The GiveWell Blog

Coming down to earth: What if a big geomagnetic storm does hit?

This is the fourth post in a series about geomagnetic storms as a global catastrophic risk. A paper covering the material in this series was recently released. I devoted the first three posts in this series to describing geomagnetic storms and assessing the odds that a Big One is coming. I concluded that the iconic Carrington…

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The long-term significance of reducing global catastrophic risks

Note: this post aims to help a particular subset of our audience understand the assumptions behind our work on global catastrophic risks. One focus area for the Open Philanthropy Project is reducing global catastrophic risks (such as from pandemics, potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, geoengineering, and geomagnetic storms). A major reason that the Open…

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Good Ventures’ $25 million grant to GiveDirectly

Good Ventures has granted $25 million to GiveDirectly for the support of GiveDirectly’s general operations. While the grant is unrestricted, we expect that GiveDirectly will most likely use this grant as follows: ~$6-9 million: to hire a marketing team to raise significantly more funding than GiveDirectly has raised in the past. ~$16-19 million: to provide…

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