I'm a doctor working towards the dream that every human will have access to high quality healthcare. I'm a medic and director of OneDay Health, which has launched 53 simple but comprehensive nurse-led health centers in remote rural Ugandan Villages. A huge thanks to the EA Cambridge student community in 2018 for helping me realise that I could do more good by focusing on providing healthcare in remote places.
Thanks for the update, and the reasons for the name change make s lot of sense
Instinctively i don't love the new name. The word "coefficient" sounds mathsy/nerdy/complicated, while most people don't know what the word coefficient actually means. The reasoning behind the name does resonate through and i can understand the appeal.
But my instincts are probably wrong though if you've been working with an agency and the team likes it too.
All the best for the future Coefficient Giving!
Thanks @mal_graham🔸 this is super helpful and makes more sense now. I think it would make your argument far more complete if you put something like your third and fourth paragraphs here in your main article.
And no I'm personally not worried about interventions being ecologically inert.
As a side note its interesting that you aren't putting much effort into making interventions happen yet - my loose advice would be to get started trying some things. I get that you're trying to build a field, but to have real-world proof of this tractability it might be better to try something sooner rather than later? Otherwise it will remain theory. I'm not too fussed about arguing whether an intervention will be difficult or not - in general I think we are likely to underestimate how difficult an intervention might be.
Show me a couple of relatively easy wins (even small-ish ones) an I'll be right on board :).
Thanks for this great write up, and it all sounds very reasonable. I really respect that the orgs here didn't go crazy claiming they could spend ludicrous amounts of money straight away. I agree with @MichaelDickens that is crazy how little funding there is in this area, and that's from someone who might rate animal welfare stuff 1000x less important than him haha.
As a rule of thumb in the global health world at least, I think there are few orgs it's where it makes sense to increase spending than 2x - 3x funding year on year, scaling up orgs and operations isn't easy.
I think I said this on another post, but in the wild animal welfare space I would love to see a couple of clear practical wins, even if really small to show that change is possible here, and learn how to make change. Even if it's more token than meaningful. Most of these orgs seem heavily focused on research which is helpful, but I think we can learn a lot as well from doing things and seeing what happens.
Kudos for the economist for my favourite mainstream news article on the Anthropalypse yet
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/08/13/silicon-valleys-ai-boom-is-remaking-american-charity
(Behind a paywall)
I think it outlines the issues very well, and you won't see a mainstream news article start as smart as this very often.
"EACH DOLLAR given to charity may soon do less good. In the coming years the marginal cost of saving a child’s life from disease or starvation could jump from about $5,000 to $15,000, or more. This sounds worrying. In fact it is good news, argues Alexander Berger of Coefficient Giving, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential grantmakers. Non-profits like his spend on cheap, scalable interventions first—say, by buying malaria nets before malaria vaccines. If an influx of donations pays for all the inexpensive ways of doing good, then the rest flows into costlier acts of altruism that can save yet more lives."
I read this just because of this into "every 5 minutes while writing this post, I had to stop to do 13 push-ups, and when I could no longer complete my required number, I had to upload it.
And I can't believe you did 468 pushups that's crazy. I would have published after maybe 10 minutes under these rules?
Good reminder to be a bit more focused with my podcasts/reading. I like to have broad understanding, but its probably going too far that way.
Yeah it might not increase that much or at all (although perhaps lightcone folks are more connected to doers the fund might be funding, which would increase conflict of interest). My point was that especially in AI grantmaking where the field is small, I think it might always be too strong/incorrect to say there might not be even "the perception of conflict of interest"
Conflict of interest is not necessarily a big problem and probably completely unavoidable in the AI safety sphere, but I think it's good to be honest that it's a reality.
This is great I love the framing, helps me think more clearly.
For our nurses at OneDay Health, its very much "bar" hiring. We might interview 15 nurses and offer between 1 and 3 jobs. Wheras for management positions its "slot" hiring really.
"Oliver, I, and potentially other LTFF staff will participate in the first round, so routing this money through the Commons means the remaining LTFF balance is still allocated in part by the judgement of the LTFF fund managers at the time the donors made their donation. To avoid any perception of conflict of interest, Lightcone has agreed to waive its administrative fees on this transaction, so the 3% platform fee and 2% evaluator fee will not be charged on the LTFF contribution."
I think this is a good move, but I think there will remain many genuine conflicts of interests in these grants (which is both inevitable and OK as long as its recognised). Conflict of interest is about more than admin fees - more importantly its about bias towards where money gets allocated. Given how small the field is I'm sure many who get allocated money will be friends and former colleagues of those given the money, whether its former LTFF or Lightcone staff who are giving the money.
Thanks and I should clarify this EXCLUDES people I know pretty well working in GHD grantmaking jobs outside EA, where salaries are often much higher.
#Quickmaths