I realise I'm responding to an old comment, but was this post of Nuno's the product of your project?

You may be interested in this chart from the What trends do we see in GWWC Pledgers’ giving? subsection of GWWC's 2020-22 cost-eff self-evaluation, as well as their discussion:

My personal (skeptical) benchmark for price per unit of non-garbage carbon offsets comes from Scott Alexander's mention of Climeworks:

“Pessimistic” comes from Climeworks, a company that builds giant reverse-factories which take carbon out of the air. If you’re maximally skeptical about any charity's ability to offset CO2, these are the people for you - they can literally hand you a bottle full of the carbon they removed, so you don't need to take anything on faith. But they charge as much as $1000/ton. 

Climeworks actually charges more now, at least for their individual subscription pricing: $1,500/ton, no volume discount across subscription tiers. 

I like the idea of immediately donating the same amount or more to effective environmental funds, thanks for sharing.

(Attention conservation notice: rambling in public)

A striking throwaway remark, given its context: 

There is remarkably little evidence that evidence-based medicine leads to better health outcomes for patients, though this is absence of (good) evidence rather than (good) evidence of absence of effect.

It's striking given that this comes from this book on Thailand’s Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP) (ch 1 pg 22), albeit perhaps understandable given the authors' stance that evidence is necessary but not sufficient to determine the best course of action (to treat a patient, to design a social insurance scheme, etc), which seems completely unobjectionable.

That said, I did wonder about the first half of the quoted throwaway remark, so I asked Elicit; its top-4 paper summary is

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been shown to improve patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency. A study in a Spanish hospital found that an EBP unit had lower mortality rates (6.27% vs 7.75%) and shorter lengths of stay (6.01 vs 8.46 days) compared to standard practice (Emparanza et al., 2015). EBM can reduce clinical uncertainty, leading to better patient outcomes, improved population health, and reduced costs (Molony & Samuels, 2012). The implementation of EBM is expected to enhance the quality of care as part of healthcare reform initiatives (Hughes, 2011). Additionally, EBM has paralleled the growth of patient empowerment, supporting informed decision-making by integrating the best available research with individual patient values and concerns (Hendler, 2004). While challenges remain in translating EBM principles for public consumption, its adoption has the potential to significantly improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. 

although the summary didn't include these papers it listed in the top 10

• Bahtsevani et al 2004's systematic review (weak evidence of limited findings)
• Every-Palmer & Howick 2014's paper with these dramatic sentences in their abstract:
  • "In this paper we suggest that EBM's potential for improving patients' health care has been thwarted by bias in the choice of hypotheses tested, manipulation of study design and selective publication." 
  • "Evidence for these flaws is clearest in industry-funded studies. We argue EBM's indiscriminate acceptance of industry-generated 'evidence' is akin to letting politicians count their own votes. Given that most intervention studies are industry funded, this is a serious problem for the overall evidence base. Clinical decisions based on such evidence are likely to be misinformed, with patients given less effective, harmful or more expensive treatments." 
  • "More investment in independent research is urgently required. Independent bodies, informed democratically, need to set research priorities. We also propose that evidence rating schemes are formally modified so research with conflict of interest bias is explicitly downgraded in value." 
• Shaw et al 2007's dramatically-titled Why Evidence Based Medicine May Be Bad for You and Your Patients ("This review argues that the basis of EBM is so deeply flawed that in many cases it cannot usefully inform clinical practice, reflected in fact by the current majority outcome of most trials as “no-blood,” or no result")

With the proviso that I'm a layperson w.r.t. medicine and healthcare, and that I didn't ask Elicit further questions or really dig further into this at all — I find myself mostly unmoved by these papers & reviews, while the younger me of (say) a decade ago would've epistemically panicked. Partly it's that they aren't really contra "using evidence to inform medicine" per se: to oversimplify a bit, Bahtsevani et al recommend more evidence generation, Every-Palmer & Howick recommend less industry-biased evidence generation, and Shaw et al argue that other less legible-than-RCT types of evidence should occupy more mindshare than they did back in '07 (there's a loose parallel here to the more recent growth vs randomista debate in dev econ). Partly it's that I suspect there's some talking past each other, which only becomes clear when one digs into the nuts-and-bolts. Partly it's that I think the general underlying ethos of "using evidence to inform medicine" is a lot more robust than any particular instantiation of it (e.g. using only empirical data from systematic reviews of RCTs), sort of like how cluster thinking > sequence thinking for decision-making, or like how foxes have weak views strongly held (side note: in that essay's framing I used to be a hedgehog, hopefully I'm now more fox than degenerate cactus). Partly it's that I've "seen this before" with other topics, cf. Scott Alexander's many deep dives. Maybe I'm just getting old... 

I'd note that quoting that sentence without including the one immediately after it seems misleading, so here it is — it's essentially a distillation of (for instance) Our World in Data's main message:

Things are getting better. While there are substantial ups and downs, long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people’s lives longer, freer, and more prosperous.

The fact that people’s lives are longer, freer, and more prosperous now than a few centuries ago doesn't contradict the fact that (as you rightly point out) the biosphere is degrading horrifically. 

I'd also note that your depiction of Ord here

his latest work (both the blog post and the chapter in the forthcoming OUP book, Essays in Longtermism) feels like a philosophical version of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook motto, Move fast and (risk) break(ing) things

seems strawmannish and unnecessarily provocative; it doesn't engage with nuances like (quoting the OP)

I’m a natural optimist and an advocate for progress. I don’t want to see the case for advancing progress undermined. But when I tried to model it clearly to better understand its value, I found a substantial gap in the argument.

and right before that 

If advancing all progress would turn out to be bad, but advancing some parts of it would be good, then it is likely that advancing the remaining parts would be even more bad. Since some kinds of progress are more plausibly linked to bringing about an earlier demise (e.g. nuclear weapons, climate change, and large-scale resource depletion only became possible because of technological, economic, and scientific progress) these parts may not fare so well in such an analysis. So it may really be an argument for differentially boosting other kinds of progress, such as moral progress or institutional progress, and perhaps even for delaying technological, economic, and scientific progress

which sounds like a serious consideration of the opposite of "move fast and risk breaking things", for which I commend Ord given how this goes against his bias (separately from whether I agree with his takes or the overall vibe I get from his progress-related writings). 

re: your addendum

But it also includes the idea that the new trust that Buffet is creating, to be overseen by his children, has to give away all of the bequest within 10 years of his death. I just don't see how that is remotely possible, even with a McKenzie Scott approach, barring just dropping money from the sky 

My sense is the orgs and focus areas Yield Giving has gifted to probably can't absorb as much funding as the big line items in this Longview report (several of which exceed Buffet's entire endowment, albeit none shovel-ready AFAICT), so a MacKenzie Scott approach at 3-4x the scale for the Longview focus areas seems to have an outside shot at being possible? (Scott has been giving ~$4 bn per year over the last few years going by Yield Giving's public database alone, and Buffet's planned trust would need to give >$13 bn a year) 

Not really. This post's cost-effectiveness calculation was done at the cause area level, so it's an average of many interventions of highly varying cost-effectiveness, while GW top charities' cost-eff are evaluated at the (org-specific) intervention level.  

Striking paper by Anant Sudarshan and Eyal Frank (via Dylan Matthews at Vox Future Perfect) on the importance of vultures as a keystone species. 

To quote the paper and newsletter — the basic story is that vultures are extraordinarily efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it, and farmers in India historically relied on them to quickly remove livestock carcasses, so they functioned as a natural sanitation system in helping to control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume. In 1994, farmers began using diclofenac to treat their livestock, due to the expiry of a patent long held by Novartis leading to the entry of cheap generic brands made by Indian companies. Diclofenac is a common painkiller, harmless to humans, but vultures develop kidney failure and die within weeks of digesting carrion with even small residues of it. Unfortunately this only came to light via research published a decade later in 2004, by which time the number of Indian vultures in the wild had tragically plummeted from tens of millions to just a few thousands today, the fastest for a bird species in recorded history and the largest in magnitude since the extinction of the passenger pigeon. 

When the vultures died out, far more dead animals lay around rotting, transmitting pathogens to other scavengers like dogs and rats and entering the water supply. Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from carcasses, leading to a higher incidence of human contact with infected remains, and they're also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Sudarshan and Frank estimate that this led to ~100,000(!) additional deaths each year from 2000-05 due to a +4.2%(!) increase in all-cause mortality among the 430 million people living in districts that once had a lot of vultures, which is staggering; this is e.g. more than the death toll in 2001 from HIV/AIDS (92,000), malaria (53,000), and alcohol use disorders (14,000). 

(Cause X, anyone? Preventing a hundred thousand deaths a year for less than half a billion dollars annually clears the GiveWell top charity-level threshold, and half a billion is in the ballpark of Open Philanthropy's entire annual grantmaking...)

So what to do? For vultures in particular, Sudarshan and Frank say their results "inform current vulture recovery efforts in India, and conservation efforts elsewhere" e.g. parts of Africa and Spain, albeit without elaborating. More broadly, they hope their paper informs better policymaking by providing "a particularly stark example of the type of hard-to-reverse and unpredictable costs that must be accounted for when evaluating the introduction of new chemicals into fragile and diverse ecosystems", stating "it is plausible that a counterfactual policy regime in India that tested chemicals for their toxicity to at least keystone species might have avoided the collapse of vultures". They conclude:

In the absence of empirical estimates of the social benefits conferred by different species, conservation policy may be heavily influenced by existence values unrelated to utility. The vulture is not a particularly attractive bird and evokes rather different emotions at first sight than do more charismatic poster-animals of wildlife conservation such as tigers and panda bears. Nevertheless
our results suggest that subjective existence values alone may not be the best way to formulate conservation policy.

The remark that vultures are not particularly attractive reminds me of the overlooked plight of farmed chickens, shrimp, insects etc for not being charismatic fauna. (I am admittedly sort of emotionally conflating the welfare of vultures with their ecosystem importance as a keystone species here.)

Thanks for the thoughtful & generous response and interesting links Emrik :) The natural cluster of questions that include deference has been on my mind ever since I learned about epistemic learned helplessness years ago, so I appreciate the pointers.

I confess to being a bit alarmed by your footnote. For reasoning transparency's sake, would you be willing to share how you were led to the conclusion to turn inward? I have in my own way been trying to improve clarity of thought, although my reasons include an extrinsic component (e.g. I really like helping people figure out their problems, or fail productively in trying), and even the intrinsic component (clarity makes my heart sing) often points me outward (cf. steps 3 and 8 here) and can also look like teaching others. And I've noticed that both can speed up my progress greatly despite reducing time spent just thinking, the former akin to being Alice not Bob, and the latter in a way a bit like "pruning the branching factor" or making me realize I had been overlooking fruitful branches or just modeling the whole thing wrongly. This is the overall "vibe" from which I doubt the effectiveness of your inward turn. 

But that's admittedly not the real reason I'm writing this; my real reason echoes Julia's comment.

There is A Year of Wins for Farmed Animals by Lewis Bollard, Open Phil's program officer for farmed animal welfare, although it's limited to 2023 and none of these big wins have been easy. I'd love to know this as well.