Boston-based, NAO Lead at SecureBio, GWWC board member, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise. Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/news/ea
Jeff Kaufman 🔸
Karma: 18,239
Yup! Linked from the bottom of the post.
Also (not linked; learned about it in comments) a nursing home
Why is it good practice to allow a post to be on the forum for some time before the response is available to readers?
meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed
Note that this factory was just producing polypropylene pellets, not melt-blown fabric or masks themselves.
The pellets also last ~indefinitely if well stored (no UV, no heat, minimal oxygen, low humidity), and so are well suited for stockpiling. But you’d probably want to move up the chain and stockpile the fabric instead, or perhaps N95s themselves, or perhaps reusable respirators, …
Currently, when I see something that reads as AI written that’s a pretty strong signal that the nominal author doesn’t fully stand behind the post. I really hate it when I engage deeply with the arguments in a post and write a carefully reply, only to learn that the author wasn’t really trying to say that and didn’t review the output of their AI carefully enough.
I think maybe that wasn’t public until 2026-01 with Dario’s “All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth”?
almost as big as Coefficient Giving
Specifically within animal welfare (this wasn’t immediately clear to me, and I was very confused how CG’s grants could be so low)
Could probably get more support if you presented it as not limited to veganism: a lot of people have dietary restrictions (ex: allergies) and this is a way supermarkets could compete for customers.
It depends a lot on what the org is doing, but my understanding is that even most advocacy 501(c)4 organizations stick to lobbying and not campaigning (which would trigger 527(f) taxes). But you’re right, worth checking!
If you try the steps that follow it’s actually pretty annoying, unfortunately.
Thanks for sharing this! @Julia_Wise🔸 and I also decided to give more in 2025 (or early 2026), from a combination of pressing funding gaps and wanting to pull giving forward because of Anthropic donors.
What kinds of rooms would be better cleaned by the 4 smaller lamps vs. the 1 larger lamp (and whether that’s the most salient difference between Aerolamp and Nukit)?
I think the biggest difference between the Aerolamp and Nukit is the bulb: the Aerolamp uses a Care222 bulb which I expect to last much longer.
When it would be better to invest in a Far-UVC lamp vs. a high-CADR air purifier? I think HouseFresh is fairly trusted as a review site ― to be more concrete, who would you recommend buy a CleanAirKits Luggable over a UVC lamp?
It depends on how important it is to you to minimize noise, and how big the room is (since filter-based purifiers clean a given amount of air per minute while UVC depends on the size of the space). https://illuminate.osluv.org/ is not super user-friendly, but will calculate the CADR-equivalent for you of a given UVC setup.
Thanks for clarifying! I do think in a context like this one, where people are thinking about why offices etc don’t install far-UVC, your friend’s phrasing is likely to confuse people. For example, if I recommended someone not buy a car because it only had a one-year lifespan, I think they’d be grumpy if they later learned I meant it would only last one year of 24⁄7 operation. When we talk about “lifespan” we’re normally bringing in assumptions about expected usage.
most average only 1 year lifetime or less with decreasing efficacy over time, have to replace the entire system when it’s spent, adds to electricity cost when in use, and you need to install a lot of them for it to be effective because when run at too high power levels they produce large amounts of hazardous ozone
I think this is true for many options, but not the Aerolamp:
It is built around the Ushio Care222 B1. This is a long-lasting design, rated for 10,000 hours before falling below 70% output. That’s one year of 24⁄7 usage, five years of working hours, or much longer if run less often.
They do use electricity, but at 11W it’s a negligible 1-2¢ per hour.
Even one Aerolamp cleans a lot of air. You can model efficacy with Illuminate.
Well filtered lamps do not produce a lot of ozone. Unless your building is incredibly well sealed ozone levels would go up if you opened a window. If you’re very concerned you can run an air purifier that includes an activated carbon layer, which many do.
Thanks for writing this! I think this is a direction that it would be valuable for more people to move in, on the margin.
On the other hand, as someone who went pretty far in this direction and has since backed off some, I think there can be some pretty strong trade-offs here that I don’t see you getting into, around putting oneself in a position where you might spend time to save money in ways that are not actually worth it.
Let’s say you have a directly useful job, or you are earning to give in a field where your long-term compensation is going to track your overall productivity. These are both situations I’ve been in, and I think they’re reasonably common? There tends to be a lot of opportunities to choose between more work time or less spending. Ex:
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If my house needs repairs, it’s generally much cheaper for me to do it myself rather than hire someone, and I’ve done a lot of this over the years. To the extent that this is something I enjoy doing, it’s not a bad hobby! But more recently, I’ve been spending more of my “hobby” time on kinds of extra work for my org (tasks that I find less draining than my usual work). If a big repair came up, I think it would likely be actually a large mistake for me to put a lot of time into resolving that myself if that meant doing less of my primary work.
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Say I’m going to take a week off of work to spend with family. My work has unlimited vacation, so I could choose to take an extra day off on each end so I could travel by bus instead of spending more on a plane. But since it’s better for me to put more work in, being willing to spend the money on the plane is better.
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How big an area they cover depends on how long the sight lines are: the more air the light can travel through the more it can clean. It’s not linear, though, and there are different effects for different pathogens because some are quickly inactivated with low levels of UVC and others need more. The modeling tool Illuminate can be very useful here; here’s something I wrote up when I was figuring out what made sense for the dance hall: Assessing Far UVC Positioning.
There are very few providers, and hardly any of them sell an off-the-shelf product. You usually can’t just buy a lamp to try it out—you have to call the company, get a consultation, and often have someone from the company come install the lamp. It’s a lot of overhead for an expensive product that most people have never heard of.
This has changed! You can buy an Aerolamp for $500. I have one for my own use, and my dance organization uses four.
[EDIT: expanded this into a post]
What is our estimate for how logarithmic the utility functions of common EA charities are?
The argument is less about how the value of the marginal dollar falls off, but instead about how smoother funding is usually much more valuable to projects. Imagine I’m trying to decide between donating $100k today and $100k in a year, or $200k today. If I expect everyone else together will be donating $1M today and $10M in a year, then I should probably pick the $200k today. The idea is that the charity can probably much more productively use $1.2M today and $10M in a year than $1.1M today and $10.1M in a year.
EDIT: added something like this to the post
They want to work at mission-driven organizations like SecureBio, … Unfortunately, these organizations are often too busy working on the problems themselves to invest in younger, inexperienced trainees.
Flagging that while SecureBio has hired mostly senior people, we do have a relatively junior job posting open at the Nucleic Acid Observatory for a Bioinformatics Engineer. We’d love to see more applicants, and we’re offering a significant referral bonus if you know anyone who might be a good fit!
We’re not currently looking for engineers right out of undergrad (“2+ years of professional experience in industry or academia”) but it’s also not five to ten years skill building first. And in our case it’s true that they “don’t need another degree”.
Seems worth doing!