This past August, a thousand or so entrepreneurs gathered in Berkeley, California to talk about making the world a better place. They represented the usual suspects you’d find at a Bay Area conference – data wonks, business strategists, venture capitalists, and blue-sky creative types. They shared Silicon Valley’s obsession with big ideas powered by data…

I’ve been doing some reading lately about the role of consciousness in the Universe. Now up is Beyond Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza, one of the world’s most famous scientists. Lanza’s premise is that life is not merely an accidental outcome of a meaningless Universe. Instead, life — and consciousness, are an integral component of the Universe….

The election is only eleven days away, and thank God for that. It’s creating unprecedented levels of anxiety and making lots of us wonder how, exactly, we all ended up in this place. It astounds me that anyone is still actually undecided, given the wealth of information we already have about both candidates. However, as we…

Effective Altruism (EA) is an emerging movement based on a simple idea: that we ought to use reason and evidence to do the most good in the world. This summer I had the opportunity to attend the EA Global conference in Berkeley, which brought together people from the realms of philosophy, international health and development, research methods, nonprofit management,…

Back from vacation and still metabolizing the caloric tsunami that swept through our house over the holidays.  Now that the fruit cake and egg nog safely out of site, it’s time to get our heads back into deep thoughts about research methods. Today we turn our attention to randomly controlled trials, or RCTs.  An RCT…

An article in this week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that 1 in 3 Americans lacks faith in charities, according to a new poll: More than 80 percent said charities do a very good or somewhat good job helping people. But a significant number expressed concern about finances: A third said charities do a “not too good” or…