According to him, at least, the impressive-sounding things that he does—hobnobbing with special advisers to the Prime Minister, helping set disease control priorities, attracting tons of donors—don’t actually require superpowers, just a willingness to be bold and network/make connections. He claims they’re the kind of thing that any sufficiently motivated and reasonably bright person could do, and could be a good fit for many of the students listening to him. I think this may have been the part of the talk that was best for the undergrads to hear—certainly heartening for me!

(The big one, in my opinion:) some preliminary modeling results show that the impact differential between meta-research (on which interventions are most effective) and direct interventions could be a factor of 1,000 or higher. Unsurprisingly, this is quite sensitive to the amount of money you assume will be redirected to more cost-effective interventions, so I’m guessing they used pretty optimistic figures for this (I think Toby mentioned something in the billions). Nevertheless, if you assume it’s linear in money moved and you go down from a billion to just GiveWell’s money moved ($10 million this year), you still have at least a factor of 10.

I assume that this figure is very tentative because otherwise I would surely have heard it before, but even rumors of that kind of differential are enough to suggest that I might want to wait before making a donation.