Kaleem Ahmid.
Previously an Entrepreneur in Residence at EV, Community Builder at Northeastern and in Boston, a Visiting Scholar at JHU Center for Health Security, and EAGxBoston 2022 and EAGxNYC 2023 organiser.
Kaleem
Karma: 2,384
lol I am one of the people who (maybe narrowly?) missed out on the incubation program. Yeah I have emailed them about hopefully people connected with any promising collaborators.
Thanks for the encouragement and the ideas :)
Expressions of Interest: Starting an Islamic Effective Giving Org
I haven’t done any enough research to know how much this would affect the estimates but I do want to point out that zakat is calculated on wealth, and wealth is not the same thing as GDP (maybe you’re already aware of this and think that GDP is a good enough proxy to estimate wealth).
On Estimates of how much Zakat there is
FAW#3
An interesting idea (no evidence that it would work) - just putting it here for preservation more than anything else:
Insects are haraam to eat. This is obviously good news in that it means at least 20% of the global population is unlikely to contribute to the demand for insects as food. However it doesn’t automatically rule-out that muslims will contribute to the demand for insects through the consumption of farmed-animals who we might use insects to feed—e.g. Chickens and Fish.
It might be worth finding out if muslims would care if their chicken or fish was unnecessarily fead exclusively haraam food instead of plant-based feed. My experience as a muslim makes me feel like a lot of people would much rather prefer the animals they consume to not be fead on things which they themselves wouldn’t consider halaal.
We should hire leaders based on how well suited they are to running the organization in question
I’d argue that an important part of running a new philanthropic organisation is stakeholder engagement and relationship management, and this was not a good example of fostering a good relationship with someone who is highly influential and a likely source of valuable connections with respect to FF’s goals.
I think I agree with the general point you’re making, but I specifically I disagree that the longtermist project is incompatible with good PR, and that it doesn’t appeal to common moral intuition (eg people do care about climate change, nuclear war, rogue AI, deadly pandemics).
EA (via discussion of SBF and FTX) was briefly discussed on the The Rest is Politics Podcast today (the 3rd of April) and …. I’m really irritated by what was said. This is one of the largest politics podcasts in the world at the moment, and has a seriously influential listener-base.
Rory Stewart said that after 15min someone at FTXFF cut his call with Rory short because that person wanted to go have lunch. The person reportedly also said “I don’t care about poverty”.
Rory Stewart (the ex-President of GiveDirectly, and ex-MP) now seems to think that we are weird futurists who care more about “asteroids and killer robots” than we care about the 700M people currently in poverty.
Great work, whoever that FTX person was...
I was going to suggest the same thing but I wanted to be able to read the article before pointing this out
Can you post a non-paywalled version, if possible?
I’m sorry that you had to go through this terrible event, but thanks for writing this—I found it really moving and I think the lesson is a good one. I think you conveyed the value of moth wellbeing, and your respect for it, in a touching way.
I enjoyed this a lot, thanks !
Done ✅
If someone knows/is able to put me in touch with Mehdi Hassan, I’d be SUPER grateful
[Question] Legal advice in the UAE
Looking for potential co-founders for an Effective Zakat org.
I’m exploring launching a new org which aims at redirecting zakat to effective charities. The whole plan is extremely speculative at the moment (I’m currently funded to explore this idea, including looking for potential co-founders). I’m open to people from different backgrounds, locations, and experience levels. Ideally you’d be someone who is Muslim and has a decent amount of theological understanding around zakat, or have a history of working in Islamic Philanthropy. Fluent Arabic speakers would be a huge plus.
FAW#2.
An interesting potentially high-impact intervention: banning dog meat production/trade in Indonesia.
I was surprised to find out that Indonesia produces/consumes ~1M dogs per year, given that it’s ~89% Muslim, and dogs are absolutely not permissible to consume in Islam. For context, very quick googling and estimating leads me to believe that the number of dogs killed per year in Indonesia is ~half the number of cows consumed in Indonesia per year (nowhere near the ~700M chickens per year though).
I’d assume it’d be WAY easier to help push through a dog meat ban in Indonesia than it would be to get people to eat less chicken or beef? I know there are already quite a few orgs working for dog meat bans across all of Asia, and (at least one) working in some capacity towards a ban in Indonesia (which OP has mad a small grant to, but I don’t think it was specifically for this issue). This could be a very cost effective opportunity in terms of $/animal saved, given that I assume there’d be quite a lot of domestic and international support.
Leonie and Akhil, are there any results from this would could be shared?
This does answer the question and is much appreciated! Do you have any sources I can cite (other than the paper linked in your response) ?
didn’t pan out, unfortunately