Government decision-making underpins almost half the developed world's spending, and is often involved in the areas effective altruists care about the most. So learning how effective altruists should work with policy seems incredibly important.
That's what we're trying to achieve at the Global Priorities Project. One of our donors has decided to match all donations we get up to the amount we need to cover this year's budget until January 31st. We still need to raise another £21,000 over the next two weeks to fully fund our £217,000 budget for 2016. Your support could help us build on our tangible results so far including:
- The Department for International Development reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work. We had recommended this to policy-makers based on our primary and secondary research, and were one of several who made similar recommendations,
- Building existential risk policy and strategy recommendations that we shared at the State of AI Safety 2015 and receiving a grant from the Future of Life Institute to extend this work, and one from the Finnish government to lay the foundations for an international coalition on existential risk coordination,
- The UK government changing the way they evaluate risks in the National Risk Assessment framework partly in response to our advice on accounting for type of risk and distinguishing preparation from assessment.
If you've been on the fence about supporting us, or meant to give some day but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time!
If you want to donate - you can support us through the CEA website.
Visit our website here for more details including our detailed review of progress, work update, strategy overview, financial overview, and team and capabilities assessment.
If you have more questions, you can either ask them below or contact me here.
"you rather than the very many other groups" The post above said "several." I think the number of players here is incredibly important.
Can we get ballpark estimates on how many is the several/very many other players of equivalent or higher weight in this field? 5? 50? 500?
EDIT: Why was my question downvoted? I feel like it's an important question, and asked in good faith.
I'm not very confident on this estimate, but I'd hazard that between 5-50 causally connected groups will have made a recommendation related to the balance of research vs direct work in global health as part of the DfID budget (in either direction).
That's maybe a 75% confidence interval.