Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) can increase people’s IQ for like less than $1 per point of IQ. I doubt you will find any better intervention for increasing IQ.
Tyler Kolota
Karma: 131
Could this technology improve methods to vaccinate large amounts of farmed & wild animals to help reduce vectors for pandemics?
If we’re doing a constitutional convention then really make it count…
-Statehood for Puerto Rico & Washington D.C.
-Expand the house so each representative represents fewer people.
https://youtu.be/KhQGHY44XPM?si=iLivhjAUAl-igEtd
-Make some extra Senators elected by popular vote.
-Make it easier to remove the president/executive with a congressional vote of no confidence or a 60% referendum vote at each mid-terms.
-Add term limits to the supreme court & elect new justices on a schedule. Or make the Supreme Court a rotating lottery of Appellate judges.
I’m still catching up on some work for a global health contractor, but when I get more spare time I want to develop a website to help people contact their representatives about several EA topics.
And it would be nice to enable multiple channels of contact like email, phone, text message, mail/post-card, social media, etc, so people can partly express intensity of interest through varied & frequent messaging.
Small to medium donors should also consider making some more speculative donations with even higher expected impact than the GiveWell All Grants & EA Animal Welfare funds.
For example…
Donations to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) are more speculative as some of their government & corporate advocacy campaigns to eliminate lead may fail, but on average they expect to generate 1 extra healthy year of life (DALY) for every $5-$15 donated, which is about 3X better than malaria bed-nets at $50 per healthy year of life (DALY).
https://leadelimination.org/how-cost-effective-are-leeps-paint-programs/
Donations to the Shrimp Welfare Project are more speculative as they are reliant on early & not entirely certain research indicating shrimp have some level of consciousness and reliant on one’s own valuing of animal sentience & suffering and reliant on studies indicating stunning shrimp actually renders them unconscious. But even given those points, the potential scale of suffering reduction is enormous. Every $1 donated to the Shrimp Welfare Project could avoid the painful death of 14,000 shrimp.
Donations to Screwworm Free Future are speculative because they are highly reliant on advocacy of governments / policy outcomes. But screwworm elimination would likely save at least 5 billion wild & farmed animals over 25 years from a very torturous death of being eaten alive from the inside out. Assuming this project has a 50⁄50 chance of success at a funding of $5million, each $1 donated could avoid the torturous death of ~500 animals.https://manifund.org/projects/anti-screwworm-gene-drive-advocacy
After looking up more stuff I think small & medium EA donors have at least a few solid options to beat GiveWell All Grants & EA Animal Welfare Fund and I personally am adjusting over 25% of my giving to them…
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)
The cost per DALY (healthy year of life gained) on LEEP is like 5-10x better than the best GiveWell interventions like malaria bed-nets. Instead of taking $50 to get a healthy year of life their estimate is like $5 for lead elimination programs. I gather this is because they can leverage policy changes in government & companies to remove lead from many many products & because some products like house paint may be around a lot of people for a lot of time. Please comment if you know of any other factors affecting their DALY estimates.
Shrimp Welfare ProjectUsual arguments: number of animals involved, ease of stunning intervention to avoid suffering, neglected, etc.
https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think?r=87ph2&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Screwworm EliminationArguments listed in previous comment.
I think a point here is based off last year’s executive cuts & statements we expected like a 50% global health cut officially put into the budget, but we are actually only seeing like a 25% cut.
It’s true that Trump may still solely & unlawfully block spending, but this indicates those actions would likely not continue beyond his term & also the resulting suffering & deaths would really be solely on him.
Bill Would Restore Most US Global Health Spending
Getting used to a camper van may only make sense if you really plan to work in like SF tech where housing costs are out of control. Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to try maintaining a good relationship with family / friends, work on being a really good/easy room-mate, & then rent a cheap room from family/friends into adulthood to save more money.
More from the researcher…
“If everything went perfectly, from this early stage research to clinical trials to broad deployment, we’d treat about 5% of the current causes of death (most but not all of the 7% chronic respiratory disease category, not pneumonia). It could theoretically be higher if there are e.g. positive effects on cardiovascular disease from healthy lungs, but those kinds of nebulous benefits are hard to predict.
To be clear though I’m sure you know, like all preclinical research it is many millions of dollars and very high chance of failure away from hitting that 5%.”
MRNA lung researcher replied:
“… my lead indication is not one of those 3 (Pneumonia, COPD, Asthma), but the further indications I’m testing with my approach does include one of those!”
So this may eventually lead to something to help with a like 2.5%-4.4% cause of death disease.
So I don’t know if it really passes a GiveWell All Grants cost effectiveness threshold at this point without more strong commitment to target something significant like Pneumonia.
I’m very skeptical 90% of these options are better than GiveWell All Grants & EA Animal Welfare Fund, but the following two seem like they could be significantly better:
Screwworm Elimination Advocacy
https://manifund.org/projects/anti-screwworm-gene-drive-advocacy
On a per animal basis screwworms are likely much much worse than factory farming as animals are essentially being tortured to death so it may have extra importance. Also elimination could mean a lot of counterfactual suffering averted at lower costs. And given agriculture/rancher interests align with animal welfare here it is more tractable.
MRNA For Lung Diseaseshttps://manifund.org/projects/mrna-for-pulmonary-fibrosis
The importance of this one is highly dependent on if this intervention could also help in causes of death (CopD/Asthma/Pneumonia/Other-Lung-Diseases 11% of deaths) more common than other neglected diseases like malaria 1.1% deaths, HIV 1.5% deaths, TB 2% deaths. And given lung diseases are also relatively more common in rich countries than other neglected diseases, it may be more tractable to get more funding once it has been pushed past a couple hurdles.
Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas
Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas
Here’s an even better write-up of this & similar ideas
See this piece for more on optimizing tax deductions with charitable giving
Thanks for writing this, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of arguments for patient philanthropy. But at the same time mildly patient philanthropy has lead me to some more easy/sustainable ways to donate over time.
As a US citizen, instead of donating $5000 every year I can donate $1000 every year & invest $4000 every year. Starting in 2026 we can do a tax write off up to $1000 per year in donations even if we take the standard deduction. Then every like 4-7 years when the $4000 per year investment fund reaches around $30,000 (or whatever 30% of my annual income is as that’s the max one can stock transfer donate), I can do a direct stock transfer to GiveWell/EA programs, avoid capital gains, & itemize my taxes so I can get a better $30,000 write off than what the standard deduction offers. All that can make for an extra like $4500 in tax write-offs on net.
In some senses I really couldn’t blame them for spreading out donations with that kind of windfall. I’d personally just donate the maximum amount per year that I could still write off on taxes which is 60% of annual money income or 30% equivalent income if doing direct stock transfers.
On the margin I’d expect more AI safety donations, from them. But any guess to how much the cost effectiveness may change for health & biosecurity areas?
I’d initially think there is a lot of room to absorb more funding with…
-Malaria vaccines
-Near HIV vaccine
-Chronic diseases (https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death)
-Sentinel / biosecurity global disease monitoring system
-Advanced Market Commitments for various vaccines & tests (https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/10-technologies-that-wont-exist-in-5-yrs/)
Also promotion of more free trade always got a much higher cost effectiveness score than even any health intervention in the Copenhagen Consensus estimates. Maybe with building negative sentiments around tariffs EA could start pushing for more trade agreements with lower income countries. (https://copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus)
On 1 I think you are making a few common assumptions & the world may actually be more bottlenecked on broadly implementing existing ideas, thus we need higher average intelligence around the world for that implementation.
And a more general point, a lot of genes associated with higher intelligence are also associated with introversion/anti-socialness & with various mental abnormalities like OCD & others. By optimizing purely for IQ in genes you may be creating less collaborative & less happy individuals.