The person I spoke to at the party said that he knew somebody who had a fungal infection and was likely to die from it.
I don’t know much about antifungals, but I infer from his comment that we don’t have enough antifungals to cover all of the potential fungal infections.
According to someone I chatted to at a party (not normally the optimal way to identify top new cause areas!) fungi might be a worrying new source of pandemics because of climate change.
Apparently this is because thermal barriers prevented fungi from infecting humans, but because fungi are adapting to higher temperatures, they are now better able to overcome those barriers. This article has a bit more on this:
https://theecologist.org/2026/jan/06/age-fungi
Purportedly, this is even more scary than a pathogen you can catch from people, because you can catch this from the soil.
I suspect that if this were, in fact, the case, I would have heard about it sooner. Interested to hear comments from people who know more about it than me, or have more capacity than me to read up about it a bit.
For anyone who got excited about the title, it may well be the case that you cannot just buy far UVC. I had a look at https://aerolamp.net/products/devkit and it doesn’t seem to ship to countries outside the US, so if you’re one of the 95% of the world’s population that isn’t American, this doesn’t seem to be an option.
Great to see you thinking about this, good work.
I would have expected to see more on India.
In particular, Indian companies above a certain size are required by law to donate 2% of profits
Given the enormous wealth disparity, companies can make a lot of money, donate locally within India, and still find extremely poor people and relatively good giving opportunities
This post has plenty on “how to make EA cool”, but the title promised “Why make EA cool” as well. I think the post is a bit light on the why.
Maybe you don’t think being cool matters. That’s a fine opinion if you’re ok with EA being a group of 10,000 people, ~70% male and ~75% white, circularly spending Dustin Moskovitz’s money.
But imagine a movement of a million people. A million people donating a percentage of their income to create a community fund as large as Open Phil’s. A million people working at high-impact organizations.
There’s been plenty of debate within the community about this. And I think some people really are OK with EA being a group of 10,000 people.
Those people would say that you’re arguing for a low fidelity model of spreading EA ideas, but you haven’t made the case very strongly.
A movement of a million people sounds great.
But if the reality is that those people are ~all donating ineffectively, and working at organisations which actually aren’t particularly high impact orgs, then I suspect that movement is worse than the one we have now (for all its flaws).
For what it’s worth, I think I probably do prefer broader outreach.
And I’d want that outreach to aim to be high-fidelity, but to recognise that we inevitably have to compromise on that to reach more people.
But I don’t think it’s obvious either way.
I feel like this is a first step on the road to something that might be quite powerful at communicating chicken/hen welfare.
The thing that was missing for me was that when I was “playing” at being a chicken in the different environments, I didn’t see the point. I did various things, but found them boring.
The easiest way to better gamify this is to explain upfront that the user will be asked to guess what sort of environment the chicken is in, so the user can better orient themselves to what they are trying to achieve.
A better way to gamify is to add a welfare score. It would probably need some careful thought, because you want the scoring system to capture the idea that the chicken wants to do various different things (ie sitting on the perch, coming off, going back on again ad nauseam shouldn’t get you a good score). It should also capture the idea that being pecked or harmed by other chickens hurts you, which teaches you not to get too close. And perhaps the scoring system might incentivise you to hurt other chickens (eg pecking them might make you feel less bad—again, need this to align with how the animals actually feel and our best motivations of what motivates them to peck other chickens).
The idea should be that no matter how well you play the game, your welfare will be terrible in the factory farmed condition, and less bad in the others.
Another more minor point: the instructions said I could use arrow keys or WASD. I couldn’t get arrow keys to work, which was a shame because I prefer them to WASD
This is an important and valuable question, thank you for raising it. I’ll split my observations into two effects:
Malthusian effects
Benefits of scale
Malthusian effects
Other responses have referred to Malthusian effects, by which I mean the concern that with only finite resources, the resources will be spread between more people, and each person will have a worse quality of life.
Benefits of scale
Creating another person doesn’t only create another mouth to feed. It also creates another source of ideas and creativity.
For example, each new birth has the potential to become another Norman Borlaug (who is claimed to have saved a billion lives through his research).
Even if 999,999 new people fail to come up with a ground-breaking innovation which makes the world better, if the millionth person does, it could allow everyone to benefit.
Of course, the flipside is that any new person could be the next Hitler/Stalin/insert-your-favourite-bad-guy-here.
Are the Norman Borlaugs winning over the Hitlers?
If you believe the data that seem to suggest that the world has been getting better over recent centuries, the answer seems to be yes.
There’s also benefits around the fact that niche interests/needs are better accommodated at scale. If 0.01% of the population has a rare disease, and the population is 10 billion people, that’s a million sufferers—enough scale to incentivise scientific research. And if successful, maybe everyone is cured/treated. For a significantly smaller population that disease may remain untreated for a very long time.
Do the benefits of scale win over the Malthusian effects?
I don’t think this is obvious, but I’m inclined to think the benefits of scale win.
If we look at recent examples of challenges that humanity has faced, human ingenuity has managed a few good successes (the aforementioned example of Norman Borlaug and dwarf wheat; the cost effectiveness of solar power has improved dramatically in recent years; smallpox eradication; saving the ozone layer). Don’t get me wrong, we still have more to do! But that suggests we want more brains, not less.
Furthermore, decisions we make today should be based on how the benefits of scale will work in the future, not how they were in the past. Will we be better able to use our ingenuity to solve big problems in the future? Some would argue that AI will make us better able to explore creative new solutions (not that everyone will agree on this).
Lastly, and this isn’t really answering your question, but rather picking up on a comment of yours. You said that the idea that saving lives makes the world better is a “core assumption of the effective altruism movement”. I don’t think this is correct. EA is a movement built around using evidence and reason to do good. If the evidence showed that saving lives was bad, the essence of EA would be unchanged. Furthermore, lots of the practice would be unchanged too—a lot of EA activity is not linked to saving lives.
This post (especially this section) explores this. There are also some ideas on this website. I’ve copied and pasted the ideas from that site below. I think it’s written with a more international perspective, but likely has some overlap with actions which could be taken by Americans.
Promoting free and fair elections, especially at the midterms
Several NGOs are well established as working on this, eg Common Cause works to reduce needless barriers to voting and stop gerrymandering, etc. Verified voting advocates for secure voting systems, and the Brennan Center for Justice researches and advocates for relevant policies.
Enabling bravery of key individuals.
Example: Mike Pence was very brave in standing up to Trump and enabling a transition of power, and he has been vilified for this by Trump and his supporters.
Today, members of Congress don’t always seem to stand up for what they believe in (eg not opposing controversial appointments such as RFK and Hegseth). Presumably they are concerned about threats made by Trump.
Unclear exactly what this intervention looks like (provide financial support? Or something else?)
Consumer power and investor power
The boycott of Tesla is an obvious example of this, and Musk is clearly feeling the pain.
Further work could identify and assess the extent to which other large corporates are kowtowing to the Trump administration, so that consumers can make informed choices.
People who are members of pension schemes could write to the trustees asking them to divest from relevant corporates (Tesla being the obvious choice at this stage, this large scheme has already divested from Tesla). Furthermore, people could coordinate this activity.
Support grassroots protests
MoveOn, Democracy forward, etc
Bail project
Supporting free and balanced media
We need media sources which are critical of government.
Such media sources don’t seem naturally set up to accept moderate sized donations. Paying them subscription fees can support them, although the amounts are modest.
Large donors could reach out to suggest an investment in their work to bring about more work which is critical of government.
Avoid travelling to the US
Reducing tourism revenue may have a (very modest) impact on the US.
Several countries have issued travel advisories about going to the US, so this may make sense for self-interest reasons anyway.
For people who haven’t clicked through, it might be worth mentioning that this is about insects being used as livestock for other animals.
This matters because you might consider insect farming for human consumption to be more morally ambiguous. (If insects turn out not to be sentient, and insect consumptions displaces consumption of larger, actually-sentient animals, this could be a positive for the world).
However, insects being used as livestock is more clearly negative.
I think this is the same consultation flagged by James here, right? If so, might be worth flagging that.
I really appreciate having these flagged on the forum, so thank you, I think it’s a valuable public service
Glad to see you raising this. I raised a related question here (has a slightly more US-centric angle to it). In that post I do suggest some interventions, but there’s not a lot of careful research behind it.
I’ve upvoted this comment and disagree-voted it. I was initially prone to be dubious of the suggestion. I think lots of us are motivated by important outcomes like children not dying, and linking aid to national self-interest seemed problematic, because children not dying (or other good outcomes) are not the same as national self-interest. Optimising for one is likely to lead to different aid interventions than optimising for the other.
However I’ve warmed somewhat to the suggestion.
Nick rightly pointed out that politics risks toggling the supply up and down. (or rather down!) A clearer link to self-interest does indeed help.
For those of a GiveWellian mindset, part of the reason for believing that some interventions are more effective than others is a “sceptical prior”—ie a default assumption that interventions don’t work in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Aid which has a hard-nosed link to self-interest (eg better enabling markets for donor country exports) might be more likely to have the evidence needed.
On balance, I still think I disagree with the suggestion, mostly because a hardnosed link to self-interest probably won’t be compelling for those who are politically opposed to aid. But I appreciate the prompt to give this some thought.
I think this is definitely an interesting question, and I can see how it has some strategic value for organisations doing scenario planning for the future.
As far as I’m aware (based on conversations with people closer to US government than me) there was an element of “pandemic fatigue” in US government. The government was painfully aware that they had spent a huge amount on COVID already. Proposals to spend even more on an “Apollo programme” or other efforts to ensure we don’t have this problem again didn’t seem appealing, because some many other priorities had been put on hold and were vying for attention.
I don’t remember hearing much about polarisation being an important driver.
Good question, I’m sorry nobody has replied yet. I don’t feel like I’m much of an expert on this, so others may be better positioned than me.
My sense is that yes, this may well be impactful, especially if it is clearly communicated. This is a meaningful move, and one that the party will feel—all parties need financing.
To maximise effectiveness, you likely need to inform the right people. By all means, do tell your MP (assuming your MP is a Labour MP). Saying that you’re willing to leave the Labour party makes you less likely to vote for them in future, and they will care about this. In fact, if it’s true that it would make you less likely to vote for them in future, do tell them this explicitly, as that’s probably what your MP cares about.
Cancelling your Labour membership matters to the people responsible for the finances of the party. I believe those people are probably the Treasurer and General Secretary of the party. I don’t know how you would reach out to them, but if there were some way of communicating this to the right people, you could increase your impact.
Good point here:
Another lever to consider, rather than ‘punish government for cutting aid’, is ‘telling the government that effectiveness matters to me when they decide what to cut’. Don’t know how to compare those.
If I’d given more thought to the draft letter, I might have said more on this.
I’m conscious that Jenny Chapman (who is taking over from Anneliese Dodds as Development minister) doesn’t seem to have much background in development.
If someone wrote an email which conveyed acceptance of the reality (cuts are going to happen, whether I like it or not), and which suggested that effectiveness matters, this might be viewed as a much more constructive email, which might land better and be more influential.
Sorry I didn’t see this sooner. Yes, I do believe that an email will be more likely to be effective if it looks like it’s not copied and pasted. My basis for this is that when I supported a group of people to campaign on ODA about 4 years ago, I asked several people, including veteran campaigners and people who have worked for an MP replying to emails for them. Those people explained that if the email looks like a copy-and-paste/boilerplate email, they will assume that it was driven by a campaign group, which carries less weight than if you do it yourself.
I’d also bear in mind that this email is unlikely to be a particularly impactful action. (but also not a zero-impact action either). So I’d be sympathetic to people putting in less effort on this email (and saving their efforts for other effective ways of making the world a better place :-))
Strong upvoted. I’m definitely among the people who saw the headlines, thought that it was a simple case of Musk losing, and didn’t appreciate that it’s potentially much less favourable to OpenAI that it appears from the headlines.
Thanks for the question. Happy to set out how I think about this, but note that I haven’t researched this deeply, and for several parts of this argument, I could imagine myself changing my mind with a bit more research.
Firstly, we’re not considering the aid spend in isolation. Rather, the impact of our actions may be to redirect spend from one usage to another, so we’re comparing to some counterfactual spend, which is typically likely to be some sort of spend which leads to (probably) some sort of economic activity in a developed economy.
Secondly, I think it’s useful to consider three levels of impact
| Aid spend: effect on animals | Counterfactual spend: effect on animals | ||
| First order | Direct effect on people: presumably some sort of economic benefit | None (directly) | None (directly) |
| Second order | Indirect effect: the economic benefit means people eat more meat | Moderate negative | Smaller negative |
| Third order | Very indirect effect: moral circle expansion | Potentially large positive | Minimal positive |
Part of the reason why I consider the meat-eater problem to be only a “moderate negative” (as per “second order” row) is because I’m inclined to believe it’s not always bad for animals. If the aid targets the poorest of the poor (which doesn’t always happen) these are likely to be rural poor, who live in areas where land is cheap, and animals have lots of space to peck around, graze, and seem, from what I’ve seen, to have a nice time (source: hanging around in poor parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not that I’m an expert at judging animal welfare just from looking at an animal, so my judgement may be off). These animal lives appear (to me) to be net positive. On the other hand, I do expect the effect of aid will be to accelerate the rate at which people become middle class. This is more likely to lead to consumption of factory farmed animals, which is a negative.
The third order effects are much more speculative. To what extent does greater economic development spur moral circle expansion? There’s lots to say on this, and I don’t want to lengthen this comment further.
To my mind, the second order effects are very speculative, and the third order effects even more so. But they are potentially more important in the long term.
Putting together all the second order and third order considerations, I don’t think it’s clear which outcome leads to be better outcomes for animals, so I’m inclined to treat the effects on animals as a neutral factor.
If I spent more time looking into this, I may still change my mind.
Hey, I dunno, my experience with it has been pretty OK thus far