New releases

Building effective altruism

Problem profile by · Last updated July 2020 · First published March 2017

Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis. Promoting its ideas can increase your impact many times over, through influencing other altruists to pursue the very best opportunities for doing good. Past efforts to promote effective altruism from Giving What We Can have already caused almost 5,000 people to pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to highly effective charities, with over $125 million donated so far and much more pledged in lifetime donations. Promoting effective altruism also builds a community that will work on whichever global problems turn out to be most pressing in the future, so it’s a good option if you’re unsure about which problem is most pressing.

Very few people are working on promoting effective altruism directly. The total staff at effective altruism-aligned organisations is probably about 500 — that includes many people who are not involved in building the effective altruism movement, but also excludes some that are (like local group leaders).1 The combined budgets of organisations that work on building effective altruism is around $25 million. In part because doing so is relatively neglected, we think building effective altruism is one of the most promising ways to improve the world.

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#82 – James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system

Podcast by and · Published July 27th, 2020

No democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rate down to the global average, the US would have to release 3 in 4 people in its prisons today.

The effects on Black Americans have been especially severe — Black people make up 12% of the US population but 33% of its prison population. In the early 2000s when incarceration reached its peak, the US government estimated that 32% of Black boys would go to prison at some point in their lives, 5.5 times the figure for whites.

Contrary to popular understanding, nonviolent drug offenses account for less than one fifth of the incarcerated population. The only way to get its incarceration rate near the global average will be to shorten prison sentences for so-called ‘violent criminals’ — a politically toxic idea. But could we change that?

According to today’s guest, Professor James Forman Jr — a former public defender in Washington DC, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, and now a professor at Yale Law School — there are two things we have to do to make that happen.

First, he thinks we should lose the term ‘violent offender’, and maybe even ‘violent crime’. When you say ‘violent crime’, most people immediately think of murder and rape — but they’re only a small fraction of the crimes that the law deems as violent.

In reality, the crime that puts the most people in prison in the US is robbery. And the law says that robbery is a violent crime whether a weapon is involved or not. By moving away from the catch-all category of ‘violent criminals’ we can judge the risk posed by individual people more sensibly.

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#81 – Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

Podcast by , and · Published July 9th, 2020

80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments.

Today’s guest, Ben Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, supports the continued expansion of AI safety as a field and believes working on AI is among the very best ways to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But he also believes the classic AI risk arguments have been subject to insufficient scrutiny given this level of investment.

In particular, the case for working on AI if you care about the long-term future has often been made on the basis of concern about AI accidents; it’s actually quite difficult to design systems that you can feel confident will behave the way you want them to in all circumstances.

Nick Bostrom wrote the most fleshed out version of the argument in his book, Superintelligence. But Ben reminds us that, apart from Bostrom’s book and essays by Eliezer Yudkowsky, there’s very little existing writing on existential accidents. Some more recent AI risk arguments do seem plausible to Ben, but they’re fragile and difficult to evaluate since they haven’t yet been expounded at length.

There have also been very few skeptical experts that have actually sat down and fully engaged with it, writing down point by point where they disagree or where they think the mistakes are. This means that Ben has probably scrutinised classic AI risk arguments as carefully as almost anyone else in the world.

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#80 – Stuart Russell on the flaws that make today’s AI architecture unsafe, and a new approach that could fix them

Podcast by and · Published June 22nd, 2020

Stuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook, thinks the way we approach machine learning today is fundamentally flawed.

In his new book, Human Compatible, he outlines the ‘standard model’ of AI development, in which intelligence is measured as the ability to achieve some definite, completely-known objective that we’ve stated explicitly. This is so obvious it almost doesn’t even seem like a design choice, but it is.

Unfortunately there’s a big problem with this approach: it’s incredibly hard to say exactly what you want. AI today lacks common sense, and simply does whatever we’ve asked it to. That’s true even if the goal isn’t what we really want, or the methods it’s choosing are ones we would never accept.

We already see AIs misbehaving for this reason. Stuart points to the example of YouTube’s recommender algorithm, which reportedly nudged users towards extreme political views because that made it easier to keep them on the site. This isn’t something we wanted, but it helped achieve the algorithm’s objective: maximise viewing time.

Like King Midas, who asked to be able to turn everything into gold but ended up unable to eat, we get too much of what we’ve asked for.

This ‘alignment’ problem will get more and more severe as machine learning is embedded in more and more places: recommending us news, operating power grids, deciding prison sentences, doing surgery, and fighting wars. If we’re ever to hand over much of the economy to thinking machines, we can’t count on ourselves correctly saying exactly what we want the AI to do every time.

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What 80,000 Hours learned by anonymously interviewing people we respect

Blog post by · Published June 18th, 2020

We recently released the fifteenth and final installment in our series of posts with anonymous answers.

These are from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution.

It features answers to 23 different questions including “How have you seen talented people fail in their work?“ and “What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?“.

We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provocative, others just surprising. And as intended, they spanned a wide range of opinions.

For example, one person had seen talented people fail by being too jumpy:

“It seems particularly common in effective altruism for people to be happy to jump ship onto some new project that seems higher impact at the time. And I think that this tendency systematically underestimates the costs of switching, and systematically overestimates the benefits — so you get kind of a ‘grass is greener’ effect.

In general, I think, if you’re taking a job, you should be imagining that you’re going to do that job for several years. If you’re in a job, and you’re not hating it, it’s going pretty well — and some new opportunity presents itself, I think you should be extremely reticent to jump ship.

I think there are also a lot of gains from focusing on one activity or a particular set of activities;

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Anonymous answers: Are there myths you feel obliged to support publicly? And five other questions.

Blog post by · Published June 5th, 2020

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful.

This is the fifteenth and final in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

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#79 – A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles

Podcast by and · Published June 1st, 2020

Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, “You know what, she’s not so bad”.

Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history.

He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind, tried to become the healthiest person in the world, read 33,000 pages of facts, spent a year following the Bible literally, thanked everyone involved in making his morning cup of coffee, and tried to figure out how to do the most good. His next book will ask: if we reframe global problems as puzzles, would the world be a better place?

This is the first time I’ve hosted the podcast, and I’m hoping to convince people to listen with this attempt at a clever blog post that changes styles each paragraph to reference different A.J. experiments. I don’t actually think it’s that clever, but all of my other ideas seemed worse. I really have no idea how people will react to this episode; I loved it, but I definitely think I’m more entertaining than almost anyone else will. (Radical Honesty.)

We do talk about some useful stuff — one of which is the concept of micro goals. When you wake up in the morning, just commit to putting on your workout clothes. Once they’re on, maybe you’ll think that you might as well get on the treadmill — just for a minute. And once you’re on for 1 minute, you’ll often stay on for 20. So I’m not asking you to commit to listening to the whole episode — just to put on your headphones. (Drop Dead Healthy.)

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#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress

Podcast by , and · Published May 22nd, 2020

Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.

These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today’s episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy.

Danny and I talk about how to understand his team’s results and what they mean (and don’t mean) for how we should think about progress in AI going forward.

Debates around the future of AI can sometimes be pretty abstract and theoretical. Danny hopes that providing rigorous measurements of some of the inputs to AI progress so far can help us better understand what causes that progress, as well as ground debates about the future of AI in a better shared understanding of the field.

If this research sounds appealing, you might be interested in applying to join OpenAI’s Foresight team — they’re currently hiring research engineers.

In the interview, Danny and I (Arden Koehler) also discuss a range of other topics, including:

  • The question of which experts to believe
  • Danny’s journey to working at OpenAI
  • The usefulness of “decision boundaries”
  • The importance of Moore’s law for people who care about the long-term future
  • What OpenAI’s Foresight Team’s findings might imply for policy
  • The question whether progress in the performance of AI systems is linear
  • The safety teams at OpenAI and who they’re looking to hire
  • One idea for finding someone to guide your learning
  • The importance of hardware expertise for making a positive impact

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#77 – Marc Lipsitch on whether we’re winning or losing against COVID-19

Podcast by and · Published May 18th, 2020

In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust.

Here he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he’s open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time.

As Marc tells us, island nations like Taiwan and New Zealand are successfully suppressing SARS-COV-2. But everyone else is struggling.

Even Singapore, with plenty of warning and one of the best test and trace systems in the world, lost control of the virus in mid-April after successfully holding back the tide for 2 months.

This doesn’t bode well for how the US or Europe will cope as they ease their lockdowns. It also suggests it would have been exceedingly hard for China to stop the virus before it spread overseas.

But sadly, there’s no easy way out.

The original estimates of COVID-19’s infection fatality rate, of 0.5-1%, have turned out to be basically right. And the latest serology surveys indicate only 5-10% of people in countries like the US, UK and Spain have been infected so far, leaving us far short of herd immunity. To get there, even these worst affected countries would need to endure something like ten times the number of deaths they have so far.

Marc has one good piece of news: research suggests that most of those who get infected do indeed develop immunity, for a while at least.

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#76 – Tara Kirk Sell on COVID-19 misinformation, who’s done well and badly, and what we should reopen first

Podcast by and · Published May 8th, 2020

Amid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news — and one thing we’re especially thankful for is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS).

CHS focuses on protecting us from major biological, chemical or nuclear disasters, through research that informs governments around the world. While this pandemic surprised many, just last October the Center ran a simulation of a ‘new coronavirus’ scenario to identify weaknesses in our ability to quickly respond. Their expertise has given them a key role in figuring out how to fight COVID-19.

Today’s guest, Dr Tara Kirk Sell, did her PhD in policy and communication during disease outbreaks, and has worked at CHS for 11 years on a range of important projects.

Last year she was a leader on Collective Intelligence for Disease Prediction, designed to sound the alarm about upcoming pandemics before others are paying attention. Incredibly, the project almost closed in December, with COVID-19 just starting to spread around the world — but received new funding that allowed the project to respond quickly to the emerging disease.

She also contributed to a recent report attempting to explain the risks of specific types of activities resuming when COVID-19 lockdowns end.

It’s not possible to reach zero risk — so differentiating activities on a spectrum is crucial. Choosing wisely can help us lead more normal lives without reviving the pandemic.

Dance clubs will have to stay closed, but hairdressers can adapt to minimise transmission, and Tara (who happens to also be an Olympic silver medalist swimmer) suggests outdoor non-contact sports could resume soon at little risk.

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#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours

Podcast by , , and · Published April 28th, 2020

Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on the most plausible paths for them, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.

I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, and these days I’m 80,000 Hours’ Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds of things it’s useful for people to hear about when thinking through their careers.

We all thought it would be useful to discuss some of those on the show for others to hear. Among other topics we cover:

  • The difficulty of maintaining the ambition to increase your social impact, while also being proud of and motivated by what you’re already accomplishing.
  • Why traditional careers advice involves thinking through what types of roles you enjoy followed by which of those are impactful, while we recommend going the other way: ranking roles on impact, and then going down the list to find the one you think you’d most flourish in.
  • That if you’re pitching your job search at the right level of role, you’ll need to apply to a large number of different jobs. So it’s wise to broaden your options, by applying for both stretch and backup roles, and not over-emphasising a small number of organisations.
  • Our suggested process for writing a longer term career plan: 1. shortlist your best medium to long-term career options, then 2. figure out the key uncertainties in choosing between them, and 3. map out concrete next steps to resolve those uncertainties.
  • Why many listeners aren’t spending enough time finding out about what the day-to-day work is like in paths they’re considering, or reaching out to people for advice or opportunities.

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Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk

Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2020

In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord suggests a range of research and practical projects that governments could fund to reduce the risk of a global catastrophe that could permanently limit humanity’s prospects.

He compiles over 50 of these in an appendix, which we’ve reproduced below. You may not be convinced by all of these ideas, but they help to give a sense of the breadth of plausible longtermist projects available in policy, science, universities and business.

There are many existential risks and they can be tackled in different ways, which makes it likely that great opportunities are out there waiting to be identified.

Many of these proposals are discussed in the body of The Precipice. We’ve got a 3 hour interview with Toby you could listen to, or you can get a copy of the book mailed you for free by joining our newsletter:

Policy and research recommendations
Engineered Pandemics

  • Bring the Biological Weapons Convention into line with the Chemical Weapons Convention: taking its budget from $1.4 million up to $80 million, increasing its staff commensurately, and granting the power to investigate suspected breaches.
  • Strengthen the WHO’s ability to respond to emerging pandemics through rapid disease surveillance, diagnosis and control. This involves increasing its funding and powers, as well as R&D on the requisite technologies.

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Anonymous contributors answer: How should the effective altruism community think about diversity?

Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2020

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community.

But it’s the fourteenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

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#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 and reducing global catastrophic biological risks

Podcast by , and · Published April 17th, 2020

Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise.

The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, including here at 80,000 Hours.

Today’s guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 compares to other diseases, pandemics of the past, and possible worse crises in the future.

COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we are vulnerable to biological threats and underprepared to deal with them. We have been unable to suppress the spread of COVID-19 around the world and, tragically, global deaths will at least be in the hundreds of thousands.

How would we cope with a virus that was even more contagious and even more deadly? Greg’s work focuses on these risks — of outbreaks that threaten our entire future through an unrecoverable collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity.

If such a catastrophe were to occur, Greg believes it’s more likely to be caused by accidental or deliberate misuse of biotechnology than by a pathogen developed by nature.

There are a few direct causes for concern: humans now have the ability to produce some of the most dangerous diseases in history in the lab; technological progress may enable the creation of pathogens which are nastier than anything we see in nature; and most biotechnology has yet to even be conceived, so we can’t assume all the dangers will be familiar.

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What programmes will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effective altruism community?

Blog post by · Published April 14th, 2020

There are many career services that would be useful to the effective altruism community, and unfortunately 80,000 Hours is not able to provide them all.

In this post, I aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can’t, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps.

80,000 Hours’ online content is also serving as one of the most common ways that people get introduced to the effective altruism community, but we’re not the ideal introduction for many types of people, which I also list in the section on online articles.

You can see our full plans in our annual review.

Target audience

Our aim is to do the most we can to fill the key skill gaps in the world’s most pressing problems. We think that is the best way we can help to improve the lives of others over the long term.

We think that the best way to do this is – given our small team – to initially specialise on a single target audience, and gradually expand the audience over time.

Given this, most of our effort (say 50%+) is on advice and support for English-speaking people age 20-35 who might be able to enter one of our current priority paths.

We also aim to put ~30% of our effort into other ways of addressing our priority problems (AI,

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200+ opportunities to work on COVID-19, and 60+ places to get funding

Blog post by and · Published April 5th, 2020

Below is a list of opportunities to help the global response to COVID-19. The list focuses on opportunities in research, policy, technology and startups, especially in the US and UK, and includes jobs, volunteering opportunities, and opportunities to receive funding. It accompanies our article on how to volunteer to help tackle the crisis most effectively.

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80,000 Hours Annual Review – December 2019

Blog post by · Published April 5th, 2020

benjamin todd 80000 hours

We’ve released our 2019 annual review here.

It summarises our annual impact evaluation, and outlines our progress, plans, mistakes and fundraising needs.

The document was initially prepared in Nov 2019. We delayed its release until we heard back from some of our largest donors so that other stakeholders would be fully informed about our funding situation before we asked for their support. Most claims should be taken to be made “as of November 2019.”

We include:

If you would like to go into more detail, we also provide the following optional sections:

You can find our previous evaluations here.

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Good news about COVID-19

Blog post by · Published April 3rd, 2020

Many of us feel depressed about the COVID-19 situation, and it is without doubt a horrible tragedy.

But millions of people are rising to the occasion, and there’s a lot of good news mixed in with the bad.

The media has a tendency to give extra coverage to bad news, because readers find negative stories more eye-catching.

So in the interest of balance, here are some positive things we’ve learned in the last week while writing articles on how to tackle the coronavirus crisis through temporary work, donations, or policy, and compiling over 250 job opportunities and 60 funding sources.

Some countries are turning COVID-19 away at the door, while others are turning the tide of the pandemic

As you can see in this chart, COVID-19 remains mostly controlled in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Taiwan is barely visible down there at the bottom, while Singapore actually hasn’t had enough deaths to make it onto the figure yet.

Once they emerge from their ‘lockdowns’, other places can potentially copy the methods which these three countries have shown can work.

COVID-19 may also be controlled in Hong Kong, Japan and China, which are reporting few new cases. (Unfortunately Hong Kong and Japan aren’t testing enough people to be sure, and China doesn’t say how many tests it’s running, so we’ll have to wait and see.)

As the figure below shows,

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Essential Facts and Figures – COVID-19

Article by and · Published April 2020

This page aims to summarise our understanding of the current science on key questions about COVID-19 (as of 3 April, 2020), as best we can given the state of the evidence and the fast moving situation. We provide more explanation as well as sources in the footnotes.

Symptoms and severity

  • The most common reported symptoms are cough (appearing in about 80% of confirmed cases – meaning those who have been tested and found to be infected with the virus) and fever (80%-90%). Many also experience shortness of breath, usually later in the disease progression. Diarrhea and other GI symptoms have also been seen in some patients. Nasal congestion and runny nose seem uncommon (<5%). Anecdotally, loss of the sense of taste or smell have also been reported.
  • Once someone is infected, it seems to typically take ~7 days for symptoms to develop. One study with a large sample size found that for 11.5% of confirmed cases it took more than 14 days.
  • According to initial data from China, around 81% of confirmed cases are ‘mild’ (though can still involve pneumonia), 14% are severe (requiring hospitalisation), and 5% are critical. A large proportion of people infected with the virus have mild symptoms, and around 20% may have no symptoms, though there is not reliable data here.
  • Most current estimates of the fraction of infected people (rather than people with confirmed cases) who die from the disease (the ‘IFR’) seem to be between 0.1% and 2%.

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Options for donating to fight COVID-19

Article by · Published March 2020

Many people have been asking about where they can donate to fight COVID-19, so we asked a couple of advisors for their initial thoughts on which opportunities could be especially high-leverage.

We haven’t evaluated how these compare to donation opportunities in other areas, but if you are keen to donate specifically to COVID-19-related work then read on.

1. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

Personally, I would donate to the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins (CHS), which researches biosecurity and advocates for better policy. It takes donations here, or you can donate through the Effective Altruism Funds.

  • They’ve been one of the most influential sources of information and analysis for helping inform policymakers’ response to the crisis, for instance releasing influential situation reports at least once a day since January 22nd.
  • Getting the policy response right seems like a crucial lever in navigating the crisis, and requires comparatively little funding.
  • They had a good track record of work on pandemic preparedness before the crisis, and received a large grant from Open Philanthropy in 2019.
  • My best guess is that if the CHS has urgent funding needs during the crisis, those needs will be met by other donors, especially Open Philanthropy. However, the Center’s budget is large, so in the longer term I expect it could make productive use of additional funding,

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