GiveWell says "We maintain a cost-effectiveness threshold [bar] at a level where we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities we find above it", as I have been assuming. So I am confident it would be better to set the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's All Grants Fund (AGF) to GiveWell's bar, 6 times their benchmark in May 2026, instead of the cost-effectiveness of all the grants they made in a year.

You are currently assuming AGF has a marginal cost-effectiveness of around 16 times GiveWell's benchmark (see my 1st comment in this thread), 2.67 (= 16/6) times GiveWell's bar in May 2026. This is a significant difference in the context of global health interventions, whose cost-effectiveness is less uncertain compared to that of interventions targeting animals, and decreasing catastrophic risks neglecting effects on non-target individuals. So I suggest you update your assumption about the marginal cost-effectiveness of AGF before CCF makes more grants.

I am considering publishing a post about this on October 28. Let me know if you update your assumptions.

Hi Ariel. You may be interested in Brian Tomasik's post Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness.

It doesn't make sense to ask questions like, Does a computer program of a mind really instantiate consciousness? That question reifies consciousness as a thing that may or may not be produced by a program. Rather, the particles constituting the computer just move—and that's it. The question of whether a given physical operation is "conscious" is not a factual dispute but a definitional one: Do we want to define consciousness as including those sorts of physical operations?

Relatedly, you may like this linkpost for Ethics without sentience. Facing up to the probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness by François Kammerer.

The relevant question is how much animals' experiences are discounted relative to the global poor's experiences. If they're discounted the same amount, animal welfare remains ~1000x as cost-effective [ratio between the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler welfare and GiveWell's top charities neglecting effects on non-target individuals].

I got this estimate based on the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and neglecting effects on soil invertebrates. However, I have little idea about whether chicken welfare reforms increase or decrease welfare accounting for uncertainty in welfare comparisons across species, and effects on soil invertebrates. For the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob Fischer's book, which are similar to the ones RP initially presented, I think effects on soil invertebrates would be much larger than those on chickens. So, trusting the values in the book, and excluding interventions decreasing uncertainty, I would focus on increasing the welfare of soil invertebrates by increasing or decreasing agricultural land. I believe this can be achieved more cost-effectively by the Good Food Institute (GFI) or Giving What We Can (GWWC) than interventions improving the conditions of farmed animals. In reality, I favour interventions decreasing uncertainty about welfare comparisons across species, and effects on soil invertebrates.

Hello. You may be interested in David Thorstad's series Instrumental convergence and power seeking.

I see. I wonder if any of the patients who has benefitted from DMT would be interested in appearing on podcasts. I suspect founders of orgs fighting cluster headaches, people leading the research, and people with cluster headaches who have personally benefitted would more easily be accepted as guests than someone hired for public-facing work who is not leading the research, and has not personally beneffited.

Hello Jim. I had understood you used data from GiveWell (this is mentioned in the section I linked above with your methodology). However, as far as I know, GiveWell has never said the cost-effectiveness of their marginal spending in 2025 matched the cost-effectiveness of all their grants considered together in 2025, which is what you are assuming (see the quote after my question in the comment above). Here is what they say in the post you linked.

In 2025, we generally considered funding opportunities that our research estimated to be at least 8x our cost-effectiveness benchmark. Overall, we estimate that the average cost-effectiveness of the money spent across all our grants was approximately double that: 16x our benchmark.

So GiveWell estimates the cost-effectiveness of all their grants considered together in 2025 was 16 times their benchmark. The cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's marginal spending in 2025 was lower than this. GiveWell prioritises the most cost-effective grants, and some grants had a cost-effectiveness lower than 16 times their benchmark.

The marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's marginal spending in 2025 may have exceeded their bar. In principle, it could have been anything from 8 to 16 times their benchmark. In practice, I think it is close to 8 times their benchmark. Assuming they funded all grants with a cost-effectiveness higher than their bar of 8 times their benchark (considering all factors, not just the ones covered in the explicit cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA)), GiveWell granting more in 2025 would not have led to more grants with a cost-effectiveness higher than 8 times their benchmark (which would have been made anyway). It would have led to grants with a cost-effectiveness of around 8 times their benchmark (slightly below or above 8 times their benchmark because the distribution of the cost-effectiveness of the grants is not perfectly continuous).

Hi Brenton.

1. Salary
2. Opportunity cost
   1. Best quantified from the point of view of aligned funding: roughly, how much an aligned funder would be willing to pay for the impact they expect this person could produce if they weren’t working at their current org.
3. Capacity-building value
   1. Working at the organisation affects the expected value of the rest of that staff member’s career: they gain skills and context, and based on their experience there, the job increases/decreases their inclination to remain in the ecosystem.^[1]

Should the opportunity cost as defined above already cover capacity-building value? Funders should account for capacity-building value when assessing how much they would be willing to pay for the impact of hiring someone.

Hi Toby. Great post.

Hello Alfredo. Thanks for this update. I am glad you have many ideas to make progress.

Our project ClusterInfo is one of our attempts to reach such patients. It’s a website with free resources on how to diagnose and treat cluster headaches, currently available in eight languages. Since launching in late May, we’ve already reached over 11,000 unique visitors, and we’re thinking hard about how to make sure that anyone, anywhere searching for information on cluster headaches can quickly find the information they need. We work with patients, clinicians, and other advocates to ensure the content is accurate, comprehensive, and easy to understand. You can find some web analytics here, in case you’re curious.

Have you considered trying to spread the word about ClusterInfo on podcasts? Claude says Joe Rogan has had at least 3 episodes centred on DMT:

• Rick Strassman, #1854 (August 2022). Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the 1990s University of New Mexico DMT trials. He wrote “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”, a book about his findings and experiences researching DMT, and Rogan hosted the documentary version of it. sportskeeda
• Rick Strassman again, #2385 (26 September 2025). He discussed his 1990s DMT studies, and the two compared DMT experiences with ancient religious texts, especially the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Enoch. He also promoted a new book, which another summary describes as being about trauma, psychedelics and spiritual growth. shortformpodwise
• Andrew Gallimore, #2403 (30 October 2025). Gallimore is a chemical pharmacologist and neurobiologist. The interview was on DMT and the nature of reality. It covered his book, subtitled “Confronting the mystery of the world’s strangest drug”. singjupost

Hi Siebe. Nice point. Relatedly, I think people often overestimate the importance of the probability of sentience (in the EA community too).

• If you trust there is as little variation in the probability of sentience as suggested by the values used by Ambitious Impact (AIM) and Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), or presented in Bob Fischer’s book about comparing welfare across species, I believe there are other factors which may be more important for the probability of a small donation increasing animal welfare:
  • Donating to incremental instead of hits-based interventions.
  • Donating to smaller organisations.
  • Donating to organisations in lower income countries
• I wonder to what extent people donate to interventions targeting animals which are more likely to be sentient to boost the probability of increasing welfare. People routinely take actions which are super unlikely to actually matter:
  • I calculate driving a car for 10 km in Great Britain without a seatbelt leads to 1 additional death with a probability of 1 in 73.0 M. AIM uses a probability of sentience of shrimps which is 34.2 M times as high.
  • Andrew Gelman found the probability of a voter in a small United States (US) state polling around 50/50 in a close election nationally changing the outcome of the national election could get as high as 1 in 3 million. AIM uses a probability of sentience of shrimps which is 1.40 M times as high.

Hi Henning and Tom. Nice post.