Hi there! I’m an EA from Madrid. I am currently finishing my Ph.D. in quantum algorithms and would like to focus my career on AI Safety. Send me a message if you think I can help :)
PabloAMC 🔸
Karma: 1,293
[Question] How to compare theories of change in animal welfare?
I don’t think we see much top-down leadership. There’s eg GiveWell, which I take seriously, but sometimes prioritising between different broad cause areas is very hard, and my understanding is that people in my local community feel the same way and are broadly supportive of diverse points of view.
I fought for EA to mean something simpler— just someone who 1. Figured out the best way to improve the world and 2. Does it— but I lost.
For what it is worth, this is not how I feel in my local EA community. There are people leading effective giving organisations and others who just go on with their usual lives with trial pledges; and I feel we are fairly non judgemental.
I donated to (i) ARMoR (https://www.armoramr.org/), because I am convinced about the quality of their cost estimates and believe targeted policy interventions can be fairly tractable; (ii) and also to the Global Health Fund from Ayuda Efectiva (https://ayudaefectiva.org/fondo-salud-global), in part to encourage others to donate.
New anti-malaria treatment clears phase 3 trials.
I just found that there is a new anti-malarial alternative to artemisinin, the most common antimalarial chemical, which has successfully completed Phase 3 trials. Its nickname is GanLum and apparently has quite powerful effects:
A new drug, called GanLum, was more than 97% effective at treating malaria in clinical trials carried out across 12 African countries, researchers reported Wednesday at the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Toronto. That’s as good, if not better, than the current standard of treatment. If approved by regulators, it could be a powerful new tool against a disease that kills roughly half a million people each year.
This is an important advance because resistance to artemisinin is one of the growing concerns in the fight against malaria.
You may read more in https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/12/g-s1-97487/malaria-drug-new and https://www.mmv.org/newsroom/news-resources-search/phase-3-trial-next-generation-malaria-treatment-ganaplacide-lumefantrine .
EU animal welfare consultation (10 min request)
Hey Alex, thanks a lot for the post, and for the work you do at GFI.
Something I would love to read (and might write up this funding season) is how to compare the impact of GFI work with alternative proteins to other animal charities advocating working on corporate campaigns. This is highly non-obvious because GFI work depends on some theory of change, which I find very attractive, but for which I have not found good models. The closest is this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CA8a9JS3fYb63YWoh/the-humane-league-needs-your-money-more-than-alt-proteins, which compares The Humane League with investing in alternative proteins. I suspect, though, that the GFI would fare better than investing in specific companies. I also believe GFI plays a structural role in the development of alternative proteins, so the model is likely different too.
In conversations with effective altruists, we sometimes hear there’s a perception that GFI is sufficiently or even well-funded. Or that there’s less scope for impact in giving to an established charity.
It is also true that there are not many great cost-benefit analyses or estimates of the funding needs.
Do you have pointers to those two bits of information? Also, is there any reason why the past two years GFI did not go through the Animal Charity evaluators evaluations (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/waL3iwczrjNt8PreZ/announcing-ace-s-2025-charity-recommendations) ?
Thanks you!!!
I wonder how is ACE selecting charities? I wonder in particular because the Good Food Institute used to be considered a high-impact charity, but I have not seen any updates on that since 2022, when the assessment was broadly positive reference here. Not only that, but it seems GFI was probably one of the largest charities.
International Programme on AI Evaluations
I am considering writing a brief post about how I think the EU AI office (where I will likely be starting a new position in one month) can address some issues of AI differently from other actors. The EU AI office might complement the work of traditional actors in addressing loss of control issues, but it could play a significant role in mitigating power concentration issues, especially in the geopolitical sense. This is a bit of a personal theory of change too.
I’d love someone to write how someone who feels most comfortable donating to the GiveWell top charities fund should address donating to animal charities. I know there exist ways like Animal Charity Evaluators Movement Grants, the Giving What We Can Effective Animal Advocacy fund, or the EA Animal Welfare Fund.
However, these all feel a bit different-flavoured than GiveWell’s top charities fund in that they seem to be more opportunistic, small or actively managed; in contrast to GiveWell’s larger, established, and typically more stable charities. This makes it much harder for smaller donors to understand how different theories of change are being considered, or keep track of the money’s impact.
I am sorry to hear this.
Should small donors (~$10k per year) support small scale charities such as charity entrepreneurship incubated ones? Or would these charities be better supported by other larger founders?
Since targeting Ultra High Net Worth Individuals seems to be a more effective strategy than broad donations (reference), to what extent do you think it is feasible to attract more such individuals to effective giving? What strategies are you particularly excited about researching and testing more extensively to do so?
To what extent the EA community should put more effort towards increasing the donation basis vs finding ever more impactful opportunities? What worries me the most in the second case is that while there might be some pretty good untapped opportunities to create new, more impactful charities, there is always too much uncertainty. For example, this is often argued as a reason to not prioritise funding Vitamin A supplementation (€3.5k/per live saved) vs malaria nets (€5.5k/per live saved), see this Ayuda Efectiva spreadsheet based on GiveWell data; which are already pretty heavily researched areas.
What are, in your opinion, the most promising strategies to increase the amount of funding dedicated to effective charities?
To what extent would it make sense to consider the work by the Gates Foundation part of the effective giving ecosystem? I would argue that they are very effective, too, even if they have no association with effective altruism.
I’m not sure about the cost effectiveness, but they have a quote by Michael Kremer in their webpage:
“The country where one is born is the most important determinant of extreme poverty. By facilitating international educational migration, Malengo offers very low-income youth the opportunity to dramatically increase both their own incomes, and those of their families. In my view, each dollar of donation to Malengo is likely to increase the incomes of program participants by more than would be the case for donations to virtually any other organization.“
Michael Kremer University Professor in Economics, University of Chicago Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2019
I think there are good arguments why those actions might have indeed been horrible mistakes. But I’m also quite uncertain about what would have been the best course of action at the time. Eg, there’s a reasonable case that the best we might hope for is steering the development of AI. I unfortunately don’t know.
Let me give a non AI example: I find it reasonable that some EAs try to steer how factory farming works (most animal advocacy), despite I preferring no animal died or was tortured for food.
But on the other hand I believe people at leadership positions failed to detect and flag the FTX scandal ahead of time. And that’s a shame.