I've never been more proud to be part of the Effective Altruism movement

Knew it was a bit too good to be true 🥲 Meltblown PP rolls and facepiece moulds seem like the key upstream bottlenecks to N95 / reusable respirator production.

More reason to advocate for pre-securing offshore oil rig-style labour contracts + government compliance (NIOSH) for surging PPE production.

Intuitively, advocating for private companies to maximise production and removing the friction to do so feels more tractable than advocating federal governments to stockpile +5 billion additional N95s. Ideally we should still pursue both

500M in N95 mask materials in 28 days from just 2 plants is a really massive number, that's 17M per day!

Quick BOTEC: 50M essential workers in the US demand 10M N95 masks per day, assuming the best N95 masks on the market today have a 5-day lifecycle. Even if they demanded 50M day, if we increased the number of plants from 2 to 10 (assuming the next 8 have 50% the max capacity of the Braskem plants), this might potentially solve the meltblown bottleneck.

Updates me toward thinking meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed.

If similar labour pre-commitments and coordination mechanisms could be secured across other PPE stages before the next pandemic, this could potentially shift the surge vs stockpile ratio more towards surge.

Welcome to the UK Gergo! 😊

As someone not in a full-time impact job, I find thinking about Movement Roles is doubly important! By de-coupling from the job market, this is a powerful framing to be more agentic. Strong upvoted this post

Deeply appreciate this Kristof. Interesting that at a broad level (what are the best charities, how to help more people), it cites credible and evidence-based resources.

Then when discussing animals and Africa - i.e. more long-tail keywords - it does not. 

There is probably low-hanging opportunity here for charities to write up more indexable FAQs and blogposts that match the language a user would use when asking an LLM a question (or even Google). 

Helpful indeed, and thanks for the spreadsheet!

Hey Joel, thanks for the writeup, super insightful!

"the monetary value of an average GWWC pledge as 146 DALYs averted per pledge (equivalent to USD 20,000 in GiveWell donations)"

Is that $20K USD comparable to GWWC's headline figure of $100K USD per 10% pledge, or some other headline metric?

I note two interesting datapoints versus GWWC's figures:

1. 16 year lifespan vs GWWC's 35.1 <- Less than half of GWWC's lifespan?
2. 35% counterfactuality adjustment versus GWWC's 33% <- Only +2% uplift versus the Western context?

Not sure how the above parses with this paragraph: "On the positive side, Asian pledgers are counterfactually less likely to do effective giving, and give for a greater number of years."

I liked this line most: "It makes them a problem-solver, rather than putting them on the defensive."

In my experience advocating effective giving as a layperson, I find that inviting people to have more agency has generally led to my best engagement (and pledges!)

I think all comments here are accurate. 

• $100K is the headline figure
• $15K is the attribution to GWWC (would be much harder for someone to pledge without all the digital infrastructure, research, community etc)
• $47K is what you'd discount from $100K if you believe cost-effectiveness of the best charities decrease over time as the problem becomes more "solved", and if a pledger is giving a % of their donation below the GiveWell bar

If I take 10% of the median London annual salary (£4.75K) then assume they work 30 more years (£143K), this roughly in line with GWWC's headline figure. 

At 1%, if we assume annual inflation = annual salary increases = annual negative discounts on cost-effectiveness of top charities we still get ~£14K LTV of a 1% pledge. Maybe apply -£4K discounts on pledge dropouts or changes in life circumstance to £10K. 

How you wish to apply % attribution to GWWC's infrastructure / paid ads / in-person advocacy / the local EA meetup / online forums is probably a messier science and hotly debated. Good thing OP and I aren't doing this outside a personal capacity. 

That said I'd bet that OP's co-workers and mine have much limited exposure to EA, so the counterfactual upside of personal advocacy is much higher, no matter if you take from the $10K headline or $4.7K time-discounted high-impact donation per 1% pledge.

At the end of the day £10K will still go to high-impact nonprofits, and it would have been a community effort :)