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
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
David Manheim - Making Effective Altruism Enormous
Charlie Dougherty looking at how to increase the methods of introspection that EA uses
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)
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
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
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
Lauren Gilbert - Telecommunications in LMICs
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
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
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
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