2022 November EA Updates
This month we’ve passed the 400 mark for subscribers but if there is anyone you think isn’t already overwhelmed with EA related news, then send this newsletter to them.
It’s also useful for the already overwhelmed people who want to stop keeping up with the EA Forum, so feel free to share it with them too.
I couldn’t discern any overall themes from EA news this month but there were two EA in Africa related retreats announced that you should definitely share with people interested in EA in Africa.
Top Posts
Kelsey Piper - Overreacting to current events can be very costly
Katja Grace - Counterarguments to the basic AI risk case
Winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest
Charity Entrepreneurship with their recommended charity ideas for 2023, including animal welfare, global development and biosecurity
Dustin Moskovitz with a Twitter AMA on effective altruism
Lizka - Invisible impact loss (and why we can be too error-averse)
Stephen Clare - The US expands restrictions on AI exports to China. What are the x-risk effects?
Tobias Baumann has a new book on s-risks, titled Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe
George Stiffman - Growing the US tofu market - a roadmap
Upcoming Events
September to December - Prague Fall Season
November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam
1st-5th December - African Movement-building Summit - South Africa
2nd-4th December - EAGxBerkeley
5th December - Berkley Hackathon
7th-8th January - EAGxLatinAmerica - Mexico City
January to March - EA Africa Residency Fellowship - Tanzania
24th-26th February - EAG Bay Area
21st-23rd April - EAGXNordics - Stockholm
19th-21st May - EAG London
Virtual Events
13th November - GWWC Meetup
21st November - 16th January - Impactful Policy Careers Workshop Series, apply by 31st October
22nd November - Effective Giving Day - Organised by GWWC and featuring guests including William MacAskill and Rutger Bregman
Meta
The EA Forum has a new way to search, including for specific users, similar to how Swapcard is used for conferences
Edo Arad and Amber Dawn - Strange Love - Developing Empathy With Intention (or: How I Learned To Stop Calculating And Love The Cause)
Gavin - What I learned from the criticism contest
Vaidehi Agarwalla and Amber Dawn - Why don't people post on the Forum? Some anecdotes
An Ask Everyone Anything post (with over 210 comments so far)
José Oliveira - Translations (the Portuguese experience)
Ask Charity Entrepreneurship Anything (with 115 comments)
Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen - Cultural EA considerations for Nordic folks
Jan Kulveit and Gavin with a post on how cause prioritisation in EA can be better than putting all resources on our top option
One for the World, Giving What We Can and High Impact Professionals are collaborating to offer corporate talks this giving season
New Projects
Grayden - Introducing the EA Good Governance Project, for people who want to be trustees/board members and organisations looking for them
Dušan D. Nešić - EA Serbia is now launching
Inga - High-Impact Psychology (HIPsy): Piloting a Global Network
Resilience Lab is aiming to build capacity for prototyping physical engineering ideas with relevance to longtermism, they are currently looking for project suggestions
Stephen Thomas is writing profiles of people doing interesting EA work, called 'Humans of Effective Altruism' and is looking for recommendations
BlueDot Impact run cohort-based courses that support people to develop knowledge, community and a network to have more impact
Gidi Kadosh - Announcing VIVID: A new organisation aspiring to scale effective self-improvement & reflection
Joel Tan announcing the launch of the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research
Metaculus launches the 'Forecasting Our World In Data' project to probe the long-term future
A post announcing Amplify, a small grants program for creative media
High Impact Professionals are trialling a matchmaking service where they connect qualified talent with potentially high-impact organisations
Movement building
Michael Noetel - We all teach: here's how to do it better
Conor McGurk - 7 learnings from 3 years running a corporate EA Group
Michel - Ways in which EA could fail
Critiques
Peter McLaughlin - Getting on a different train: can Effective Altruism avoid collapsing into absurdity?
Lawrence Newport - EA is Not Religious Enough (EA should emulate peak Quakerism)
Nadavb - EA may look like a cult (and it's not just optics)
Bessie Odell with a post suggesting that advice in EA often doesn't take women into account
Xuan highlighting some favourite philosophical, ideological and object-level critiques of EA
Emrik - Why defensive writing is bad for community epistemics
Careers
For operations people that work in EA aligned organisations there is an EA Operations Slack
Holly Morgan, Jennifer Waldmann and Vaidehi Agarwalla - PAs in EA: A Brief Guide & FAQ
Sofia Balderson - Creative EA job hunting: things you can do in addition to filling out job applications
Careers in medicine - a new path profile from Probably Good and High Impact Medicine
High Impact Professionals - Top companies for donation matching
80,000 Hours have updated their job board
Database of EA-relevant US policy fellowships
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 18 grants recently, with a value of $82 million
$54,000,000 - Global Development
$49,000,000 - Evidence Action - Dispensers for Safe Water Program
$4,000,000 - Helen Keller International - Vitamin A Supplementation
$13,000,000 - Animal Welfare
$12,000,000 - Mercy for Animals - Corporate Campaigns
$12,000,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$11,000,000 - Redwood Research
$2,000,000 - EA Community Growth
$1,000,000 - Biosecurity
Global Development
Hauke Hillebrandt - Room for more funding: Why doesn’t the Gates foundation just close the funding gap of AMF and SCI?
Lightning talks on different approaches to measuring good from GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, Happier Lives Institute, Founders Pledge and Innovations for Poverty Action
Tom Barnes - Air Pollution: Founders Pledge Cause Report
A post introducing the Cause Innovation Bootcamp
Fortify Health responding to recent critiques of iron fortification in India
Vijaya Ramachandran and Arthur Baker - The World Bank and IMF Are Getting It Wrong on Climate Change
Caroline Wood - Isn’t poverty just a symptom and not the real problem we should be addressing?
A post asking if corporate impact investing will bring in new money to global development
Our World in Data introducing their updated work on poverty data
Oscar Delaney - GiveWell Misuses Discount Rates
Stephanie Beasley - Gates Foundation pledges $1.2B to end polio as virus stages a comeback
Saloni Dattani and Fiona Spooner - How many people die from the flu?
Joe Hasell on what the updated international poverty line from the World Bank means
Animal Welfare
George Bridgwater - Corporate Campaigns: determining the scale of the ask
Fai - Philosophers speaking against the mistreatment of animals: The Montreal Declaration On Animal Exploitation
Julian Hazell with thoughts on factory farming
A new Faunalytics study on Chinese consumers’ attitudes towards farmed animal welfare
17th-20th November - Animal Advocacy Conference Asia 2022 - Online event
Alternative Proteins
Liz Specht - The State of the Science on Alternative Proteins
Matthew Yglesias - We badly need better alternatives to conventional meat
Kenny Torrella - Inside the fantastical, pragmatic quest to make 'hybrid' meat
Lewis Bollard highlighting how governments have now invested ~$900M into alternative proteins
Biosecurity
NTI statement on new White House national biodefense strategy
Kelsey Piper - Why do labs keep making dangerous viruses?
Thomas W - "A Creepy Feeling": Nixon's Decision to Disavow Biological Weapons
NTI have launched the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science
Nuclear Risks
Nuno Sempere and Misha Yagudin - Samotsvety Nuclear Risk update for October 2022
Future of Life podcasts
Philip Reiner on nuclear command, control and communications
Alan Robock on nuclear winter, famine and geoengineering
Brian Toon on nuclear winter, asteroids, volcanoes and the future of humanity
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Martin Rees with a new book - If Science is to Save Us
Haydn Belfield - Lord Martin Rees: an appreciation
Founders Pledge have launched a global catastrophic risks fund
Janne M. Korhonen - Sheltering humanity against x-risk: report from the SHELTER weekend
Luisa Rodriguez - What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would cause technological stagnation?
Alasdair Phillips-Robins - Catastrophic Risk, Uncertainty, and Agency Analysis
John Bliss - Existential advocacy (for lawyers)
Nate Soares - Warning Shots Probably Wouldn't Change The Picture Much
Improving Institutions & Metascience
Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu on improving the discovery ecosystem with metascience (via Marginal Revolutions)
Tom Chivers - Expensive science journals are actually costing us potentially world-changing progress
Sam Hilton - How to change a system from the inside
Clearer Thinking podcast with Peter Wildeford on forecasting the things that matter
Saloni Dattani - The Pandemic Uncovered Ways to Speed Up Science
Progress Studies
Progress Summit is being held in LA on the 13th of December, you can also attend virtually
Matthew Yglesias - Ten years of YIMBYism have accomplished a lot
Benjamin Reinhardt - Making energy too cheap to meter
Sarah Constantin - Unblocking Abundance
Environment
Matt Clifford introducing Entrepreneur First Climate for people who want to found companies tackling climate change
Giving Green recommends Frontier as one of the top donation opportunities for businesses
Seth Baum with a post on what to do on climate change if you are focused on a different cause
Daniel Bertram on extreme climate change, a new chapter of the Legal Priorities Project research agenda
The Breakthrough Institute with a new campaign to build new advanced nuclear reactors
Longtermism
William MacAskill, Teruji Thomas and Aron Vallinder - The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework
A list of donation opportunities focusing on non-US longtermist policy work
Carnegie Council - Long-termism: An Ethical Trojan Horse
Violet Hour - Effective Altruism's Implicit Epistemology
William MacAskill with a thread of objections to What We Owe The Future that he think's are most compelling
Morgan Jones and David Klemperer - Does ‘Longtermism’ belong in Labour(UK)?
Richard Fisher writing in the BBC on eucatastrophe: Tolkien's word for the "anti-doomsday"
Maxwell Tabarrok with a post suggesting that if there are aliens, then preventing x-risk is not so important
The Foresight Institute are hosting Vision Weekends in Europe and the US, with speakers including Christine Peterson, Jason Crawford, Jaan Tallinn, Jose Luis Ricon and Anders Sandberg
William MacAskill on misguided objections to longtermism
AI Policy
The Center for Security and Emerging Technology on China’s Advanced AI Research and the China AI “Watchboard” Pilot Program
Toby Jolly - Where to work on AI policy in the UK government
Christoph Winter, Nick Hollman and David Manheim - Value alignment for advanced artificial judicial intelligence
Technical AI
Sam Clarke - When reporting AI timelines, be clear who you're (not) deferring to
Richard Ngo - Alignment 201 curriculum
A new newsletter for alignment research: The ML Safety Updates
Vitalik Buterin Fellowship in AI Existential Safety - 15th November
Rohin Shah, Victoria Krakovna, Vikrant Varma and Zachary Kenton - How undesired goals can arise with correct rewards
Redwood Research Mechanistic Interpretability Experiment (REMIX), a research program in Berkeley - 8th November
Other AI
Future of Life podcast with Ajeya Cotra on forecasting transformative AI
Marius Hobbhahn - Lessons learned from talking to >100 academics about AI safety
Froolow - ‘Dissolving’ AI Risk – Parameter Uncertainty in AI Future Forecasting
Jesse Clifton, Samuel Martin and Anthony DiGiovanni - When would AGIs engage in conflict?
The State of AI Report 2022
AI Safety Hub Edinburgh has been set up by Fazl Barez and Elliot Fosong
Existential Hope podcast with Richard Mallah on how aligned AI could help us create a flourishing future
80,000 Hours - Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?
Other Causes
80,000 Hours have released profiles on a range of world problems
Whole Brain Emulation
Promoting Positive Values
Risks from Malevolent Actors
Risks of Stable Totalitarianism
Safeguarding Liberal Democracy
Reducing Immigration Restrictions
Preventing the Spread of False Ideas on Social Media
Chris Blattman - The prospects for war with China
Joel Tan - Shallow Report on Fungal Diseases
80,000 Hours podcast with Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
William McAuliffe and Adam Shriver - The Relative Importance of the Severity and Duration of Pain
Ben Snodin and Marie Davidsen Buhl with a nanotechnology strategy research resources database
Stories
Ollie Base - On Absurdity
CEA have an open call for EA stories
Lynette Bye with three coaching stories
Emrik - Briefly, the life of Tetsu Nakamura (1946-2019)
Giving What We Can Member profile - Timeo Williams
LeVar Burton reads "Vaccine Season" by Hannu Rajaniemi
Vox with the Future Perfect 50 - scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers and activists building a more perfect future
EA in Blogs and Media
BBC Radio 4 on EA - Can Effective Altruism really change the world?
Julian Hazell with his straightforward case for effective altruism
Adam Fisher with a longform article on Sam Bankman-Fried
Tennis player Jamie Murray on effective giving
Other Links
Matt Reynolds in Wired - Worried About Nuclear War? Consider the Micromorts
Hear This Idea podcast with Edouard Mathieu on Our World in Data
Samuel Nellessen and Konstantin - Accountability Buddies: Why you might want one
Habiba Islam with Garrison Lovely discussing the political left and effective altruism
Tyrone Barugh - Consider entering the 2024 US diversity visa lottery by November 8 2022 - it's free and fast to do
Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen - Counterproductive EA mental health advice (and what to say instead)
Luisa Rodriguez - My experience experimenting with a bunch of antidepressants I'd never heard of
Qualy the lightbulb getting cancelled at a Happier Lives Institute talk
Good News
A report on how global wealth has increased whilst wealth inequality has fallen this century
Under 5 mortality rate in India has declined by 3 points since 2019