2022 July Effective Altruism Updates
Top News
Lizka Vaintrob, Fin Moorhouse and Joshua Teperowski Monrad have launched an EA Criticism and Red Teaming contest with $100,000 in prizes. There has already been criticism of how this competition has been announced
The Future Fund with an update on their recent grants
Julia Wise - Power dynamics between people in EA
Abraham Rowe - Critiques of EA that I want to read
Ben Garfinkel - On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates
Holden Karnofsky - AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined
James Ozden & Neil Dullaghan with a list of megaproject ideas for animals
Nuño Sempere - A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform
Kurzgesagt's recent video invites viewers to consider the potential for a vast number of future people, it already has over 2 million views
Events
8th-10th July - EAGxAustralia
29th-31st July - EA Global: San Francisco
2nd-4th September - EAGxSingapore (Applications now open)
23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.
16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin
21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual
Meta Updates
Open Philanthropy with a post looking at how accurate their own predictions are
Luke Muehlhauser - Effective altruism as I see it
Owen Cotton-Barratt - Global health is important for the epistemic foundations of EA, even for longtermists
A post looking for 'Examples of someone admitting an error or changing a key conclusion'
Ozy Brennan on the benefits of categorising people who are more or less dedicated in EA
80,000 Hours would be happy to see more projects in the careers space
Rémi T with the idea of taking an 'EA Break'
Jan Kulveit - Ways money can make things worse
Ofer & Owen Cotton-Barratt - Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects
Mathias KB asking what the overhead costs of grantmaking are
A post from me on how we should see effective altruism as more about coordination & field incubation
Thomas Woodside - You Don't Need To Justify Everything
Richard Y Chappell asking what an alternative EA movement might look like
Joey Savoie - 'Why EAs should normalize using Glassdoor'
Chris Freiman - You Don’t Have to be a Moral Saint to be an Effective Altruist
A post with 'unflattering' reasons the author is attracted to EA
Effektiv Spenden: A meta opportunity in Germany & Switzerland
Derek Shiller - Fanatical EAs should support very weird projects
A post titled 'How To Prevent EA From Ever Turning Into a Cult'
New Projects
Clearer Thinking have a new regranting program for projects that could have a big positive impact on the future of the world, applications close 22nd July
Brian Jabarian has launched a community for economists
An intro post to User-Friendly, an EA-aligned marketing agency
Giving What We Can have a dashboard with their growth metrics
Historea Club is a 'A peer-led exploration club for history enthusiasts in the EA community'
Condor Camp is a 10 day program for talented students in Brazil to learn about the worlds most pressing problems
Giveffektivt - a Danish regranting site for effective charities
Community building
Emma Williamson - Community Builders Spend Too Much Time Community Building
Owen Cotton Barratt - There is no separate "community building" track
Habryka - On funding, trust relationships, and scaling our community
S.E. Montgomery - Community builders should focus more on supporting friendships within their group
Patrick Gruban & Lukas Trötzmüller - Mastermind Groups: A new Peer Support Format to help EAs aim higher
Critiques
Michael Nielsen - Notes on effective altruism
Joey Savoie on deference culture in EA
Archana Ahlawat with replies to the post 'Towards Ineffective Altruism'
José Luis Ricón responding to 'Ineffective Altruism'
Trevor Klee with an EA critique of the Carrick Flynn campaign
Ed Talks - The totalitarian implications of Effective Altruism
James Ozden - The dangers of high salaries within EA organisations
Careers
High Impact Professionals have a new directory of the various workplace and professional EA groups, including tech, policy, engineering, communications, finance, consulting, healthcare, sports, law, entrepreneurship
Federico Speziali - Paths to Impact for EA Working Professionals
Michael Aird with resources for people interested in research careers
Ben Williamson with three lessons from starting a small EA org
Tereza Flidrova - ‘EA Architect’: Updates on Civilisational Shelters & Career Options
Yonatan Cale - Software Developers: How to have Impact?
Jeff Kaufman on why he decided to leave Google and join the Nucleic Acid Observatory
Two forum posts on hiring
Grants
Open Phil have made 15 grants recently with a total value of $33,600,000
$15,000,000 - Global Health & Development
$12,000,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
$10,000,000 - Good Forever - Regranting for Biosecurity Projects
$2,000,000 - 1Day Sooner
$3,500,000 - Alternatives to Animal Products
$1,800,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
$1,150,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
$170,000 - Transformative Basic Science
Global Development
Stuart Buck - Why Effective Altruism Should Put a Higher Priority on Funding Academic Research
Ryan C. Briggs - Results of a survey of international development professors on EA
Pfizer to sell all its patented drugs at nonprofit price in low-income countries
Saloni Dattani & Fiona Spooner - We need more testing to eradicate polio worldwide
Thomas Pogge - New Global Pools: Impact Funds
Sebastian Schwiecker - Will there be an EA answer to the predictable famines later this year?
GiveDirectly will run Chicago’s guaranteed basic income pilot
The UN has a new 5 year plan to have every person protected by early warning systems for extreme weather events
An article looking into drowning, responsible for 43% of all deaths among children ages 1-4 in Bangladesh
Podcast with Ben Kuhn, the CTO of Wave who aim to build ways for unbanked people to send and save money
The Adani Foundation plans to deploy $7.7B for social programs in India
Sigal Samuel looking at the latest evidence on what may be best for helping extremely poor people
Siobhan McDonough on why giving cash may be better than sending food for fighting global hunger
A review of evidence on whether cash transfers and therapy can reduce violent crime
A book review of James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine from an EA point of view
A research summary of what works to promote charitable donations
Akhil Bansal with a cause exploration prize submission on violence against women and girls
Animal Welfare
Lewis Bollard - Farm Animals at the Supreme Court
Ozy Brennan - Emphasize Vegetarian Retention
Gabriel Weil - The Role of Individual Consumption Decisions in Animal Welfare and Climate are Analogous
Sofia Balderson introducing the Impactful Animal Advocacy Community newsletter
Sam Glover exploring the research on effective protest and how it can be used to make change for animals
Brian Lui with a cause exploration prizes submission on bivalve aquaculture
Michael Huang in discussion with Kyle Johannsen, author of Wild Animal Ethics
Biosecurity
The World Bank has a new pandemic preparedness fund, with over $1 billion in pledges so far
80,000 Hours with a list of biosecurity projects to get involved with
Jonas Sandbrink arguing that there should be more discussion on self-spreading vaccine technology
Fønix are recruiting a team to join a project building biological weapons shelters
Hear This Idea podcast with Ajay Karpur from Open Philanthropy on metagenomic sequencing
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
'A Critique of The Precipice: Chapter 6 - The Risk Landscape'
Christian Ruhl - How Policymakers Can Build a Better Doomsday Clock
Matthijs Maas, Kayla Lucero-Matteucci and Di Cooke on 'Military Artificial Intelligence as Contributor to Global Catastrophic Risk'
Stephen Bush writing in the Financial Times on EA and avoiding disasters
Ben Garfinkel - We should expect to worry more about speculative risks
The Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience has been launched in Israel
Tom Green - Case study: Reducing catastrophic risk from inside the US bureaucracy
Peter Wildeford - The chance of accidental nuclear war has been going down
Jacy with a post looking at how the prioritisation of existential risk work depends on assuming a positive future
80,000 Hours podcast with Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
A post announcing the ‘Legal Priorities Project Writing Competition: Improving Cost-Benefit Analysis to Account for Existential and Catastrophic Risks’
Improving Institutions & Metascience
Michael Nielsen - Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science
David Reinstein - Unjournal: Call for participants and research
The Research on Research Institute with an overview of their randomisation project
Matt Clancy
Progress Studies
Michael Plant asking 'Will faster economic growth make us happier? The relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to Progress Studies'
Garrison Lovely writing for the BBC asking 'Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?'
Dylan Matthews interviewing Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama on what made the Industrial Revolution possible
Nick Whitaker on the intersection of the progress community and the idea from Holden Karnofsky of 'Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement'
Environment
Podcast with Johannes Ackva on effective climate altruism
The Centre for Global Development with the blog post 'Where Emissions Are High, Reduce Emissions. Where Poverty Is High, Reduce Poverty'
Hear This Idea podcast with Spencer Weart on the discovery of global warming
Saloni Shah - 'Are Alternative Proteins a Climate Solution?'
The U.S. Department of Energy released a Notice of Intent to fund the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $3.5 billion program to capture and store carbon dioxide pollution directly from the air
Daniel Jassby with a critical essay on 'The Quest for Fusion Energy'
Kelsey Piper - 'Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world'
Kenny Torrella - 'The environmental limits of eating local'
Lauren Holt writing in the BBC on how humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature
Longtermism
The Future Forum is a conference in San Francisco from the 4th-7th of August for people interested in improving the future of humanity, applications close 10th July
80,000 Hours have a quick census for anyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermism related work
A post asking whether too many people in longtermism are focused on movement building
Pat Andriola - Four Concerns Regarding Longtermism
The Future of Life Institute is supporting the Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest, 'offering fellowship grants for television scripts whose storylines focus on a world set between 2045 to 2100 when we achieve lives that reflect our better selves'
The winners of the FLI world building contest have been announced
Artificial Intelligence
Eliezer Yudkowsky - AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
Paul Christiano on agreement/disagreement with Yudkowsky's 'List of Lethalities'
Gary Marcus arguing that AGI is not imminent
Charlie RS - How to pursue a career in technical AI alignment
Victoria Krakovna with a high-level view of the technical AI alignment research landscape
Robin Hanson with 'Why Not Wait on AI Risk?'
A post 'Announcing Epoch: A research organization investigating the road to Transformative AI'
Rob Bensinger on 'The inordinately slow spread of good AGI conversations in ML'
80,000 Hours podcast with Nova Das Sarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
Michaël Trazzi interviewed Blake Richards on why he is skeptical of existential risk from AI
Kris Shrishak and Risto Uuk with the article 'The EU AI law will not be future-proof unless it regulates general purpose AI systems'
Kat Woods - Four reasons I find AI safety emotionally compelling
Vasco Grilo and Simon Holm 'Red-teaming Holden Karnofsky's AI timelines'
Space & Space Governance
Bryan Walsh looking at why receiving signals from extra-terrestrial civilisations could pose an existential risk
An article on the borders of ethics in astrobiology
A blog post on 'Outer Space and the Veil of Ignorance: An Alternative Way to Think About Space Regulation'
Paul Taylor arguing for Europe to be more involved in space security
An article looking at why U.S. defense and intelligence communities are taking unidentified aerial phenomena seriously
Researchers at the B612 Foundation’s Asteroid Institute have developed a new tool for tracking space-rock trajectories
Our World in Data have launched a new collection of charts on space exploration & satellites
Mental Health
The Mental Health Funding Circle has been launched
David Hartsough - History of the theory of well-being
The inaugural wellbeing research and policy conference is happening in Oxford on the 6th-8th of July
The World Health Organisation published one of the most in-depth reports on global mental health for over 20 years
Digital Consciousness
Derek Shiller - The importance of getting digital consciousness right
Dylan Matthews writing about the debate on AI sentience
G McGowan - Digital people could make AI safer
Other Causes
Matthew Barnett - Preventing a US-China war as a policy priority
The Global Terrorism Index for 2022 has seen an increase in the number of attacks but a 1.2% decrease in the number of deaths since the previous year
Gideon Lewis-Kraus asking whether social media may be less harmful than people think
Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
Productivity
Peter Wildeford with notes on 'A World Without Email'
Ben Williamson with a database of effective productivity recommendations
Lynette Bye interviewing eleven people on what is most important for their productivity
Lizka with notes on impostor syndrome
Amy Labenz - Hiking: an analogy for sustainable work
Akash has made a summary of the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares
Evie Cottrell - Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
Alex Lawsen with 'Know what you’re optimising for'
Other Links
Schmidt Futures have created the Act 2 Network to 'amplify the impact of exceptional executives, technologists, and entrepreneurs working to solve humanity's greatest challenges'
An article looking at generational churn and the Chinese Communist Party
Feather Grants has been launched, aiming to give out $500 micro grants
Giving What We Can with a series of interviews with members at EA Global London earlier this year
Holden Karnofsky - Non-profit Boards are Weird
A post on the history of the effective philanthropy movement
Calvin Baker comparing effective altruism and Engaged Buddhism
Owen Cotton-Barratt - Perils of optimising in social contexts
Gregory Lewis - Terminate deliberation based on resilience, not certainty
Sam Atis with a blog looking at extreme honesty in EA
Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen - Less often discussed EA emotional patterns
Fellowships & Programs
US Policy Careers Speaker Series - Organised by Stanford Existential Risks Initiative
ILINA Fellowship for intellectually curious students in Nairobi to spend 2-4 months learning new ways of thinking and find pressing problems to work on. Applications close July 8th
The Future Academy is a program aimed to equip students and early-career professionals with the thinking and resources to pursue impactful careers. The first program starts in September, applications close July 10th
The University Group Accelerator Program is running in August, applications close July 25th
Center for the Governance of AI Winter Fellowship - Applications close 1st August
French X-Risk and Safe Technologies Summit - Happening in September. Applications close 7th August
The Open Philanthropy Undergraduate Scholarship aims to provide support for students who are hoping to start an undergraduate degree at one of the top universities in the USA or UK. Applications close August 15th
EA On Twitter
Alexander Berger responding to Michael Nielsen on EA
Benjamin Todd also responding to that piece by comparing ‘totalising’ EA to actual EA
EA Around The World
Photos of the Lagos EA Meetup
Intro to EA event at Kathmandu
Video highlights from EA Global London 2022
Rutuja Chhajed with a photo of the first EA Delhi meetup
Good News
Benin, Uganda and Rwanda eliminate sleeping sickness as a public health problem
The Central African Republic has abolished the death penalty
China reduced air pollution by 40% in 7 years, which could add two years to average life expectancy
From 2000 to 2015, Peru's under-five mortality decreased by 56%
Another great round up!