Inside Philanthropy: Open Philanthropy Tackles the “Low-Hanging Fruit” in Public Health

“[Dr. Olufemi] Adewole’s research team is just one of the recipients of a global health and wellbeing grant in 2023 from Open Philanthropy, a foundation established according to the principles of effective altruism — that is, tackling important neglected problems with evidence-based solutions that can save a high number of lives.”

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“Other grantees in the foundation’s global health and wellness portfolio, which totaled roughly $358 million in 2023, include what Open Philanthropy CEO and cofounder Alexander Berger describes as “low-hanging fruit.” “If you look at where deaths from preventable causes, especially easily preventable causes, happen around the world, they’re happening very disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries, especially to young kids,” said Berger.”

Inside Philanthropy: What a Facebook Cofounder’s Latest $1.9 Billion for His Foundation Says about Philanthropy’s Future

“Good Ventures is now among the top 20 largest foundations in the country, close on the heels of another storied philanthropy from another century, the Rockefeller Foundation.

“Moskovitz and Tuna also offer a powerful philanthropic example to other entrants on the billionaires list, not to mention legions of other young but not-quite-so-fortunate tech entrepreneurs.”

80,000 Hours Podcast: Matt Clancy on whether science is good

“Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re making progress at a 10% faster rate than we normally would have. Over time, that aggregates up, and maybe after 10 years, we’re a year ahead of where we would have been if we hadn’t done this kind of stuff.

“Now, suppose in 10 years we’re going to discover a cheap new genetic engineering technology that anyone can use in the world if they order the right parts off of Amazon. That could be great, but could also allow bad actors to genetically engineer pandemics and basically try to do terrible things with this technology. And if we’ve brought that forward, and that happens at year nine instead of year 10 because of some of these interventions we did, now we start to think that if that’s really bad, if these people using this technology causes huge problems for humanity, it begins to sort of wash out the benefits of getting the science a little bit faster.”

80,000 Hours Podcast: Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

“One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people’s homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that’s the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. It happens in larger cities too, in this part of the world.”

80,000 Hours podcast: Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

“…if you really think that there’s a good chance that you’re not understanding things, then something that you could do that at least probably has some shot of helping is to put future generations in a better position to solve these questions — once they have lots of time and hopefully are a whole lot smarter and much more informed than we are…”