Kestrel🔸

• Kestrel🔸 3 Dec 2025 14:20 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: Bella’s Quick takes

  I’ll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I’m personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It’s not just GHD cause area marketing that’s working.

  My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.

• Kestrel🔸 3 Dec 2025 9:46 UTC

  12 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Stop Ap­ply­ing And Get To Work

  I agree with this.

  It seems to me that people are spending a lot of time (as in months and months!) applying for extremely oversubscribed things that they hope will gain them experience and a track record. EA is getting bottlenecked by application evaluation.

  The huge personal resource investment needed to make you look good and succeed on a really competitive resume, interview, application process etc—can probably be better spent on effective volunteering, assuming you’re *actually* relatively good at the work. The counterfactual difference in world impact is huge—rather than being a resource investment you’re a resource contributor. And it will also gain you experience and a track record.

  On a related note re: CEEALAR, anyone who wants to do some fundraising for effective charities is welcome to come upskill, connect, and get productive at CEEALAR for the Effective Giving Organiser Retreat 6th-9th February 2026 at the EA Hotel, Blackpool, UK. This retreat is free, with all meals and accommodation included. Run by me, with appearances from One for the World and Giving What We Can. https://​​forms.gle/​​E4Kqp32TUnG4DcVa7 to sign up. Disclaimer: I paid CEEALAR for this event out of my pledge money because it’s part of the work I’m doing to get effective giving volunteer fundraising back on the EA community map.

  Lastly I want to agree that CEEALAR is amazingly cost-efficient and impactful, and the fact that they have to go through this song and dance every single year it seems (thereby distracting their organisers from cracking on with the object-level work of training and incubating EAs and EA organisations) is clearly a major red flag about the short-termist nature of EA’s grantmaking systems for anyone looking to set up physical EA infrastructure in future. I would like CEEALAR to be able to stop applying and get to work.

• Kestrel🔸 2 Dec 2025 14:24 UTC

  31 points

  5 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bella’s comment on: Bella’s Quick takes

  I see this take a lot.

  My immediate response is fourfold:

  a) a lot of EA’s core worldview philosophy is about doing boring stuff (that works), and so we attract people with an aesthetic repulsion to overmarketing that stick here and contribute highly. It’s not clear that standard marketing strategies work for something like EA without making such people more likely to leave, so I would be hesitant to propose changes to the current setup.

  b) the School of Moral Ambition is already doing essentially a more marketed version of EA. I highly recommend anyone interested in this hop over to their platforms to check it out.

  c) Cause area marketing is going fairly well I think? You may wish to consider voting for One for the World in our donation election.

  d) We’re about to have a 3000-person conference this weekend, our largest ever. “Increasing irrelevance” EA is decidedly not. Clearly our current approach is doing something right.

• Kestrel🔸 27 Nov 2025 13:12 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jamie in Chile’s comment on: Can Bill Gates Save A Life for Un­der $2,000?

  Some points:

  • With e.g. DMI there are reputational considerations for interventions when your intervention is “convince people to get healthcare via mass radio”—as by doing it you put costs on the health system that you don’t cover. There are similar things with any kind of partnership scaling. So you can’t say it’s the most effective thing ever and therefore dump $50m on it, as it can’t absorb that in the system. Individual small donors don’t have this issue though.

  • The evidence for e.g. AMF is just really, really solid. And many donors prefer solid evidence over effectiveness. That’s why GiveWell separates out the Top Charities Fund and the All Grants Fund. I believe many of the “more effective than AMF” charities receive All Grants Fund grants. They’re just also separately fundraising because why wouldn’t they.

  • You may have noticed our Donation Election is for a comparatively tiny amount of money, and is really more of a community engagement exercise than an attempt to disperse large amounts. It’s probably also functioning as a survey of community priorities, and some donors or grantmakers may take these into account when dispersing other funding, while retaining the ability to decide on their own evaluation criteria.

• Kestrel🔸 26 Nov 2025 19:04 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: Can Bill Gates Save A Life for Un­der $2,000?

  Just did a quick scan and Lafiya https://​​lafiyanigeria.org/​​ has Gates Foundation on its sponsor list, so yes I do believe Bill Gates has saved lives for under $2k.

• Kestrel🔸 26 Nov 2025 18:58 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Can Bill Gates Save A Life for Un­der $2,000?

  You may be interested in our donation election! https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​YqYSGpRbLa7ppkuWs/​​meet-the-candidates-donation-election-2025 - all organisations on it have legitimate funding gaps.

  I believe that Lafiya ($900ish), Development Media International ($600ish), and a few others on there are under estimated $2k per life saved. Some estimates are more certain than others, and estimates of past programs may not translate to future programs.

  Away from the current candidates, there’s also Taimaka for which future donations may well get a lot under $2k per life saved due to partnership scaling, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (which doesn’t necessarily *save* lots of lives but has very cost-effective DALYs). I don’t know if these have funding gaps though.

  There’s also One for the World which will get under $2k per life saved by using your money to raise several times more for the Against Malaria Foundation (probably) than you donate to it.

  Overall, the answer is yes—saving a life is cheaper and cheaper.

• Kestrel🔸 26 Nov 2025 12:08 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Kaleem’s Shortform

  Just to let you know, the post-election-vote commenting mechanism isn’t working right on my phone—I can’t see comments I write. I assume it’s something to do with dark mode, as I’m typing white text on a white background.

• Kestrel🔸 26 Nov 2025 8:40 UTC

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Dona­tion Elec­tion Dis­cus­sion Thread

  I put Lafiya. I think they’re doing amazing work, and their cost-effectiveness numbers for saving the life of an adult are possibly the most cost-effective I’ve seen.

  (They also prevent a lot of newborn deaths, have substantial income benefits, and promote choice around children and women’s empowerment, all generally good stuff on the side)

• Kestrel🔸 25 Nov 2025 21:14 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: One woman is kil­led ev­ery 11 min­utes. Is EA pay­ing at­ten­tion?

  I agree that there are probably some good charities EA could incubate.

  I encourage anyone passionate about this cause area to vote for NOVAH in the donation election.

• Kestrel🔸 25 Nov 2025 13:52 UTC

  29 points

  10 ∶ 0

  on: Kestrel’s Quick takes

  I just want to say thanks for all the orgs posting for marginal funding week for not having really donor-grabby messaging in their posts. No guilt trips, no exploitative photos of people in distress, etc. Just genuine explanations of what could be done with extra money.

  I really dislike being the target of pushy giving tactics, because I’ll be honest they just make me feel bad. And the fact that the EA community on the whole doesn’t tolerate them is an amazing plus for being the kind of place I want to hang out in.

• Kestrel🔸 23 Nov 2025 0:38 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: OFTW: Early Re­sults from New Growth Strategy

  I’m going to have a crack at the rationale, it’s probably several things:

  • One for the World’s statistical recorded RoI from tracked donations /​ pledges through their platform is less than that of other effective giving infrastructure opportunities. (Note: it’s still significantly above 1x, which is the bar one should care about if considering between this and AMF entirely from an effectiveness standpoint with zero reputation considerations—however the portfolio average is about 6x I believe)

  • As I say in my comment, One for the World hits the issue that in-person engagement of large numbers of people giving small amounts is an absolute *nightmare* to track reliable statistics for. People will just give money without saying it was because of you (and why wouldn’t they, really?) so the RoI is definitely an undercount, but we don’t know by how much. This is compared to running more passive online platforms, where the RoI may well be an overcount (people pick your platform who would have otherwise picked a different platform). Or UHNW donations where you can reasonably track things even if they weren’t through a platform.

  • It’s my personal witnessing that OftW is really quite good at spreading the effective giving message, but people who respond really well to that can end up either choosing direct to charity, GiveWell, or Giving What We Can as their donation platform or bouncing through to other areas of the EA community. Thus the OftW enterprise is functioning as a leaky sieve of good things while struggling to achieve its core stated goal of large numbers of 1% pledgers through its own donation platform. I personally don’t mind this at all but I’m sure OftW are a little exasperated.

  • It’s been recently noted that setting up an online donation platform in a new country that didn’t previously have one is really quite a cost-effective strategy, and there’s lots of absorbency for doing that for a whole bunch of different countries. This puts quite a lot of pressure on a CG grant pot of a fixed size.

  • I imagine that One for the World is possibly one of the only effective giving infrastructure organisations that could survive without money from CG, because a) its operating costs are small, something like $350k a year total, a fraction of the cost of e.g. Giving What We Can, b) it is cultivating a pretty large community of volunteers and supportive medium-high earners, many of whom are invested in its success. So there may be a degree of “cut it loose and see if it flies” going on.

• Kestrel🔸 22 Nov 2025 16:28 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: OFTW: Early Re­sults from New Growth Strategy

  Disclaimer: I’m one of the community ambassadors.

  I imagine the numbers here probably underestimate the scale of the multiplier effect. There exist people inspired to give effectively by event attendance who don’t log or advertise it. And there exist people who will go to something set up by One for the World, do their research into effective giving, and then 10% pledge at Giving What We Can without involving One for the World. Which is all a major headache for One for the World’s statistical tracking. Nonetheless, the trend lines are very clear that the current approach is working well.

  I would consider donations to One for the World one of the most effective ways of funding effective global health and development work.

• Kestrel🔸 21 Nov 2025 10:28 UTC

  2 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: CEEALAR (EA Ho­tel) Needs a New Roof

  As someone who very much worries about EA losing foothold in America due to the political situation, I’m hopeful we can keep up investment in our UK infrastructure (as well as continue expansion to other countries).

• Kestrel🔸 19 Nov 2025 9:02 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Agnes Stenlund 🔸’s comment on: James Her­bert’s Shortform

  Thanks for putting it back!

  It’s really important to me, as I can sometimes find that the (non-EA) charity and government world is a bunch of status-based competition over funding pots that encourages flattery and truth distortions and bitterness.

  And, ok, EA can be like that as well, but ideally it isn’t—ideally we’d be totally happy for our pet project to get cancelled and the money reallocated to doing a similar thing more efficiently. And also to uphold the people this happens to, recognising their inherent worth as community members and collaborators.

• Kestrel🔸 13 Nov 2025 17:53 UTC

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: James Her­bert’s Shortform

  ...where’d the collaborative spirit go? The rest is mostly relabeling, so I’d let it slide, but that does seem like a glaring omission. Did EAs helping each other not poll well in a non-EA focus group or something?

• Kestrel🔸 11 Nov 2025 23:06 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: Cause prio cruxes in 2026?

  (the ability or lack thereof for dual-use of political infrastructure across EA causes affects the extent to which I would personally whack $20 million at political infrastructure development for EA or not, being as I am not convinced by AI safety as the far and away top cause area.)

• Kestrel🔸 11 Nov 2025 22:45 UTC

  11 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Cause prio cruxes in 2026?

  EA is pivoting hard into policy development, political organising, and comms work, driven from the AI side of things.

  To what extent is it possible to leverage the resulting political-ability capital EA develops towards lobbying governments for the restoration of effective international aid commitments?

Effec­tive Giv­ing Or­ganiser Retreat

• Kestrel🔸 10 Nov 2025 18:20 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Lack of Diver­sity Within EA

  I agree with you that improving intracommunity experience is important.

Effec­tive Giv­ing Or­ganisers Re­treat—UK