I’m currently a co-director at EA Netherlands (with Marieke de Visscher). We’re working to build and strengthen the EA community here.
Before this, I worked as a consultant on urban socioeconomic development projects and programmes funded by the EU. Before that, I studied liberal arts (in the UK) and then philosophy (in the Netherlands).
Hit me up if you wanna find out about the Dutch EA community! :)
I agree she’s now likely to be less vulnerable than she was—I assume she’s learned something from her experience. However, I think she’s still more likely to be vulnerable in this way than someone who has no track record, or has a positive track record. People aren’t static, but they’re also far from being perfectly fluid.
I disagree with you on (2). I’m staying with friends at the moment. One of them is working in an EA-adjacent organisation but has never been to an EAG or anything like that. She’d already heard yesterday about ‘some EA org hiring one of the convicted FTX people’ and brought it up with me. She’s not a student; she’s just online.
I think Nick Bostrom left a reasonable impression on a subset of people who are actually pretty relevant to the project of effective altruism. Friends whom I’d put in the general category of ‘informed readers of the New York Times’ still say things to me like, ‘What about that Bostrom guy? Seems pretty racist...’. It’s the same with FTX, the EA castle, blah blah.
And then people I’ve spoken with who work with ultra-high-net-worth individuals say they have to be very careful about associating with EA because it has a terrible reputation amongst a large proportion of these individuals, particularly in the US, largely because of FTX.
(FWIW, I think Austin’s decision is a bad one in and of itself—reputation stuff put to one side. My reading of Caroline’s court transcripts, Going Infinite, etc., suggests to me she’s a smart, hardworking, well-intentioned individual who is vulnerable to doing things she disagrees with when encouraged to do them by a sufficiently ‘charismatic’ individual. In other words, not someone who should be in a high-leverage role).
I picked one claim from this more or less at random to check—the fourfold assumption about government spending—and I don’t think it’s accurate.
The sentence: “they also argue that the resources governments contribute would have been used less efficiently elsewhere, often assuming a fourfold difference in effectiveness (GiveWell, 2018b).”
I don’t think the 2018 post cited contains that assumption. The only 4:1 ratio I can see comes from a hypothetical: a charity buys $5,000 of “magic pills”, the government spends $5,000 distributing them, 1,000 lives are saved, and without the charity the government’s money would have saved 250.
The parameter GiveWell actually states in that post is that the counterfactual value of government funds is ~75% as cost-effective as GiveDirectly.
That’s also quite an old blog post, so I checked the current figure used in GiveWell’s SMC analysis. There, each dollar of in-kind government resources is estimated at around 1⁄20 of the value of SMC spending, not 1⁄4.
They also explain where the 1⁄20 comes from. Interestingly, it doesn’t imply a particularly low opinion of government effectiveness.
GiveWell guesses the displaced resources split 80/10/10 across health, education and social security, then estimates the value of each separately.
Health comes out at 0.0056 units of value per dollar. The composition is from Uganda’s National Health Expenditure Accounts 2013-14 — roughly 31% HIV/AIDS, 22% malaria, then maternal conditions, respiratory infections, perinatal conditions, injuries, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal disease. Each of the eight largest categories gets a guessed cost per life saved ($30,000 for HIV/AIDS, $10,000 for malaria, $20,000 for most of the rest) and is classified as saving either adult or under-five lives. Categories without a guess, about a quarter of spending, are dropped and the rest rescaled. That produces a weighted $12,254 per child life and $30,000 per adult life, split 45⁄55, which GiveWell converts using its moral weights of 116 for a child death and 73 for an adult death.
Education (0.0028) and social security (0.0026) are done similarly, benchmarked against GiveDirectly rather than against lives saved. Weighted 80/10/10, that gives an overall estimate of 0.005 units of value per dollar.
Cash transfers sit at 0.0034 in the same model. So government spending is being valued at roughly 1.5x unconditional cash transfers — above GiveWell’s unit of account, though well below the 10x bar it requires to fund something.
The gap is large because SMC is modelled as exceptional, not because domestic institutions are rated poorly.
I’ve only checked this one claim, so I can’t say anything about the rest. I know Dirk-Jan a bit—he spoke at EAGxAmsterdam in December—and Martijn is on EAN’s board (for full disclosure). I’ll look through this in more detail and get in touch with Dirk-Jan. I haven’t sent this comment to Martijn to check; as he mentions in his comment, most of the writing was done by Dirk-Jan.
Edit: To be clear, none of this necessarily undermines the broader argument—you could read it as strengthening it. But it does look like a factual error, and I’d argue “GiveWell assumes a fourfold difference” is a mischaracterisation. It isn’t fourfold, and it isn’t an assumption: it’s an estimate, built up from stated components, and in the SMC case it comes out around 1⁄20.
The version I’d defend is closer to: GiveWell estimates a large difference, around twentyfold in one case.
It would be cool to hear from Dirk-Jan how he’d improve on that estimate!
Good question! I’ve updated the readme with the info
I used Claude to build a booking web app for the EA Netherlands coworking office and open-sourced it (MIT), in case you run a similar space: https://github.com/ea-netherlands/ean-office
It’s removed lots of small, fiddly jobs on our side, and our users seem to love it!
It does desk booking (full or half days), QR check-in at the door, a trial day for first-time visitors that an admin approves, automatic reminders and a no-show escalation ladder, member-proposed evening events and whole-office co-working days — and it produces the occupancy and attendance figures our funder report asks for. It replaced an Airtable form, an email approval chain, and a shared Google Sheet. Hosting is €0 on free tiers.
My take: have you spoken with key decision-makers about incentivising them to write more on the forum instead of discussing things internally in Google Docs or whatever?
IIRC, 80k stopped using their DIPY(?) metric several years ago.
If you look through their recent reports, they mostly share metrics related to engagement with their programmes/services. And then occasionally there is an additional survey, e.g., the job board survey in their H2 2025 report.
From what I understand, CG likes grantees to report individual narrative case studies, and then these are coded. At least, that’s how it works for the CEA’s CBG programme. So maybe that’s what 80k does as well? And then this is supplemented with engagement metrics.
If that’s the case, it’s pretty similar to CEA’s system.
Be grumpy! I think the forum lacks spice.
Tier 5 is about career changes. That seems like a sensible thing to be tracking, no?
But it’s a lagging indicator so to me it also makes sense to look at engagement at other points in the funnel.
They said growth was their focus, set goals, and, by their own account, did well.
However, the only place I’ve ‘felt’ their growth (beyond their reports) was with EAGxAmsterdam (attendance was up 36%). But I don’t know how much of that was due to things we did vs what CEA did.
My guess is there really is growth, but it’s not ‘felt’ by people like you and me because of where that growth is happening.
And yeah, they’ve struggled to hire for comms. They’ve admitted this. Last I heard, their hiring team was at full capacity hiring for other functions, so I guess they’re prioritising sorting their core programmes before going hard on comms.
I’ve said it before, but I really do think a General Assembly responsible for holding CEA’s board accountable would help keep everyone up to date with what CEA’s doing.
I can’t remember, to be honest, nothing fancy...
Thanks! Useful to see this laid out. I’d like to hear more on the marketing and communications side: Justin’s video was good, but what else is in the plan there?
Sharing what we’re doing at EA Netherlands in case it’s a useful point of comparison. Most of our effort has gone into LinkedIn — brand-building posts on my personal page, plus an automated outreach campaign for EAGx — and Instagram performance ads for our introductory course and EAGx. So the brand-building is currently all organic and all on LinkedIn; the paid work is event-led. I’m interested in trying more audio and video content for organic brand work, and running an always-on brand campaign.
We’re targeting proto-EAs in the Netherlands, and within that we segment by skills and career capital rather than demographics: policy and politics, organisation building, research, communicating ideas, and existing expertise in a priority problem area.
GiveWell accounts for government spending through quantitative adjustments for ‘fungibility’ and ‘leverage’, estimating both the probability that their funding alters government budgets and the comparative value of those displaced funds. These adjustments are explicitly included in their cost-effectiveness models. You can go through their spreadsheets and check out their inputs and assumptions.
Fungibility and Displacement: GiveWell evaluates whether philanthropic funding frees up a beneficiary government’s domestic budget to spend elsewhere, or conversely, whether the government would have funded the intervention anyway (the counterfactual).
Counterfactual Value: They assign a rough numerical value to what a government would have done with the money otherwise—estimating, for instance, that general counterfactual government spending is worth a fraction (such as roughly 75% or lower, depending on the specific model and sector) of direct cash transfers.
Leverage Effects: If a grant successfully persuades or helps a government scale up a highly cost-effective program using its own domestic resources, GiveWell attempts to credit that amplified impact to the initial philanthropic investment.
What about new charities?
Charities incubated by the main EA global health incubator, Ambitious Impact (AIM), view government adoption not just as a bonus, but as their primary strategy for massive, cost-effective scaling.
Unlike established organisations that often run parallel to public systems, AIM’s incubation model heavily favours non-profits designed to systematically plug ‘execution gaps’ in public health. Their goal is to build, prove, and hand over the playbook to state and national governments.
Lafiya might be a good example. They distribute modern contraceptives in northern Nigeria through a network of community health workers called “Lafiya Sisters”. They do not view themselves as a permanent, independent health provider; their explicitly stated scaling strategy is to “work with governments to execute, pay for, and take ownership of the model”.
Disclaimer: I knew this info but was feeling lazy so got AI to write it up.
I interpreted Huw’s question to be more about the region being a hub (or not) rather than there being a hub in the region. Although of course population density helps with general hub-y-ness
Really useful, thanks for preparing and publishing on here!
Excellent! Would be nice to get down to brass tacks as well. E.g., we’ve been spending 6-10% of our budget on this the past couple of years, and substantial staff time.
Lots of questions about her views on EA marketing and communications please! How much effort does she think we should be spending on it, what sort of stuff we should be doing (beyond what we’ve already seen her do at EAA), etc. Would also like to hear her takes on why some orgs are reluctant/struggle to increase their investments in this area
Hey who you calling lesser?! ;)
Tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference in hub status between the Netherlands and Australia, but I haven’t been to Australia so that’s a low confidence take
Good luck! I think there are other people on here better suited to advising on launching a group in the US but if you’d like to hear about how our uni organisers in the Netherlands do it just drop me a line :)
I think if she really was overcompensating she wouldn’t go for this role because a) the ethics of hiring her are clearly contestable (check out the number of comments on this post) and b) Manifund has made contestable decisions in the recent past.