Link post for 2022 August EA Updates.
Top News
- Olivia Addy - EA for Dumb People?
- Non-Trivial Pursuits has launched a series of interactive lessons to think critically about solving the world's most important problems, aimed at students
- Ahmed Ghoor and Kaleem have launched Effective Altruism for Muslims
- Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, Michael Plant - Deworming and decay: replicating GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis
- Astral Codex Ten with 'Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism'
- A post announcing High Impact Engineers
- GiveWell with an update on their funding projections, having changed since last year they now don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities they expect to find
Events
- 2nd-4th September - EAGxSingapore
- 23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.
- 16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin - Applications now open
- 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual
- 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam
Meta
- Benjamin Todd - Let's stop saying 'funding overhang'
- Owen Cotton-Barratt with a response to Todd - What I mean by "funding overhang" (and why it doesn't mean money isn't helpful)
- Michel Justen - Emphasizing emotional altruism in effective altruism
- Magnify Mentoring are open for applications from mentees - closes 5th August
- Ollie Base - CEA’s Community Events Programme: Update and Call for Applications, they are especially looking for applications for 30-100+ person events focused on specific cause areas, in neglected regions and EA sub-communities
- Michael Plant - A philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework
- Dwarkesh Patel - There will be many more effective altruist billionaires
- Stefan Schubert - Remuneration In Effective Altruism
- Aaron Bergman - Some research questions that you may want to tackle
- Étienne Fortier-Dubois on being for effective altruism but against optimisation
- Gidon Kadosh - How EA is perceived is crucial to its future trajectory
- EA organisation updates for June-July
- Paul Logan looking at longtermism within EA and potential splits in the community
- Sara Azubuike - Crypto markets, EA funding and optics
- 80,000 Hours are running a survey for people who have ever interacted with them
- Why EA needs Operations Research: the science of decision making
- A post on the forum suggesting that 'EA Shouldn't Try to Exercise Direct Political Power'
- Rethink Priorities 2022 Mid-Year Update: Progress, Plans, Funding
New Projects
- A post announcing the Center for Space Governance
- Book a chat with an EA professional
- EA Opportunities: A new collection of internships, contests and events
- High Impact Medicine has it's own podcast series
- A new blog looking at the intersection of EA, longtermism and liberalism
- Michel Justen - A Database of EA Organizations & Initiatives
- Open Philanthropy Technology Policy Fellowship - September 15th deadline. For people in the U.S.
Community building
- Sabrina C
- An EAGx Boston 2022 retrospective
- David Manheim - Making Effective Altruism Enormous
- Charlie Dougherty looking at how to increase the methods of introspection that EA uses
- Sophia - Is it possible for EA to remain nuanced and be more welcoming to newcomers? A distinction for discussions on topics like this one
- Rob Gledhill
Critiques
- A post critiquing how EA organisations are hiring 'senior' operations roles
- Charlie Dougherty with pushback on the fidelity of communication
- Zvi with more criticism of the EA Criticism Contest
- Helen - Leaning into EA Disillusionment
- Nick Whitaker - Going more meta on EA criticism
- Ann Garth - EA is becoming increasingly inaccessible, at the worst possible time
- Peter Elam - EA's Culture and Thinking are Severely Limiting its Impact
Careers
- Joseph Lemien - What is Operations Management?
- Ruth Grace - It's OK not to go into AI (for students)
- Tee - Replaceability v. 'Contextualized Worthiness'
- Jordan Schneider with an early career guide for people interested in China policy
- Locke - Law School: Why and When? – Considerations for Members of the EA Community (In the U.S.)
- Jake P. Mann on how EA affects his career choices in medicine
- Tim Farkas - Is Medical School High Impact?
- Probably Good have released two new chapters of their career guide
- Vael Gates - Social scientists interested in AI safety should consider doing direct technical AI safety research, governance, support roles or community building instead
- Steven Byrnes on choosing a job that has enough spare time to do become better at doing good
Grants
- The FTX Future Fund has a grants database, having committed over $130 million to date
- Founders Pledge with grants to Suvita, EA Australia and r.i.c.e institute
- EA Infrastructure Fund have made 68 grants with a value of $2,450,000
- $300,000 - Charity Entrepreneurship
- $270,500 - Gi Effektivt
- $233,000 - Effektiv Spenden
- $200,000 - Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC
- $174,000 - Global Challenges Project
Global Development
- Open Philanthropy are planning to allocate $350 million to GiveWell’s recommended charities in 2022
- Lant Pritchett - Development work versus charity work
- Tom Davidson with a report on social returns to productivity growth
- Richard Sedlmayr suggesting that Open Philanthropy should do more hits based giving in global development
- Kelsey Piper Q&A with development economist Charles Kenny
- The Gates Foundation is planning to increase annual giving by 50%
- Max Roser - The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
- Saloni Dattani and Fiona Spooner - Guinea worm disease is close to being eradicated - how was this progress achieved?
- The World Bank announced a $92 million investment in mobile money firm Wave to boost access to digital financial services in West Africa
- Kelsey Piper covering the return of 'worm wars'
Animal Welfare
- Stanford held it's first Economics of Animal Welfare conference
- Legal Impact for Chickens files its first lawsuit
- Giving What We Can podcast with Bruce Friedrich - Why plant based meat is a scalable solution to feed the world
- Saulius Simcikas - Wild animal welfare in the far future
- Michael St. Jules - Desire theories of welfare and nonhuman animals
- Saulius Simcikas - Reducing aquatic noise as a wild animal welfare intervention
- Faunalytics has produced an update to their Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts
- Animal Charity Evaluators with their movement grants for 2022 with 35 projects funded
Biosecurity
- There is a multi-year biosecurity forecasting tournament on Metaculus, aiming to map out future biosecurity risk landscape, help direct resource allocation and inform the distribution of efforts
- Jonas Sandbrink - New ideas for mitigating biotechnology misuse
- Tessa - List of Lists of Concrete Biosecurity Project Ideas
- Linch with a summary of the Apollo report on biodefense
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
- Lalitha Sundaram, Matthijs Maas and S.J. Beard have co-authored a new working paper, exploring critical questions in the existential risk studies field
- There is a new bipartisan bill on catastrophic risk mitigation introduced by two U.S. senators
- Aryeh Englander with a summary of the new book 'On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War'
- A red team post - 'Questioning the Value of Extinction Risk Reduction'
- An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Why policymakers should beware claims of new "arms races"
- Tom Gardiner - Maritime capability and post-catastrophe resilience
- Lauro Langosco with a review of a report on how scientists involved in the Manhattan project failed to influence decision-making
- Isabel - Summary of Major Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Winter
- A post looking at how the James Webb Space Telescope can help against existential risks
- Jaime Sevilla - Results of a Spanish-speaking essay contest about Global Catastrophic Risk
- The Institute for Government with a report on how the UK government can learn from Covid to be better prepared for the next crisis
- Maxwell Tabarrok - Enlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World
Improving Institutions & Metascience
- Matt Clancy - Do Academic Citations Measure the Impact of New Ideas?
- Ben Reinhardt on the interplay between funding organisations, research management, and research motivation
- Saloni Dattani has started a newsletter highlighting new scientific discoveries
- Eleni A - An Epistemological Account of Intuitions in Science
- An article on how Welcome Leap is looking to use networks to produce scientific breakthroughs
- Saloni Dattani - Real peer review has never been tried
Progress Studies
- Progress Studies has a new forum for relevant posts and conversations
- Bastian Herre looking at democracy over the last 200 years for Our World In Data
- Rose Hadshar - How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study
Environment
- Forum post on 'The most important climate change uncertainty'
- Project Drawdown has added 11 new solutions for addressing climate change
- Ben Yeoh - 'Open climate data as a possible cause area'
- The Breakthrough Institute looking at how nuclear reactors might play a major role in a least-cost plan to transition the U.S. power grid entirely to clean energy sources by 2050
- At article looking at issues with the sustainability rating industry
- Good Judgment has launched the 'Climate Change and the Long-term Future' forecasting challenge
Longtermism
- Holden Karnofsky - The Track Record of Futurists Seems...Fine
- Future Matters newsletter on digital sentience, AGI ruin and forecasting track records
- Erich Grunewald - A Kantian View on Extinction
- Matthew Barnett - The Most Important Century: The Animation
- Martin Rees writing in the Spectator - How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead
- Charlie Dougherty thinking about visualising a trillion people
- Simeon C - Future Design: How To Include Future Generations in Today's Decision-Making?
- Jonathan Rystrom - Low-key Longtermism
AI Policy
- Matthijs Maas with an intro to 'Strategic Perspectives on Long-term AI Governance'
- The Centre for Long-Term Resilience, CSER & Centre for the Governance of AI - The UK Defence AI Strategy: ensuring safe and responsible use of AI
- Michael Huang - Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy
- GovAI is running student essay prizes to promising pieces of research with relevance to AI governance, deadline 2nd October
Technical AI
- Ajeya - Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover
- A post introducing the Fund for Alignment Research
- Sam Clarke - A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI
- Dan Hendryks announcing the NeurIPS ML Safety workshop. The first at a top ML conference to emphasize and explicitly discuss x-risks
- Eli Lifland - Reasons I’ve been hesitant about high levels of near-ish AI risk
- Stanford University have a $71,000 innovation challenge to design better AI audits
- Nate Soares
Other AI
- Jacob Steinhardt with updates on an AI forecasting project after one year of predictions
- A post arguing that AI safety is not a longtermist cause area
- Lukas Trötzmüller - Why EAs are skeptical about AI Safety
- AlphaFold are releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, expanding the database from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures
- Matt Clifford podcast with Iason Gabriel on AI and moral philosophy
- Deepmind with the publication 'Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI'
- Peter Singer & Yip Fai Tse with the paper 'AI ethics: the case for including animals'
- Robert Long summarising recent debates about AI sentience
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Max Tegmark on how a ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
Other Causes
- A post asking 'Does biodiversity loss warrant being it’s own cause area?'
- Drew Housman - Reducing nightmares as a cause area
- Madeleine Chang - Why you should care about space people
- Eli Dourado - Why go to space?
- Anton Rodenhauser on fecal microbiota transplants as a potential cause and an unlikely way to earn a lot of money
- A post with a collection of links looking at what has happened this year in the decentralised science community
- Luke Eure - Pestering embassies to reduce non-policy barriers to movement
- Igor Moric - How commercial satellite imagery could soon make nuclear secrecy very difficult - if not impossible
- Could New Technology Help Solve the Glasses Problem?
- Lauren Gilbert - Telecommunications in LMICs
- Akhil - Potential new cause area: Obesity
- Cognitive Risks of Adolescent Binge Drinking
- Soleine Scotney - Expanding access to infertility services in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
- Reducing Suffering and Long Term Risk in Common Law Nations via Strategic Case Law Funding
- Khartik T - Climate Adaptation in Low-Income Countries
- Time-restricted eating (IF) for individual and community health in LMICs
- Falk Lieder - Doing research on promoting prosocial behaviour might be 100 times as cost-effective at increasing well-being as providing psychotherapy
Productivity
- Anonymous forum post - Digital Networking for Dummies
- Amy Labenz writing about a group activity for receiving critical but beneficial feedback
- Jack Cunningham - What is your theory of victory?
- Joey - The value of content density
- Using the “executive summary” style: writing that respects your reader’s time
- Lynette Bye
Philosophy
- Max Görlitz - All moral decisions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution
- Tobias Leenaert - Confused about "making people happy" vs. "making happy people"
- Rohin Shah - Person-affecting intuitions can often be money pumped
- Applied Divinity Studies looking at utilitarians and thought experiments
- Eleni A - Why did I misunderstand utilitarianism so badly?
- Michael Plant exploring and evaluating an internal bargaining approach to moral uncertainty
- Hamish Huggard - When Utilitarianism is Actually Fun
- Nick Beckstead and Teruji Thomas - Paper summary: A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values
- Richard Ngo
Other Links
- Dwarkesh Patel podcast with Sam Bankman-Fried
- Zvi Mowshowitz - When Giving People Money Doesn't Help
- Anna Leptikon with a post describing the reasons for, process, and result of creating an information design poster of the essential books on effective altruism
- Scott Alexander - Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
- Lorenzo - Probability distributions of Cost-Effectiveness can be misleading
- Jason Collins - We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model
- Rhodri Davies - Why are we so bad at measuring giving and why does it matter?
- An article looking at Elon Musk's charitable foundation
- Hear This Idea podcast with Doyne Farmer on complexity and predicting technological progress
- Martin Rees on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing black holes, dark matter and space exploration
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us
- Andre Ferretti - 300+ Flashcards to Tackle Pressing World Problems
- Jeff Kaufman - Passing Up Pay
- Ben Yeoh with Larry Temkin discussing concerns/thoughts over international aid, longtermism and philosophical notes
- Akash - A summary of every "Highlights from the Sequences" post
- Semicycyle with their 'EA Failure Story'
- Rahela with 'How I went from working in the fashion industry to animal advocacy'
Tweets
- Frances Lorenz asking people 'If you've interacted with the EA community, I would be very interested to hear: in what ways do you think you've changed as a result?'
- Peter McIntyre on what he wish he knew 7 years ago
- Ben Todd
Good News
- 46 countries have eliminated at least one NTD between 2015 and 2019
- India reports 86% fall in malaria cases and 79% reduction in deaths due to malaria since 2015
- A study in the Lancet found that Covid vaccines prevented nearly 20 million deaths in the first year after they were introduced
- An article looking at how child mortality fell from 40% to 4% in 200 years
- Global bank account ownership increased from 51 percent to 76 percent in the last decade