Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him;
but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself...

I was talking with a friend the other day, and the topic turned to vaccines. It's expected that the Sinovac and Pfizer vaccines will become available roughly simultaneously in Hong Kong, and so the question was, which vaccine we'd would prefer to receive.

Two topics that came up were safety and efficacy...

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On safety, one can ask whether the Sinovac vaccine should be trusted quite as much as the ones developed in the West. (Hey, one can ask just about anything...)

Well, medically speaking, CoronaVac is a relatively conventional killed-virus vaccine. There's significant trial data available on it, as it has been given to more than a million people in mainland China since it received EUA in July. They've had months to observe side effects.

The issue is that that trial data is in the hands of Sinovac, a state-owned enterprise. And the question, then, is whether the Chinese authorities might have EUA'd the vaccine even if it had side effects that would make you, personally, balk. If it did, and even if it was massively good for society as a whole to get it, you might prefer to pass on getting it in your arm.

But that's just speculation; how likely is it to be true? Well, if CoronaVac's minor negative effects would be suppressed

Weird year, right? Still, some things don't change -- I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to make the universe better.

Here's how I'm thinking about doing that at the end of 2020.

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Back in February 2019, I was randomly (yes, randomly) selected to direct $500k of funds from a donor lottery, and have spent a fair amount of time since then thinking about how to direct those funds most efficiently.

So far, I have recommended grants of $165k to the Good Food Institute in the spring, and just over $200k to a number of Covid-19 interventions in May and June. You can read about those grants here and here.

The work that I did to research and decide on those grants was most of the thinking about effective giving that I did this year; it's been written up elsewhere, and so this post will mostly not cover the same ground. (If you're just looking for new ideas from these posts, see "Relative opinions" from my donor lottery writeup and section 1 below.)

Summary of the rest of this post:

• I provide a new reflection on why I expect to continue supporting a mix of 'solid' and 'speculative' causes for the forseeable future. (1)
• I still recommend using a DAF. (I use Vanguard.) (2a)
• I'm supporting the same organizations that I did last year, in comparable amounts. (2b, summary)
• I made substantial one-off donations relating to the US November elections, which I will not say as much about as you probably want. (2b:politics)
• As my budget for donations grows, I'm sending most of the year-over-year growth into entering another

This is the second in a series of reports on my decision-making process and decisions in allocating the $500k funding pool from the January 2019 CEA donor lottery. This writeup on my phase-2 grant recommendations is released simultaneously with my writeup of phase 1, which also provides a broader introduction to my personal background, philosophical foundation, and initial process.

While the decision-making process for phase 1 was largely completed prior to the widespread understanding of the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic, phase-2 grantmaking began in March 2020 and specifically focused on neglected responses to the pandemic. This writeup outlines what I can reconstruct of my process and opinions at the time, and discusses my thoughts on room for further funding.

As with the previous report, this writeup represents independent work and is not coauthored or endorsed by CEA, the organizations or individuals mentioned, or my employer. Grantee organizations and individuals were given one week to review a draft of relevant segments (except for COVID-END, who I neglected to contact before publication through my own mistake), though final editorial decisions were mine.

Overall summary

In phase 2, CEA accepted my recommendations to grant (in decreasing order of grant size):

• $100k to Fast Grants, for rapid regranting to academic research projects related to Covid-19.
• $80k to COVID-END, to reduce duplication in Covid-19-related research and accelerate evidence-based policy responses worldwide.
• $15k to the Bottleneck Fund, for regranting to global interventions in water and sanitation to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
• $6.4k to Ian David Moss, for consulting work supporting

The results of the January 2019 CEA donor lottery meant that I was responsible for allocating the donor lottery's $500k funding pool. I entered the donor lottery anonymously, though I now intend to explain my grants and decision-making process publicly; I believe that transparency and open sharing of ideas is a good thing for effective altruism, and I'm glad to be able to contribute to that here.

I expect that my grant recommendations from this funding pool will ultimately be made in three or four phases; this writeup is a preliminary report on phase 1, and is released simultaneously with my writeup on phase 2.

The decision-making process for phase 1 was largely completed prior to February 2020, and phase-1 grants were not substantially affected by consideration of the Covid-19 pandemic (see "Adjusting for unexpected developments", below). Phase-2 decision-making began after February 2020, and phase-2 grants focused on neglected responses to the Covid-19 pandemic (see phase-2 writeup post). As of December 2020, phase-3 decision-making has not yet begun in earnest.

Overall summary

In phase 1, CEA accepted my recommendations for two earmarked grants to the Good Food Institute:

• $120k to GFI's European affiliate to support policy advocacy enabling the development and mainstream deployment of food products that replace farmed-animal products.
• $45k to GFI's Asia--Pacific affiliate to support market research and policy advocacy, likewise to support deployment of alternative protein products in Asia.

This post has top-level sections on:

• my personal and philosophical background,
• my current high-level thoughts on different EA cause areas,
• some considerations for medium-size

A prospective Harvard student wrote the other day asking for advice about CS+Math at Harvard, and (among other questions) asked if I'd share the courses I took to help them compare with their own plans. As always, I was happy to help. I figured it might also be useful to someone else to have an (admittedly idiosyncratic) sample of a Harvard CS+Math schedule on the Internet, so I'm posting it here, too.

It should be obvious, but no one should take this as a prescription -- not everything was the right choice for me in hindsight, so it's definitely not exactly right for you. At best, it's a data point for people exactly like me, and at worst you should consider reversing the major takeaways.

I also feel compelled to pass along the best advice I received about picking a major, which came from Harry Lewis:

• Pick the 32 courses you most want to take.
• See if any major will give you a degree for exactly those.
• If so, then you're done.
• If not, find the one that will give you a degree with the fewest changes. Pick that one.

Don't take extra courses to get extra pieces of paper. As Harry would say, "Don't let getting your degree get in the way of getting your education!"

But, without any further caveats, here we go...

First, I'll list just the course numbers. Below that, I've listed the course titles, professors, and some light thoughts on the professors and/or the

Jeff Kaufman discusses an interaction between price controls and emergency preparedness:

Let's say you see a potential pandemic coming, and you produce a product that could be critical. Maybe you make respirator masks, maybe you make ventilators, maybe you make PCR test reagents. You can see that if you and your competitors don't ramp up production and the pandemic happens, there will be a shortage. What do you do?

[...]

[One] option is to ramp up production now, speculatively. Start paying workers extra to work longer shifts and run your assembly lines around the clock. Train extra workers. Find what you're bottlenecked on and figure out how to get that ramped up too. If the pandemic fears were overblown you lose a lot of money, but if the pandemic happens people need what you have so much that you can charge high prices. How much to ramp up production in advance depends on how likely you think the pandemic is, and how much you'd be able to increase prices if it does happen.

Except we have laws and customs against price gouging: if the pandemic does happen, you are going to have a lot of trouble raising your prices. The laws generally do allow passing along increased costs, but the problem here is that your costs were speculative. Let's work an example. (...)

The punchline of the worked example is that if you think that there's a 50% chance of an emergency that will make your products ten times as valuable, it's still not worth it

For the sixth year, I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to support the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts at the end of 2019.

These specific organizations I'm supporting are, in relative terms, mostly unchanged from 2018. The biggest changes are:

• Marginally more saving / investing for later donation opportunities (including the potential for political contributions in 2020).
• Because of the above, marginally less donor lottery.
• The Good Food Institute replacing The Humane League.

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Compared to years past, I spent relatively more time thinking about donations this year. This reflects a few things:

• I'll be giving more as my income grows and my personal savings reach more comfortable levels, so I expect to get more value from making an X% better decision.
• I felt that some of the available opportunities were more difficult to think about but still worth considering (such as political donations), and spent some time considering them.
• I got excited about certain organizations I was considering and spent a bit more time learning about them, specifically.

I certainly don't think that this process has left me with more expertise than people who take this very seriously, and I expect that my heavy reliance on my local network has biased my outlook in ways I don't completely understand. I'm not claiming that my thoughts here are authoritative or finished in any sense; I'm mostly trying to support a culture of sharing and building on each others' opinions, however complete or incomplete they are.

The rest of this post covers logistics and personal tax