Against Malaria Foundation

All right.

Donate to the Against Malaria Foundation if you'd like to support this podcast.

And yeah, that's it.

See you all later.

I showed that the apparent contradiction in this view is difficult to escape.

The most straightforward resolution is that the Against Malaria Foundation is an order of magnitude less cost effective than GiveWell's estimate suggests.

Subheading.

Example two.

That's not Terrible, all things considered.

It's, yes, those resources could have been invested in bed nets and some to Against Malaria Foundation, whatever.

I think really the question is, if things were to really escalate, so say there was a cult that deified AI systems, and we all had to devote significant resources to the welfare of AI systems because we thought that AI systems were capable of vastly greater welfare capacity than humans because of their immense intelligence, right? I'm far more concerned about that kind of situation, right?

Yeah, I mean-

And so we sort of think about our impact in like ripples, right? It's like at the core you've got the money that we move, but then there's the attention and the engagement that we get, and then there's the like second and third order effects of all of that.

And even the money that we give, like to the orgs, we've got one org where Against Malaria Foundation, they provide bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa for an incredibly cheap, um, cost, and they save lives at I think about 5,000 US, uh, is the average cost to avert the loss of life.

It's like incredible, incredible organization run by incredibly lean, incredibly like absolute weapons.

And every dollar we give them, they estimate it spills over into $12 of economic gain for, for the region that it's pointed at, um, through the spillover effects of these.

Would it be be- And you wanna help people as much as possible.

Would you give it to Donald Trump right now? Would you put it in the bank? Or would you donate it to like the Against Malaria Foundation? Right? That's the trade-off we all face.

So the sort of the question of what's the most valuable use of any particular amount of money is, I think, a different question from do you owe the government taxes.

Um, I'm not sure that like the taxes I pay to the government right now are being used all that efficiently 'cause the government's making a lot of stupid choices as we speak.

But if you don't believe me and want to see the data behind it, you can find that on my sub stack.

So thank you to everyone who has donated to the Against Malaria Foundation.

We are over 70,000. over $37,000 raised for the Against Malaria Foundation, which is amazing.

Thank you so much to everyone who has donated.

It genuinely helps motivate me to keep building this podcast and to keep pushing out episodes for you guys.

So then we thought, well, maybe some people would support a matching fund, right? So we...

Our, our setup was like, "Okay, you just agreed to give half your money to the Against Malaria Foundation or the...

Or, or Deworm the World.

But you can take that money instead and put it into this matching fund that will pay it forward and, and it'll, it'll allow someone else to, to, to get a match the way we offered it to you." And enough people took that offer that it provided enough money to pay for the matching funds for the people who didn't.

And so I moved to a charity called One for the World as their first full-time executive director, which asks graduates of elite universities, mainly in the US, but also in the UK and Australia and Canada, to give 1% of their income to highly cost-effective global health causes.

And all the way through working for School of Hard Knocks, I'd always donated my own money to very cost-effective stuff in global health, things like the Against Malaria Foundation or the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which is now Unlimit Health.

And so that was appealing to me because I know that a dollar goes a long way when it's deployed in these very cost-effective programs.

But after

And then the other thing that we should say is behavior is already changing, even if this money never arrives.

So Coefficient Giving gave GiveWell a billion dollar commitment a couple of months ago.

GiveWell just made the largest grant in its history to the Against Malaria Foundation.

And so the landscape is already changing in response to this money, anticipating this money, even if it never arrives.

Mm-hmm.

In fact, I believe that Against Mara- the Against Malaria Foundation estimated that, um, one should expect that for every 4 or $5,000 spent on malaria nets, one child is spared of a malaria death.

So suddenly that $50,000 looks like 10 lives saved, not just, like, a small patch of grass on the Northwestern quad being, like, watered a bit, um, more vigorously.

And so that is where effective altruism began for me, was this idea of how can we do the most good with the money and the time that we have in this world.