Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸

Karma: 128

Becoming Earth’s best “layperson” effective giving advocate. All views expressed are my own. Therefore, I can absorb more pain and do more daring initiatives vs a formal organisation without worrying about being defunded. Current portfolio:

- Deeply personal 1:1 conversations

- In-person community building @ London Effective Giving Community

- Hosting EG advocacy workshops

- Finding new One for the World Community Ambassadors

- Doing surprise £1000 donation stunts and posting it on LinkedIn

- Lobbying the UK government to spend their foreign aid more effectively

- Joining professional networks to talk about EG: Nova Talent, UK Apprenticeships

- Advising an individual how to maximise new counterfactual effective giving using £50K

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 3 May 2026 13:27 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Manuel Allgaier’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?
It’s not a good use of marginal funding when even one of the best forecasters can’t build a strong view around its impact.
You can say “confidential AI use cases make it valuable”. I don’t disagree. I disagree that $100M went into this. Why shouldn’t it be $10M?

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 1 Mar 2026 4:10 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Pete Hegseth declares Anthropic a supply-chain risk
I’m glad as a movement we are able to appreciate this nuance too David. By no means does Anthropic get a free pass, especially since mass foreign surveillance wasnt part of their two non-negociables, as someone who is foreign to the US.
Still want to acknowledge the bold action they took in the face of an autocratic regime

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 28 Feb 2026 1:14 UTC
82 points
26 ∶ 6
on: Pete Hegseth declares Anthropic a supply-chain risk
I’ve never been more proud to be part of the Effective Altruism movement

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 27 Feb 2026 16:29 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers
Knew it was a bit too good to be true 🥲 Meltblown PP rolls and facepiece moulds seem like the key upstream bottlenecks to N95 / reusable respirator production.
More reason to advocate for pre-securing offshore oil rig-style labour contracts + government compliance (NIOSH) for surging PPE production.
Intuitively, advocating for private companies to maximise production and removing the friction to do so feels more tractable than advocating federal governments to stockpile +5 billion additional N95s. Ideally we should still pursue both

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 27 Feb 2026 15:44 UTC
6 points
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on: Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers
500M in N95 mask materials in 28 days from just 2 plants is a really massive number, that’s 17M per day!
Quick BOTEC: 50M essential workers in the US demand 10M N95 masks per day, assuming the best N95 masks on the market today have a 5-day lifecycle. Even if they demanded 50M day, if we increased the number of plants from 2 to 10 (assuming the next 8 have 50% the max capacity of the Braskem plants), this might potentially solve the meltblown bottleneck.
Updates me toward thinking meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed.
If similar labour pre-commitments and coordination mechanisms could be secured across other PPE stages before the next pandemic, this could potentially shift the surge vs stockpile ratio more towards surge.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 16 Feb 2026 7:48 UTC
1 point
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on: Announcing the new Director of EA UK
Welcome to the UK Gergo! 😊

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 12 Feb 2026 0:40 UTC
1 point
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on: Don’t just have a job role. Have a movement role.
As someone not in a full-time impact job, I find thinking about Movement Roles is doubly important! By de-coupling from the job market, this is a powerful framing to be more agentic. Strong upvoted this post

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 6 Feb 2026 11:39 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Kristof Redei’s comment on: Answer Engine Optimisation: What do LLMs believe about impact?
Deeply appreciate this Kristof. Interesting that at a broad level (what are the best charities, how to help more people), it cites credible and evidence-based resources.
Then when discussing animals and Africa—i.e. more long-tail keywords—it does not.
There is probably low-hanging opportunity here for charities to write up more indexable FAQs and blogposts that match the language a user would use when asking an LLM a question (or even Google).

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 13 Jan 2026 21:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Joel Tan🔸’s comment on: Deep Report on Effective Giving in Asia
Helpful indeed, and thanks for the spreadsheet!

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 11 Jan 2026 23:43 UTC
1 point
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on: Deep Report on Effective Giving in Asia
Hey Joel, thanks for the writeup, super insightful!
“the monetary value of an average GWWC pledge as 146 DALYs averted per pledge (equivalent to USD 20,000 in GiveWell donations)”
Is that $20K USD comparable to GWWC’s headline figure of $100K USD per 10% pledge, or some other headline metric?
I note two interesting datapoints versus GWWC’s figures:
1. 16 year lifespan vs GWWC’s 35.1 ← Less than half of GWWC’s lifespan?
2. 35% counterfactuality adjustment versus GWWC’s 33% ← Only +2% uplift versus the Western context?
Not sure how the above parses with this paragraph: “On the positive side, Asian pledgers are counterfactually less likely to do effective giving, and give for a greater number of years.”

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 9 Jan 2026 17:47 UTC
1 point
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on: Great bit of messaging from The Life You Can Save
I liked this line most: “It makes them a problem-solver, rather than putting them on the defensive.”
In my experience advocating effective giving as a layperson, I find that inviting people to have more agency has generally led to my best engagement (and pledges!)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 27 Dec 2025 18:01 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Is Silent Participation Ethically Sufficient?
I think all comments here are accurate.
- $100K is the headline figure
- $15K is the attribution to GWWC (would be much harder for someone to pledge without all the digital infrastructure, research, community etc)
- $47K is what you’d discount from $100K if you believe cost-effectiveness of the best charities decrease over time as the problem becomes more “solved”, and if a pledger is giving a % of their donation below the GiveWell bar
If I take 10% of the median London annual salary (£4.75K) then assume they work 30 more years (£143K), this roughly in line with GWWC’s headline figure.
At 1%, if we assume annual inflation = annual salary increases = annual negative discounts on cost-effectiveness of top charities we still get ~£14K LTV of a 1% pledge. Maybe apply -£4K discounts on pledge dropouts or changes in life circumstance to £10K.
How you wish to apply % attribution to GWWC’s infrastructure / paid ads / in-person advocacy / the local EA meetup / online forums is probably a messier science and hotly debated. Good thing OP and I aren’t doing this outside a personal capacity.
That said I’d bet that OP’s co-workers and mine have much limited exposure to EA, so the counterfactual upside of personal advocacy is much higher, no matter if you take from the $10K headline or $4.7K time-discounted high-impact donation per 1% pledge.
At the end of the day £10K will still go to high-impact nonprofits, and it would have been a community effort :)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 27 Dec 2025 11:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: satelliteprocess’s comment on: Is Silent Participation Ethically Sufficient?
Glad you’re forming your own views on what feels like an obligation and what does not.
Some thoughts gently encouraging advocacy. Not because it’s an obligation, but solely because of its impact:
- Giving What We Can conservatively values the lifetime value of a 🔸 10% Pledge at $100K USD (inflation adjusted to 2024)
- The implicitly LTV of a 1% Pledge is therefore $10K USD. 1% is a far more accessible option for people who are building up 3-6 months of financial runway, cannot meaningfully save at a 10% pledge, are remitting money to family, are paying off debts, or have other charitable commitments / personal circumstances
- Following that, personal advocacy is one of the highest-leverage direct impact activities any working professional can go after without quitting their day job imo
- Over 6 months, I helped inspire 8 EG pledges ranging from 1% to 10%. 4 came from personal conversations. Of that, 3 came from people at my private sector job. None have heard of EG before; the counterfactual of personal advocacy is definitely there
- I explicitly do not discuss Effective Altruism unless prompted, and so do multiple EG organisations such as One for the World and FarmKind. I view it as unnecessary cognitive load that detracts from the core objective. For most people, it’s not needed when making an informed and personally fulfilling decision to donate more effectively
Understand the feeling of being a hypocrite, but please know that I—and most people on this forum—wouldn’t call you that! We all have our own circumstances

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 26 Dec 2025 14:46 UTC
4 points
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on: Is Silent Participation Ethically Sufficient?
Heya!
I think public advocacy can be a sliding scale of participation and does not immediately go from 0 to 100. It does not require fighting every online battle.
Why fight battles anyway, 99% of people havent even heard of effective giving despite all of GWWC / TLYCS / 1FTW’s online outreach. There are only ~11,000 pledgers worldwide. The London Effective Giving Community WhatsApp group is 100 people. Besides myself I rarely see other private individuals posting on social media about EG unless they work for an EG organisation.
Want to gently push in favour of starting with small-scale advocacy: You currently might find it draining to engage publicly, be it online or in person. I did too when I started out and still do sometimes.
You can always start low-touch with people in your immediate circle: “what did you do last weekend?” “Just some volunteering and donation things” and let the conversation flow from there.
Best argument against this is you might have a counterfactuallly better use of your time versus trialing effective giving / vegan advocacy. Since you’re earlier in your career you might want to prioritise building your credibility—less people in your personal life might take your EG / veganism seriously if they don’t consider you serious people. Or you’re working on a more ambitious initiative. Or you have personal commitments. Or you want to avoid burning out if advocacy will stretch you too thin.
Happy to DM on this for some of your more sensitive topics. Wishing you a Merry Christmas /good holiday season.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 18 Dec 2025 18:05 UTC
1 point
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on: Why I donate: some selfish reasons
Unfathomably based. Im stealing this one and its relevant ideas:
Choosing to donate based on the cost-effectiveness of helping is making a radical political statement about equality.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 21 Oct 2025 9:56 UTC
1 point
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on: Reflecting on One Year of Mieux Donner: Launching the French Effective Giving Initiative
Hey team! Late comment but really curious about this:
Counterfactual: We estimated the counterfactual factor, the part of donations received that have happened as a result of our work, at 0.5 → Now, our best guess is 0.64
This seems very high versus how GWWC attributed their counterfactual impact of a pledge (at least when I went through their Pledge Advocacy programme last year, they tentatively recommended a factor of 0.2)
Also, given a factor of 0.5 or 0.64, I’m not sure how accurate this statement follows: “50% / 64% of the decision-making of the pledger had not come from the pledger, but rather through active outreach and influence of Mieux Donner”. I’m probably wrong. How would I interpret this factor more accurately? :)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 15 Oct 2025 0:18 UTC
1 point
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on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
Considering writing a post on how EAG(x) Effective Giving meetups MUST drive a call to action (pledge, pledge advocacy, learning more about EG, running an EG-related project)
IMO intellectual discussion about EG without action does not meet the bar for engagement or expected impact for an EAG(x).
Example meetup dicussion topics I personally did not like at past EAG(x)s: talking about how cost of living / mortgages get in the way of giving, talking about giving now vs accruing interest then giving later, back-and-forth about how improving farmed animal welfare results in higher wild animal suffering. Valid personal concerns and intellectually stimulating, but I’d reserve it for local meetups. These discussions do not yield impact nor meaningfully increase community bonding.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 13 Oct 2025 16:33 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Effective Giving for Relational Altruists
Mental framework here captures 80% of my experience as an in-person / events-based effective giving advocate.
That said there are ways to make impact-focused EA funds deeply relational. I passionately tell people a large part of my pledge goes to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. “Since the beginning of 2025, 14 million lives could be lost due to entirely preventable deaths from malaria / TB / HIV. This was since the Trump administration and Elon Musk decided to shut down USAID. I give to ensure the most critical frontline organisations can keep their lights on to protect and empower some of the world’s most vulnerable”.
An important 3rd point: relational altruists might not start with the highest-impact malaria-reduction charity, or other EA golden standard charities. That said, t hey are still giving. It’s still counterfactual impact (as opposed to giving nothing), and they should be deservedly praised and acknowledged. Further effectiveness can come incrementally as along as you help nurture their altruism. Make them feel supported and part of a like-minded community of people with skin in the game (people who take concrete action improving the world by donating)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 4 Sep 2025 20:53 UTC
2 points
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on: EA in the Lakes—Reflections
Kes, this was such a great weekend, so thoughtfully put together. It really helped me recentre. I came away feeling more authentically connected to people in the EA community I hadn’t met before.
Outing myself as the effective giving community-builder who ran the outreach and advocacy workshop. Was genuinely surprised how engaged and high-agency everyone was. Strong +1 on the value of this sort of workshop for highly-engaged EAs. Probably the best hour I’ve spent in the last few months. Substantially better than most EG group sessions I’ve attended at EAGs.
Really hoping EA in the Lakes becomes an annual thing, and that Pardshaw being is used more in general. Place felt truly EA: unpretentious, humble, a little basic but all the more charming. Great place for honest conversations and reflections.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 31 Aug 2025 0:33 UTC
1 point
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on: How to stay motivated to donate?
If you currently don’t get much meaning or fulfilment from giving effectively, it might help to notice the areas in your life that do give you that sense of meaning and fulfilment. The fact that this question has stayed with you for six years, even during times when you weren’t actively donating, suggests it’s something important to you, something that continues to pull at you.
For me, I’ve welcomed pledging as part of my identity, and that’s where I draw meaning from it.
Like you, I don’t tend to feel a big emotional connection to my giving. I give because I believe it’s the right thing to do. I’m at peace taking longer to pay off a mortgage if it means more people in the world get the chance to live their lives. These are lives that might otherwise be cut short by preventable causes far beyond their control.
Effective giving has become part of who I am. It shapes my relationship with money, my decision-making, my career planning. That’s been my path. I’d be curious to hear what might work for you.