2022 June Effective Altruism Updates

Top Links

• Will MacAskill on EA and the current funding situation

• Theo Hawking - 'Bad Omens in Current Community Building'

• Nick Beckstead - clarifications on the Future Fund's approach to grantmaking

• Haydn Belfield -'Cautionary Lessons from the Manhattan Project and the ‘Missile Gap’; Beware Assuming You’re in an AI Race'

• Linch - 'Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker'

• Luke Freeman - '"Big tent" effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)'

• Julia Wise - 'Messy personal stuff that affected my cause prioritization (or: how I started to care about AI safety)'

New Organisations, Projects & Prizes

• Open Philanthropy have prizes for new cause area suggestions, submit suggestions by August 4th

• A post introducing Asterisk, a new quarterly journal of ideas from in and around Effective Altruism

• An EA Unjournal has been started. They aim to organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects

• Nuño Sempere has started the EA Forum Lowdown, a tabloid version of the EA Forum digest

• The EA Forum has a new feature allowing you to find other people interested in EA near you

• Charity Entrepreneurship have launched career coaching for impact-focused entrepreneurs

• EA Engineers has been set up as a discord for people interested in EA and non-software engineering

• Non-trivial Pursuits has been set up to help teenagers find fulfilling, impactful careers

• The Nucleic Acid Observatory project for early detection of catastrophic biothreats has been launched

Critiques/Suggested Improvements

• Ines on how EA can sound less weird

• CEA is looking for anonymous feedback

• Hal Triedman with a critique of effective altruism

• Jeff Kaufman on 'Increasing Demandingness in EA'

• Luke Freeman on being ambitious and celebrating failures

• Arjun Panickssery on impressions of 'Big EA' from students

• Justis with a post on status as a Giving What We Can Pledger

• Marius Hobbhahn with 'EA needs to understand its “failures” better'

• Marisa with 'The EA movement’s values are drifting. You’re allowed to stay put.'

• Caroline Ellison on how discussion about increased spending in EA and its potential negative consequences conflates two separate questions

• James Lin and Jennifer Zhu with 'EA culture is special; we should proceed with intentionality'

• Luke Chambers with 'Why EA’s Talent Bottleneck is a Barrier of its own Making'

• Ben Kuhn suggesting that 'The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift'

• Étienne Fortier-Dubois with 'Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philosophies: Why Aesthetics Matter'

Miscellaneous Meta EA

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

• EA Funds donation platform is moving to Giving What We Can

• David Moss and Jamie Elsey ran a survey to find out how many people have heard of effective altruism

• Matthew Yglesias on understanding effective altruism's move into politics

• Results from the Decade Review on the EA Forum

• Lucius Caviola, Erin Morrissey, Joshua Lewis have run a survey that found most students who would agree with EA ideas haven't heard of EA yet

• Kat Woods and Amber Dawn on how to have passive impact

• Owen Cotton-Barratt on deferring

• Justis looking at how complicated it is to work out impact

• Julia Wise with a post on what to do as EA is likely to get more attention over time

• Updates from the CEA community health team

Careers

• Vaidehi Agarwalla on the availability bias in job hunting

• Joseph Lemien looking at how to do hiring better

• Jonathan Michel with an overview of his job as an EA office manager

• Tereza Flidrova on becoming an EA architect

• A post asking for an EA copyediting service

• 'Is it still hard to get a job in EA? Insights from CEA’s recruitment data'

• Lynette Bye with 'Have You Ever Doubted Whether You're Good Enough To Pursue Your Career?' and also 'Do you need to love your work to do it well?'

• Ben West on why CEA Online doesn’t outsource more work to non-EA freelancers

• A post suggesting 'You should join an EA organisation with too many employees'

• Ben West with 'Comparative advantage does not mean doing the thing you're best at'

• Joey Savoie asking 'Does it make sense for EA’s to be more risk-seeking in earning to give?'

• Caroline Ellison on organisational alignment

• A post arguing that people should spend more time working on projects together to improve networking in EA

• Ben West suggesting that people do 'EA Tours of Service'

• Abby Hoskin on how to apply for a PhD

• Abi Olvera and Dan Spoko suggesting that Americans should consider applying to join U.S. diplomacy

Grants

• Open Phil have made 6 grants recently with a total value of $14,300,000

  • $12,600,000 - Global Health & Development

    • $8,200,000 - Fortify Health

    • $4,400,000 - Sightsavers

  • $750,000 - Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative

  • $500,000 - Center for Popular Democracy

  • $360,000 - Malaria Vaccine Research

  • $95,000 - Effective Altruism Curriculum for Debaters

Global Development

• The Integrated National Financing Framework Facility has been launched aiming to bring together international partners to align and magnify support to more than 80 governments to channel investment towards the Sustainable Development Goals

• The WHO reports that excess deaths from COVID-19 pandemic may be 3 times more than reported

• 80,000 Hours podcast with James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

• Shakeel Hashim asking 'Is the world really getting worse?'

• Kelsey Piper looking into whether microfinance is encouraging women to join multilevel marketing schemes

• Pablo Villalobos and Jaime Sevilla looking at how much population growth happened because of the introduction of potatoes

Animal Welfare

• Andrea Polanco writing in Faunalytics on 'The Impact Of Diet & Different Animal Advocacy Tactics'

• Joy Muthanje Mwaniki with 'What I’ve learnt from researching animal advocacy interventions across the African continent'

• On the 18th-20th July there is a virtual global animal law conference

• The world’s largest vats for growing cultivated meat are to be built in the U.S.

• Clearer Thinking podcast with Leah Edgerton discussing cognitive biases and animal welfare

• Animal Advocacy Careers with posts on whether animal charity jobs can be a good personal fit and an overview of fundraising for nonprofits in effective animal advocacy

• Jamie Harris, Ali Ladak and Maya Mathur on whether animal welfare reforms affect wider attitudes towards animals

• Jamie Gittins with 'Why should I care about insects (and other invertebrates)?'

• Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie with data on the proportion of people in the UK who say they are vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian

• Holly Elmore on the 'The Rodent Birth Control Landscape'

Biosecurity

• Open Philanthropy have a request for proposals to help quantify biological risk - Apply by June 5th

• Gates Notes on how to prevent future pandemics

• The National Institutes of Health has awarded $577 million to establish nine antiviral drug discovery centres for pathogens of pandemic concern

• A post from iGEM on the risks from information hazards

• The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations with a post asking if monkeypox could give us an R&D blueprint to end pandemics

• A paper in Nature on how to prevent pandemics by stopping animal to human pathogen exchange

• Bridget Williams in conversation with Carrick Flynn on how to prevent the next pandemic

• Kelsey Piper with 'Can we stop the next pandemic by seeking out deadly viruses in the wild?'

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Anders Sandberg with a paper on 'Collective Intelligence as Infrastructure for Reducing Broad Global Catastrophic Risks'

• Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative are accepting applications from university-affiliated groups and individuals interested in receiving their support. Applications close 26th June

Improving Institutions

• The Research on Research Institute is hosting the virtual event 'Priorities for Research on Research' on the 20th June

• The Hypothesis Fund has been launched to support early stage, innovative research that increases adaptability against systemic risks

• A new paper on potential risks from making science open

• Nadia Asparouhova with the concept of Idea Machines, looking at the example of effective altruism

• Chris Said has started Apollo Academic Surveys, aiming to aggregate the views of academic experts

Progress Studies

• Matt Clancy has created New Things Under the Sun, aiming to be a living literature review on social science research about innovation

• The Atlantic has a new series focused on progress

• Hear This Idea podcast with Jason Crawford on Progress Studies

• Ben Yeoh interviewing Alex Stapp on 'Policy For Progress, Under-Researched Areas, Science Of Science and Biosecurity'

Environment

• 80,000 Hours with an update to their climate change profile

• The UK government has started a £120 million fund to develop nuclear power technology

• An article on how to use carbon that has been captured

• Stanford has started a new climate school with $1.1 billion

• An article on how more attention should be paid to geothermal energy

• Project Innerspace is a new organisation focused on advocating for geothermal energy

• Ben Yeoh with the post 'Why Consider Supporting SEC Climate Disclosures'

Longtermism

• Lizka against “longtermist” as an identity

• The Global Priorities Institute is producing summaries of their papers. Here is 'The case for strong longtermism' and 'Moral demands and the far future'

• Frances Lorenz asking whether EA is just longtermism

• Boaz Barak with 'Why I am not a longtermist'

• Sigal Samuel interviewing Sophie Howe, the future generations commissioner of Wales, where they are trying to shift policy to consider 25 years into the future

• John G. Halstead with 'Should we buy coal mines?'

• Richard Ren asking if longtermists focus more on climate resilience

Artificial Intelligence

• Anthropic have raised $580 million to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems

• Astral Codex Ten with a post aiming to popularise obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment

• 80,000 Hours with a new article on data collection for AI alignment

• Jeffrey Ladish and Lennart Heim on information security considerations for AI and the long term future

• Frances Lorenz, Nora Belrose and Jon Menaster with a non-technical explainer on DeepMind’s generalist AI, Gato

• An article in Foreign Policy looking at why China and the U.S. need to limit the risks from autonomous weapons

• Luke Chambers with 'The Case for Non-Technical AI Safety/Alignment Growth & Funding'

• The AI X-risk Research podcast discussing natural abstractions with John Wentworth

• Podcast with Holden Karnofsky on AI, philanthropy and the future

• Timothy Liptrot with 'How to internationally regulate industries in non-democracies'

• Joe Carlsmith with a presentation on existential risk from power-seeking AI

• Thomas Woodside and Dan Hendrycks with a series of posts on pragmatic AI safety

• Vael Gates with 'Transcripts of interviews with AI researchers'

• Buck with 'The case for becoming a black-box investigator of language models'

• A post arguing that 'we shouldn’t confuse theoretical possibility with likelihood, let alone with theoretical certainty'

Other Causes

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Chris Blattman on five reasons wars happen

• Shakeel Hashim on influencing the culture to improve the world

• Leo has made a list of cause candidates that have been posted on the EA forum in the first quarter of 2022

• Ben Snodin with thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area

• Austin on What We Owe the Past

• Dan Elton with 'Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area'

• Saloni Dattani with data on the lifetime risk of depression

• Bryan Walsh looking at the potential of quantum computing

• Dylan Matthews asking whether economic growth will slow down in the long run and the implications of that

Other Links

• Matt Clifford in discussion with Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross exploring how to identify talent around the world

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine

• Rutger Bregman giving a talk about effective altruism to 400 people

• Richard Y Chappell on levelling-up impartiality rather than levelling down

• Gregory Lewis with 'Rational predictions often update predictably*'

• Alex RJL suggesting that sharing google docs with your current thinking is a good way to make tough decisions

• Kuhan J on avoiding invisible mistakes

• Chana Messinger with a list of lists of EA-related open philosophy research questions

• A story of how someone missed their biggest career opportunity so far

• Shakeel Hashim with '13 musings from EA Global'

• Photos from EAGxPrague

• Milan Patel with 10 learnings from EAGxPrague

EA in the Media

• Sam Bankman-Fried says he could spend $1 billion or more in the 2024 U.S. election

• The BBC interviewing Peter Singer as he’s awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture

• Politico writing about Carrick Flynn running for Congress in Oregon’s 6th Congressional District and the interest from people involved in EA

• Seren Kell, Rishub Jain and Arvind Raghavan on why they give via Giving What We Can

• Nathan Young with social media rules of thumb

Conferences

• 8th-10th July - EAGxAustralia - Apply by 24th June

• 29th-31st July - EA Global: San Francisco

• 2nd-4th September - EAGxSingapore

• 23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.

• 16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin

• Apply to join the EAGxIndia 2023, the Future Forum and the EAGxBerkeley 2023 teams

Fellowships & Programs

• Leaf are running an eight day residential program in Oxford in August for sixth formers on the theme 'Building a Better Future'

• University Group Accelerator Program Application - June 19th

• Legal Priorities Summer Institute is a week-long program in Oxford with the goal of introducing altruistically-minded law and policy students to projects, theories, and tools relevant to tackling issues affecting the long-term future - apply by 17th June

• ML Safety Scholars Program - 9 week program to help undergraduates gain skills in machine learning with the eventual aim to work on AI safety research - Apply by May 31st

• Center on Long-Term Risk - Summer Research Fellowship

• An EA fiction writing retreat will be near Oxford for a week in September - Apply by June 26th

Good News

• Over 1 million children have been protected by first malaria vaccine

• In Vietnam, over the last decade, absolute poverty has dropped from 16.8 to 5 percent, and over 10 million people were lifted out of poverty