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Not all meat is equal in the animal suffering it creates. A surprisingly good predictor of the suffering footprint of meat is its color. The lighter the meat, the worse the intensity and duration of suffering behind it. This is true for three separate reasons...

GiveWell revisited its cost-effectiveness estimate of GiveDirectly unconditional cash transfers: we think they're 3-4x more CE than we'd previously estimated, & about ~30-40% as CE as our marginal funding opps. Blog: blog.givewell.org/2024/11/12/re-… Main analysis: givewell.org/international/…

We're hiring a Senior Communications Officer at Open Philanthropy — if you're excited about making complex ideas accessible (esp. in AI, science & global health), and care deeply about improving the world, I'd love to hear from you! [link to apply below]

Happy Birthday to Giving What We Can 🔸, which turns 15 today! 🥳 When Toby Ord and I started GWWC 15 years ago, we had just 23 members, each of us pledging at least 10% of our income to effective charities until we retire. Now, over 9,000 people have taken this pledge...

Inspired by this viral meme about DOGE: Research the US government has supported that can be made to sound silly, but that has contributed to human progress. Valuable work can often be framed as absurd out of context. That doesn’t make funding research any less important.🧵

Impressive work from Jenna Forsyth et al. following up from eliminating lead in turmeric in Bangladesh to identify other hotspots. Patna stands out, and our grantee Pure Earth is working in Bihar to mitigate the problem. The lead exposure research -> policy link is humming atm

Very cool RCT finding that an air pollution restriction market in India reduced pollution and compliance costs: wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1741… h/t James Snowden

A litmus test for making American healthier is whether the government pursues proven strategies to stop the known and leading causes of most chronic disease: tobacco, alcohol, junk food, and air pollution.

We still have a relatively poor understanding of the relationship between research and policy. Program evaluation in particular is often motivated by a desire to make policy better. But how effective is program evaluation itself? Michelle Rao's JMP tackles this question.

Microplastics and PFAS Are Dominating Headlines, But Lead is Probably Worse cgdev.org/blog/microplas…

25 years in the making, final 10 led by Medicines Development for Global Health. Long slog of drug development. Finally moxi is approved for river blindness in a country where people get river blindness! medicinesdevelopment.com/news/ghana-bec… MDGH won a Priority Review Voucher in 2018, which helped fund development:

Last, this is why descriptive work is underrated. No preposterous IV, no incomprehensible structural model, just a new fact about the world. If the descriptive work is done well — and it is not easy — the fact permanently enters everyone's headspace and must be contended with.

I just got the kids down for naptime so I wanted to take a second to point out two key problems (and a few areas of agreement) I see with this morning’s Emma Goldberg The New York Times article about effective altruism: 🧵 x.com/nytimes/status…

GiveWell has directed over $1 billion to our top charities. Recently, we red-teamed our research to identify blind spots and areas for improvement in the grants we’ve made. Here’s what we found — and what it means for our work going forward. 🧵

LEEP is hiring! Hear more about lead poisoning and our work:

After more than a decade of procrastinating, this week I finally filled out the paperwork (ok, webform) to pledge to give at least 10% of my income to effective charities for the rest of my career. 🧵