Software Developer at Giving What We Can, trying to make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
Lorenzo Buonanno🔸
Karma: 5,556
research [...] which they generally find easier to fill
I’m surprised to read that lots of EA orgs find it easier to hire research roles than ops roles, and it doesn’t match what I heard, or the state of 80k’s job board at the moment, with ~1.8x more research roles than ops roles
Edit to clarify: my sense is that many orgs struggle to hire both for ops and for research
Random datapoint from Italy, when I started googling things on animal welfare/veganism years ago, this website was often one of the top Google results, and it seems it’s still going strong
Here are some recent articles:
Meat may protect against cancer: a new study strengthens the evidence.
Broiler chickens and transport: more space does not improve animal welfare.
Beyond the “Carbon Tunnel Vision”: The meat and sustainability debate deserves more. (some quotes: “Cutting down on meat doesn’t lower your personal carbon footprint.” , ““Alternative” proteins are not better”)
And here is an article from last year specifically against the European Chicken Commitment, which is a major focus of a lot of EA-funded campaigns, and has been a massive win in France and other countries.
That project seems to be supported by the “National Association of Meat and Livestock Industry and Trade”, “Association of Meat and Cured Meat Industry”, and a “National Union of Meat and Egg Agri-Food Supply Chains.”
I would be surprised if there wouldn’t be similar initiatives in other countries with a stronger animal rights movement, and if there weren’t social media influencers running similar campaigns at much greater scale.
In general I think it’s fairly easy make campaigns supporting all sorts of things, from factory farms, to tobacco, to datacenters[1]
- ^
e.g. I found this recent Asterisk article against a datacenter moratorium similar to the meat-industry articles above. Here’s a section on environmental concerns: “Data centers aren’t the only new loads coming onto the grid – electric vehicles and electrified manufacturing are also driving demand that requires more generation, more transmission, and long-overdue grid modernization. Many data centers are leaning on gas for near-term power, but data centers could serve as anchor tenants for new clean generation, fiber, battery storage, and transmission. Many companies are moving in that direction.
Industrial projects like these are also prompting pragmatic shifts on decarbonization from environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for instance, just supported its first nuclear project ever, to power a data center.
A moratorium forecloses exactly the kind of creative thinking these projects are beginning to generate.”
Thank you for sharing this, and for the amazing job board!
Do you happen to also have an API or raw CSV/JSON export somewhere? (e.g. similar to https://backend.eawork.org/api/jobs for 80k)
[LLM written below, as I’m in a rush, but I confirm it’s accurate]
A few weeks ago I clauded a quick job-search script for my sister. It pulls roles from several sources, deduplicates them, applies some basic filters, then uses an LLM to score likely fit and sends her the best on Telegram. Since May 8 it has sent ~130 roles from LinkedIn/Indeed via JobSpy, Probably Good, 80,000 Hours, jobs.ch, Exa, Greenhouse, and Arbeitnow.For Probably Good, it’s currently using the public Algolia index, but I suspect that may be suboptimal compared to fetching all jobs and brittle. The new Airtable seems great for humans and no-code workflows, but for scripts and AI agents a simple raw CSV/JSON endpoint could be much easier to fetch autonomously. Airtable sync/API access seems to require a PAT or some scraping to get the current csv url, while a stable export of all published roles would make this kind of personal automation easier.
[/LLM]
This might be an uncommon usecase for now, but I recommend other people who know someone looking for a job to build similar automations based on their location/CV/interests/preferred messaging system
Does this apply to things like job listings (e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tS23nkt27cDRFDrMf/hiring-head-of-community-engagement-us-giving-what-we-can ) ?
You can use https://web.archive.org/ for deleted web pages, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20250426145325/https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pc3CFbYxPXgyjoDpB/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic
The author also deleted their EA Forum and LessWrong accounts, so you’d need to reach out to them directly to ask why
I don’t think “EA Funding” is that useful of a term here. My sense is that forecasting is not funded by a large number of small retail donors thinking about forecasting as a category, but by few large institutions funding specific projects for specific reasons (which are sometimes not just effectiveness-related, and usually not public so hard to evaluate)
[The internet] was then not very useful until the 1990′s.
I don’t think this is true. Emails and FTP were established in 1971 and used a lot by academics, scientists, and the military[1]
- ^
From Gemini:
The utility of email, FTP, and remote login (Telnet) during the 1970s and 1980s repaid the original government grants in three primary ways:1. Elimination of Duplicate Hardware Costs
In the 1960s and 1970s, computers were multi-million-dollar mainframes. Prior to ARPANET, ARPA frequently had to purchase separate, identical computers for different research institutions. The network allowed a researcher at UCLA to log into and utilize a specialized mainframe at MIT. The cost of developing and laying the network infrastructure was significantly lower than the cost of buying duplicate hardware for every university the Department of Defense funded.2. Accelerated Scientific and Defense R&D
Email and FTP collapsed the time required for complex collaboration. Instead of mailing magnetic tapes or waiting months for academic papers to be published and circulated, researchers shared datasets, software code, and peer reviews instantly. This rapid iteration sped up advancements in computer science, aerospace engineering, and defense logistics, delivering immense strategic value to the military and government.
- ^
And to add some obligatory nitpicking, “Individual starfish typically consume around 0.5 mussel per day although maximum feeding rates of 0.8 mussels per hour have been recorded for larger individuals”
I agree that the value of many interventions is sensitive to specific moral weights, but I disagree with “therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work”.
The increase in subjective wellbeing from GiveWell-funded work seems really high, and it could be competitive with mental health types of work. (or not, as different kinds of wellbeing can be reasonably valued in very different ways)
E.g. HLI “higher risk, higher reward” “Promising Charities” at https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/charities/ are both also funded/recommended by GiveWell.
Worth noting that besides HLI focusing on happiness, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship just incubated https://www.betterfuturesguide.org/ which seems to focus entirely on poverty reduction, and GiveWell is expanding their work on ”Livelihoods Programs”, which weigh income gains 2x higher than they normally would.
(I’m sure you know all the above, just writing it out for people with less context)
That’s not clear to me: all GiveWell interventions have lots of life-improving benefits besides life-saving.
E.g. for the AMF, 33% of the estimated value comes from long-term income increases, and for each life saved there’s ~200 malaria cases averted, which likely significantly increases subjective wellbeing
Thank you! Here’s a link from web.archive.org of the EA Forum citation https://web.archive.org/web/20230715000000*/https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0255/4986/5032/files/DC-CASE-STUDY_NEW-BRAND_WEB2.pdf?v=1653689936
But yeah if we can’t trust that there was a real significant population reduction it doesn’t mean much
I haven’t read the whole post, but “519 g of fertility bait prevents one rodent birth” seemed implausibly high. I asked Gemini to review it, and it came out with this:
This 519g figure assumes wild rats will drink 10% of their body weight in bait every day as their exclusive hydration source. But real-world data shows intermittent grazing is enough to cause cumulative infertility.
For example, in the Washington D.C. ContraPest pilot trial (Nov 2019–Oct 2020):
Site A had a starting colony of 391 rats.
Over 12 months, the population crashed by 88% (the juvenile count specifically dropped from 121 to just 2).
The entire colony consumed only 1.8L of bait all year.
If it truly took 519g to prevent one birth, 1,800g would have only prevented ~3.5 births for the whole colony.
Was it correct? I’m mostly curious about whether current LLMs can already help improving these estimates, or their reviews have too much noise
orgs like GiveWell are still getting a lot of funding
It’s not just that these orgs are still getting a lot of funding:
their funding is significantly increasing
there’s many more of them
many of them are making more and more varied grants themselves, e.g. GiveWell making 2 <$100k grants in 2026 which they didn’t use to do 5 years ago, Founders Pledge brand new Catalytic Impact Fund
there were more fellowship and grant and award opportunities than I could possibly apply to. It does not feel like that today.
I’m surprised by this, I think there’s a ton today. I’m not following this space actively but, besides the >100 job openings and >3 AIM programs mentioned above, here’s some off the top of my head:
CEA bootcamp (which as far as I know is not mainly about AI)
School for Moral Ambition fellowships and circles
Magnify Mentoring mentee applications (I think it now accepts more people than WANBAM did five years ago, but can’t quickly find numbers. I see it got $371k from Coefficient Giving in August 2025, and their revenue seems to be increasing)
Animal Advocacy Careers course and career advising
Their Job Board has 21 job openings from last week
You can also have a look at the most recent posts tagged “opportunities to take action” and the EA opportunities board, there’s lots of non-AI stuff, enough to overwhelm newcomers as much as EA in 2021, and likely way more than EA in 2017.
Also in general if Coefficient Giving and others are making more grants to more things, it likely means that there are more opportunities.
funding for non-AI projects has dried up
What are you basing this on? I think the opposite is going on. Some datapoints that come to mind:
Coefficient Giving more than doubled their funding for GiveWell for 2026, adding $175M on top of the existing $100M. They also started two new funds
GiveWell’s funding from non-Coefficient Giving donors is also increasing
Founders Pledge went from $25M money moved in 2022 → $80M in 2023 → $140M in 2024, and other major funders are emerging
Giving Green influences >$17M/year in climate donations, and recently started research into biodiversity projects
The EA Animal Welfare fund raised >$10M/y last year and is now targeting $20M/y
https://jobs.probablygood.org/ has 148 roles published in the last 4 days, only 10 of which are explicitly categorized as AI safety (although a few more involve AI)
Charity Entrepreneurship is launching more and more charities per year, and AIM as a whole has more programs
Thanks for sharing! I’d have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!
my first post on LessWrong was scrapped because they identified it as AI written
I’m surprised to read this, can you check your post on https://www.pangram.com/ ?
The link seems to be broken
https://benefficienza.it/ (spelled with two Fs) has a lot of material on effective giving in Italian, in case it’s useful, although nothing on catholicism as far as I’m aware.
Some EA articles were translated here: https://altruismoefficace.it/blog
And the EA handbook a few years ago was translated here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/ea-italy (I don’t know if it changed much since then)
There was also this article in the major Italian Catholic newspaper after the FTX scandals, which was not entirely negative, but still mostly skeptical.
To clarify, it was just in a Google Reviews carousel they also have on the homepage, at the bottom of the page, and it was quickly removed
I would interpret all three as signals that orgs find it harder to fill research roles, right?