Summary

The written word dominates EA discourse but visuals have a unique power in communicating ideas that seems quite underleveraged in this community. As a designer and communicator in the space, I wanted to share some of the presentations and visualizations I’ve created over the years in hopes that they might be helpful to others. My goal isn't to present these visuals as "ready-to-use" resources—for various reasons they're not ready (see disclaimers)—but rather as references that hopefully inspire others to create and invest in visual forms of communication.

Effective Giving 101 (2023)

In 2023, when I was director of design at Giving What We Can, we were invited to give a talk at Microsoft about effective giving.  We normally don’t dive so deep into the research that undergirds our recommendations but—given the highly-educated, highly-analytical audience at Microsoft—I thought it could be compelling to actually get into the weeds and show them how serious and compelling GiveWell’s analysis is. Below I’ve excerpted two sections of that deck and linked to the complete deck below for those interested in seeing them in context.

Disclaimers

• This deck is outdated—GWWC has since created an updated version of this talk which makes some important updates (GiveWell’s current estimates) and clarifications (drawing a clearer line between “charities” and “interventions”).

Full deck: Doing Good Better (Microsoft 2023)

GiveWell’s 2020 analysis of AMF

Within the context of the talk, this section comes after illustrating the importance of cost-effectiveness and the necessity of trusted evaluators. My sense was that consultants would quickly grok these concepts but might still be skeptical of these “trusted charity evaluators”. By walking them through GiveWell’s rigorous analysis of AMF, I was able to build GiveWell’s credibility, while introducing them to Malaria and ultimately lead them to the (profound) conclusion that a donation of $4500 (now $5500) can save a real child’s life.

Disclaimers

• The actual analysis presented in this section (done by GiveWell & Cochrane) is incredibly solid but it’s presented by an amateur (me). I did my best to represent the research to the best of my understanding but wouldn’t be surprised if experts had suggestions for improvements or corrections in the details.

Slides: GiveWell’s 2020 analysis of AMF

Global income illustration

At GWWC, we spent a lot of time reminding people that “you are the top 1%” but for many reasons, simply saying that rarely resonates. Wealthy westerners understand that we are fortunate but because we’re surrounded by similarly fortunate people, it doesn’t really feel that way. In this concluding illustration, I wanted to make people really feel that top 1% position by removing them from their privileged bubble and lining them up with 100 representative people from around the world. This physical illustration shrinks the incomprehensible scale of 8 billion people down to an intuitive scale and makes your 1% position tangible and unignorable. Not only are you the first in line but you make more than half of the field combined… Should it matter that your neighbors & coworkers are also first in line? I don’t think so.

Note: I think this illustration is effective in slides but could be more powerful in other formats like video.

Disclaimers

• The data here comes from GWWC’s How Rich Am I Calculator pulled in February 2023. This data was updated in 2024 making the income figures presented here ~5% lower than those in the calculator today. 

• The conversion of international income data to a USD equivalent comes from the World Bank’s Purchasing Power Parity Index (PPP). The conversion from GWWC’s post-tax income data to the post-tax income figures used here was done by me using standard NYC tax rates for 2022 (where I first gave this talk).

   

Slides: The Global Income Distribution

Prioritization in GCR (2024)

In an attempt to casually explain why EA tends to prioritize certain sources of global catastrophic risks above others, I recently put together some quick slides illustrating some guiding concepts. In the first set, I illustrate Parfait’s famous hypothetical comparing a 99% extinction event to a 100% extinction event (with some modifications). In the second set, I map all major sources of GCR on an X-Y comparing how likely each is to cause extinction this century (X) and roughly how much funding each receives (Y). Funding here is obviously a proxy for “neglectedness” and risk of extinction is a proxy for “scale”/ “importance”.

Parfit’s 99% extinction hypothetical

If you look at the current prioritization of EA, few thought experiments are as influential and philosophically load-bearing as Parfit's 99% hypothetical. But despite its importance many communicators shy away from retelling it because it seems morbid, callous, and highly non-intuitive. This may ultimately be the right path but I wanted to try to make this an easier though experiment to reach for. In this illustration, I simply wanted to make the argument & conclusions less morbid and more obvious by (literally) zooming out from our present existence and illustrating just how different 99% and 100% events are.

Disclaimers

• The rate and pattern of the civilizational recovery depicted here is (obviously) not based on anything specific. This could probably be modeled better with dedicated research (and a specific catastrophic event) but I think it illustrates the concept perfectly well.

Slides: Parfit’s 99% v 100%

Mapping the GCR landscape

When explaining my new career focus on global catastrophic risk, many people assume I'm talking about climate change or something like asteroids. In explaining why I, and the organizations I'm working for, have prioritized nuclear weapons, pandemics, and artificial intelligence above other legitimate sources of risk, this is the graph I've used. While these slides don't get into the details of why certain risks are dangerous or underfunded, I think this plot nicely introduces the concepts of "scale" and "neglectedness" while illustrating why certain esoteric risks have become the primary focus of EA more broadly.

Disclaimers

• The landscape funding numbers aren’t real—Well... they’re very crude approximations, done by a non-expert (me), in very limited time (an afternoon), using limited tools (Google & Claude). I believe they’re in the right ballpark but you should basically treat them as fabrications until someone actually crunches the number. (And BTW, if you’re reading this and you want to crunch the numbers I’d love to collaborate and make this a real document)
  • "AI Safety efforts are being outspent 2246-to-1 "  is also my own napkin math but the 2021 numbers referenced are solid. The $150M spent on AI Safety comes from a  Longview report and the global AI investment numbers come from Our World in Data.
• The risk estimations come from The Precipice—I consider this a great source (and ballpark correct) but of course people disagree on these estimates and Toby himself has updated some of his thinking since the book’s publishing.

Slides: Visualizing: The GCR Landscape

Bonus: Effective Giving Strategy Frameworks

Earlier this year, while I was working as GWWC’s Design Director & US Country Manager, I spent some time thinking about what should guide us as we formalized our theory of change. I created some slides pitching my ideas about how we could connect our lofty vision to concrete measurables (“Vision to Vectors”) and laid out a couple of foundational frameworks I thought could help our development of a theory or change (“The Pledging Journey”). Although the team agreed with much of the foundational ideas in this deck, they were never formally adopted by GWWC and the frameworks were not implemented as a part of GWWC’s strategy. You can read more about their high-level strategy here.

Disclaimers

• These concepts are my own ideas and don’t reflect GWWC’s current strategy—(repeated from above) Although the team agreed with much of the foundational ideas in this deck, they were never formally adopted by GWWC and the frameworks were not implemented as a part of GWWC’s strategy. You can read more about their high-level strategy here.

Vision to Vectors

Slides: Vision to Vectors

The Pledger Journey

Slides: The Pledger Journey

Thank you to everyone who helped in producing the original visuals and thank you to @Aric Floyd & @Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 for the encouragement and helping edit this post.