I really dislike being the target of pushy giving tactics, because I'll be honest they just make me feel bad. And the fact that the EA community on the whole doesn't tolerate them is an amazing plus for being the kind of place I want to hang out in.
I'll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I'm personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It's not just GHD cause area marketing that's working.
My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.