2022 December EA Updates
This month there have been quite a few posts about FTX so I’ve made a roundup of some of the most relevant ones, otherwise the top posts would be FTX only.
Also consider taking 10 minutes to fill out this year’s EA survey. The survey helps create a clearer picture of what the EA community works on, prioritises and how it could improve. (You can see the results of past years’ surveys here.)
Take the survey by 31st December.
Top Posts
"Evaluating the evaluators": GWWC's research direction
Michael Plant, Joel McGuire and Samuel Dupret - The elephant in the bednet: the importance of philosophy when choosing between extending and improving lives
Luke Eure - On EA messaging - being a doctor in a poorer country
Lucas Lewit-Mendes and Aaron Boddy - What matters to shrimps? Factors affecting shrimp welfare in aquaculture
Clara Collier - Announcing the first issue of Asterisk
Jason Schukraft - Pre-Announcing the 2023 Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest
Adam Shriver - Why Neuron Counts Shouldn't Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight
FTX Related Links
The FTX Future Fund team has resigned
William MacAskill - A personal statement on FTX
Shakeel Hashim - Why you’re not hearing as much from EA orgs as you’d like
Michelle Hutchinson - Some feelings, and what’s keeping me going
Julia Wise - Community support given FTX situation
Robert Wiblin - My reaction to FTX: appalled
Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
Holden Karnofsky - My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot
Bastian Stern - Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events
Evan Hubinger - We must be very clear: fraud in the service of effective altruism is unacceptable
Molly - Thoughts on legal concerns surrounding the FTX situation
Peter Singer - Has the FTX Debacle Discredited EA?
Tyrone-Jay Barugh - CEA/EV + OP + RP should engage an independent investigator to determine whether key figures in EA knew about the (likely) fraud at FTX
Clearer Thinking podcast - The FTX catastrophe (with Byrne Hobart, Vipul Naik, Maomao Hu, Marcus Abramovich, and Ozzie Gooen)
Gideon Futerman - Some important questions for the EA Leadership
Jack Lewars - What might FTX mean for effective giving and EA funding
Ryan Carey - Putting things in perspective: what is and isn't the FTX crisis, for EA?
Charity Evaluator Links
Because lots of people might be thinking about their donations at this time of year I’ve collated some links from different charity evaluators and funds.
Global Development
Animal Welfare
Climate Change
Longtermism
Global Catastrophic Risks
EA Infrastructure
Global Events
November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
7th-8th January - EAGx Latin America
13th-15th January - EAGx India
24th-26th February - EAG Bay Area
21st-23rd April - EAGx Nordics
19th-21st May - EAG London
Virtual Events
January to March - EA Virtual Programs - Apply by 11th December
Meta
Amy Labenz - How CEA approaches applications to our programs
Holly Elmore - Should we be doing politics at all? Some (very rough) thoughts
Jonas Volmer - Doing Doing Good Better Better
Steve Thompson and Kylie Abel - Charity Entrepreneurship: Who underrates their likelihood of success. Why applying is worthwhile
Gavriel Kleinwaks - Personal Review of Participation in the Open Philanthropy Cause Exploration Prize
Jeff Kaufman - Mildly Against Donor Lotteries
Geoffrey Miller - Teaching EA through superhero thought experiments
Bradley Tjandra and Nathan Sherburn - What's Happening in Australia (in EA)
Justis - Diversification is Underrated
Richard Ngo - Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive
New Projects
On the EA Forum there is a new Effective Giving sub forum, including an open thread asking people where they are donating and why
Terezie Kosik, Kristyna Stastna, Sylvie Wagnerová - The 8-week mental health programme published for people interested in EA
Non-Linear announcing 'The Most Important Century Writing Prize'
The 2022 Giving What We Can Donor Lottery is now open
Giving What We Can have a page for bequests
Organisation Updates
Training for Good - Update & Plans for 2023
Rethink Priorities’ 2022 Impact, 2023 Strategy, and Funding Gaps
Sentience Institute 2022 End of Year Summary
Critiques
Michel - EA movement course corrections and where you might disagree
EA-Aligned Political Activity in a US Congressional Primary: Concerns and Proposed Changes
A socialist's view on liberal progressive criticisms of EA
David Manheim - EA is a global community - but should it be?
James Foder - The FTX crisis highlights a deeper cultural problem within EA - we don't sufficiently value good governance
Careers
High-Impact Psychology with a survey to find out how they can help people who have a background in psychology
Sean Lawrence - Resources for Physical Engineers
Marius Hobbhahn - Some advice on independent research
Ben Kuhn - Want advice on management/organization-building?
Vaidehi Agarwalla, Alexandra Malikova and Elika - Doing Ops in EA FAQ: before you join
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 34 grants recently, with a value of $56 million
$28,000,000 - Global Development
$15,000,000 - Vital Strategies - RESET Alcohol Initiative
$10,400,000 - Clinton Health Access Initiative
$1,400,000 - UC Berkeley - Follow-Up Research on Cash Transfers Study
$500,000 - VenomAid - Rapid Diagnostics for Snakebites
$500,000 - Swaniti Initiative - Indian Parliamentary Air Quality Staff
$10,500,000 - Effective Altruism Community
$8,750,000 - Centre for Effective Altruism - Harvard Square Coworking Space
$650,000 - Future Forum Foundation - Future Forum
$570,000 - Effective Altruism Funds - Operating Expenses
$10,500,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
$5,300,000 - Centre for Effective Altruism - Biosecurity Coworking Space
$5,200,000 - Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense
$3,000,000 - Animal Welfare
$900,000 - University of Stirling - Fish Welfare Research
$600,000 - We Animals Media - Content for Farm Animal Welfare Advocacy (2022)
$500,000 - Food Frontier - Promoting Plant-Based Meat Alternatives in Asia
$470,000 - Animal Justice Canada - Animal Welfare Corporate Campaigns
$2,300,000 - Global Priorities Institute
$1,100,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$570,000 - Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative - SERI MATS Program
$500,000 - Open New York - Housing Advocacy in New York
Global Development
David Roodman - Does putting kids in school now put money in their pockets later? Revisiting a natural experiment in Indonesia
Sam Nolan, Hannah Rokebrand and Tanae Rao - Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Analyses
Rachel Norman, Tom Hird, Jenny Kudymowa and Bruce Tsai - How effective are prizes at spurring innovation?
Don’t just give well, give WELLBYs: Happier Lives Institute’s 2022 charity recommendation
Catherine Cheney - What will FTX's collapse mean for global health and development?
Ask Me Anything: Sean Mayberry, Founder & CEO of StrongMinds
Clearer Thinking podcast with Robert Chambers discussing how to find out what people in rural communities really need
A new initiative supported by GiveWell to tackle alcohol harms will focus on taxation
Keith Klugman with an explainer on respiratory syncytial virus, which causes more than 100,000 deaths in children under age 5 each year
Animal Welfare
Bob Fischer - An Introduction to the Moral Weight Project
Ren Springlea - The Challenges with Measuring the Impact of Lobbying
Neil Dullaghan - Does the US public support radical action against factory farming in the name of animal welfare?
Steven Rouk - Adding Nuance to the Small Animal Replacement Problem: Moral Circle Expansion
Ren Springlea - Subsidies: Which reforms can help animals?
Tessa - Banding Together to Ban Octopus Farming
James Ozden and Sharang Phadke - Introducing the Animal Advocacy Bi-Weekly Digest
Meghan Barrett - Short Research Summary: Can insects feel pain?
The November edition of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Newsletter by Sofia Balderson
Alternative Proteins
Lewis Bollard - How Can Governments Advance Alternative Proteins?
Good Growth with a survey on what Chinese consumers think about plant-based meat
The Food and Drug Administration has greenlit the production of cultivated meat in the United States for the first time
LIKE-A-PRO project received €13.9M from the European Union to make alt proteins mainstream
Biosecurity
James Lin - Map of Biosecurity Interventions
Kevin Esvelt - Delay, Detect, Defend: Preparing for a Future in which Thousands Can Release New Pandemics
Hear This Idea podcast with Jassi Pannu and Joshua Monrad on pandemic preparedness
Darius - Notes on "Barriers to Bioweapons" (Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, 2014)
Saloni Dattani in the Guardian - The big idea: Should we give people diseases in order to learn how to cure them?
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Peter Wyg - A Theologian's Response to Anthropogenic Existential Risk
Toby Ord - Lessons from the Development of the Atomic Bomb
Gideon Futerman - Beyond Simple Existential Risk: Survival in a Complex Interconnected World
Peter Rautenbach - Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Command, Control, & Communications: The Risks of Integration
Sarah Weiler - What are the most promising strategies for reducing the probability of nuclear war?
Improving Institutions & Metascience
J-PAL have launched the Science for Progress Initiative, designed to catalyse scientific research on the scientific process
The Metascience Working Group is a forum and coordination platform for academics and policy practitioners to contribute insights that could inform the design and evaluation of science funding programs
Tao Burga - List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
Ben Yeoh interviewing Michael Nielsen on metascience
Matt Clancy - Science is getting harder
Effective Institutions Project Fellowship - Apply by 4th December
Ben Yeoh in conversation with Saloni Dattani on Important Questions In Science, Open Science and Reforming Peer Review
Progress Studies
The Progress Forum has been officially launched
Dwarkesh Patel - The mystery of the miracle year
Tony Morley has created a progress dashboard
Environment
Giving Green’s Mistakes
Luisa Sandkühler, Johannes Ackva and Violet Buxton-Walsh - Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund
New NASA instrument detects methane ‘super-emitters’ from space, including previously unknown emitters
Climateworks Foundation - Funding trends 2022: Climate change mitigation philanthropy
Johannes Ackva - What "Think Global, Act Local" Means for US Climate Philanthropists
Giving What We Can interviewing Lily Odarno, Clean Air Task Force's Director of Energy and Climate Innovation Program, Africa
Johannes Ackva - The War in Ukraine, Climate Risk & High-Impact Climate Philanthropy
Longtermism
Kelsey Piper - Review: What We Owe The Future
Global Priorities Institute - What is longtermism?
Jack Malde - Mini summaries of GPI papers
Talks from GPI events are now uploaded to this page on their website
Arepo - Longtermist terminology has biasing assumptions
William MacAskill on why associating longtermism with a 'tech-accelerationist'/prototypical Silicon Valley worldview may be mistaken
Violet Hour - FTX, 'EA Principles', and 'The (Longtermist) EA Community'
Anders Sandberg - Cyborgs v ‘holdout humans’: what the world might be like if our species survives for a million years
Artificial Intelligence
Holden Karnofsky - Why Would AI "Aim" To Defeat Humanity?
Lukas Finnveden, Jess Riedel and Carl Shulman - AGI and Lock-In
Akash - Instead of technical research, more people should focus on buying time
Conjecture: a retrospective after 8 months of work
Zvi - On the Diplomacy AI
Marius Hobbhahn - Disagreement with bio anchors that lead to shorter timelines
Peter Slattery - A proposed approach for AI safety movement building
Kelsey Piper - AI experts are increasingly afraid of what they’re creating
Other Causes
Stephen Clare and Rani Martin - How bad could a war get?
Tamlin Magee - Should extraterrestrial life be granted 'sentient' rights?
80,000 Hours podcast with Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
Luis Mota and Charlotte - Assessing the case for population growth as a priority
Roger Bacon - Friendship Forever (new EA cause area?)
Joel Tan
Access to Mental Health Drugs
Stories
James Gough - Hubris and coldness within EA (my experience)
Silvia Fernández - The EA communities that emerged from the Chicxulub crater
Chana Messinger - Trying to keep my head on straight
Rich Armitage - Altruistic kidney donation in the UK: my experience
Henry Howard - Why I gave half my salary to charity
EA Nigeria with an update from their capacity-building 2 day workshop
GiveDirectly blog post on the partnership with Canva tackling extreme poverty in Malawi
Other Links
Richard Y Chappell - Naïve vs Prudent Utilitarianism
Jan Kulveit - Deontology and virtue ethics as "effective theories" of consequentialist ethics
Nuno Sempere - Tracking the money flows in forecasting
Simon Newstead - An EA storybook for kids
Jake Eberts - Come get malaria with me?
Leah Libresco Sargeant - I’m Catholic, a virtue ethicist, and part of Effective Altruism. AMA
Hannah Ritchie - The World Needs Processed Food
James Ozden - EA: Not as bad as you think
Cody Fenwick - The importance of considering speculative ideas
Ben Kuhn - Be less scared of overconfidence
80,000 Hours podcast with Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
Matthew Yglesias - A sappy Giving Tuesday post
Spencer Greenberg and Clare Diane - Opportunities that surprised us during our Clearer Thinking Regrants program
Good News
Covid-19 vaccines saved an estimated 20 million lives during their first year
Pakistan reduced malaria cases by 45% from 2015 to 2020
Cases of blindness and visual impairment in India have declined dramatically over the last decade
Between 2007 and 2019 the percentage of adults worldwide who smoked declined from 22.7% to 19.6%