Top Posts
Peter Wildeford - EA is three radical ideas I want to protect
FLI open letter: Pause giant AI experiments
Leopold - Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment
Katja Grace - How bad a future do ML researchers expect?
James Snowden - Why I don’t agree with Happier Lives Institute’s estimate of household spillovers from therapy
GiveDirectly - Offer an option to Muslim donors; grow effective giving
Ula Zarosa - After launch. How are CE charities progressing?
Lewis Bollard (with a new Substack) - What happened to plant-based meat?
Ren Springlea - Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself)
Toby Ord - Reflecting on the Last Year - Lessons for EA (opening keynote at EAG)
Richter - Share the Burden
Michelle Hutchinson - Why I love effective altruism
Global Events
14th-17th April - EA for Christians Annual Conference - with key note speaker Rory Stewart
21st-23rd April - EAGxNordics
19th-21st May - EAG London
9th-11th June - EAGxWarsaw
27th-29th October - EAG Boston
Virtual Events
1st April - High-Impact Zakat through Unconditional Cash Transfers - Organised by The Muslim Network for Positive Impact and GiveDirectly
14th April - Stanford Existential Risks Conference
20th April - Giving What We Can - Effective Giving Open Forum
Meta Updates
A post by me arguing for more centralisation in EA
Vasco Grilo - Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail
Jeff Kaufman - Milk EA, Casu Marzu EA
Fin Moorhouse - Some more projects I’d like to see
What Has EAGxLatAm 2023 Taught Us: Retrospective & Thoughts on Measuring the Impact of EA Conferences
Marieke de Visscher with a visual overview of EA related organisations
David Manheim - Cooperative or Competitive Altruism, and Antisocial Counterfactuals
Suggest new charity ideas for Charity Entrepreneurship
Ben Millwood - The illusion of consensus about EA celebrities
Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022
Deena Englander - 3 Basic Steps to Reduce Personal Liability as an Org Leader
Luis Mota - Researching Priorities in Local Contexts
Patrick Gruban & Sarah Tegeler - A BOTEC-Model for Comparing Impact Estimations in Community Building
James Özden - Tensions between different approaches to doing good
Jessica Wen - On Philosophy Tube's Video on Effective Altruism
Chana Messinger - Not all "EA" things are good
Grayden - The Role of a Non-Profit Board
FTX
Holden Karnofsky’s recent comments on FTX, and what this might mean for EA community building
Ben West - Some Comments on the Recent FTX TIME Article
Time Article Discussion - "EA Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed"
William MacAskill with an update (mainly why he can't comment in depth yet)
Owen Cotton Barratt with updates to his thinking on the value/direction of EA community building as a result of FTX
Willem Sleegers & David Moss - FTX Community Response Survey Results
Careers
Rethink Priorities - Worldview Investigations Team: An Overview
Fernando - Introducing Artists of Impact
How to Find a High-Impact Engineering Job
Luisa Rodriguez and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
Jason Clinton & Wim van der Schoot - EA Infosec: skill up in or make a transition to infosec via this book club
The EA Opportunities board has a variety of volunteer and part time roles
Luisa Rodriguez & Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
A collection of comments on work culture at EA related organisations
New Projects
Good Business Better has been set up to help create productive relationships between impact businesses
Louise Verkin - EA content in French: Announcing EA France’s translation project and our translation coordination initiative
Ramiro - Translations in Brazil: much more than you needed to know
High Impact Professionals have a new talent directory of professionals looking for impactful opportunities. You can also join the directory
Should Jeff Kaufmann write a book about EA?
Organisation Updates
80,000 Hours two-year review: 2021–2022
Giving What We Can - 2020–2022 Impact evaluation
Highlights from Legal Priorities Project’s field-building efforts
Updates from the Mental Health Funder's Circle
Deena Englander - How WorkStream EA strengthens EA orgs, leaders and impact: our observations, programs and plans
Bella - 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience
Habryka & Ben Pace - Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices
Critiques
Ozzie Gooen - Who is Uncomfortable Critiquing Who, Around EA?
Jeffrey Kursonis - EA needs Life-Veterans and "Less Smart" people
Michael Cohen - Against EA-Community-Received-Wisdom on Practical Sociological Questions
Vaidehi Agarwalla & Amber Dawn - Some problems in operations at EA orgs: inputs from a dozen ops staff
Kevin Munger - Everything was Rational and Nothing Vibed (a liberal conservative critique after attending EAG DC)
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 50 grants recently, with a value of $63.4 million
$20.5m - Global Development & Wellbeing
$13.1m - Evidence Action - Syphilis Screening and Treatment
$3.4m - Malaria No More - Malaria Funding Advocacy
$1m - Translational Health Science and Technology Institute - Henipavirus Antivirals
$11.6m - Animal Welfare
$5.7m - Eurogroup for Animals
$2.7m - University of Bern - Cage-free Layer Hen Genetics
$11.1m - Longtermism
$5.3m - Forecasting Research Institute - Science of Forecasting
$4.7m - European Summer Program on Rationality
$8.6m - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
$5m - Alvea - DNA Vaccine Platform
$2.9 - Council on Strategic Risks - Biosecurity Fellowships and Policy Work
$7.8m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$5.1m - Center for AI Safety
$2m - Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
$3m - EA & Global Development
$2.1m - Effektiv Spenden
$870k - One for the World
$600k - Paris Peace Forum - Global Commission on Governing Risks from Climate Overshoot
$7m from MacKenzie Scott for Village Enterprise, a Life You Can Save recommended charity
Global Development
Bill Gates - The Age of AI has begun
Prosper Africa Plans To Invest $170 Million To Boost African Exports And U.S. Investment By $2 Billion
Mushtaq Khan, Pallavi Roy - Making anti-corruption real: using a ‘Power Capabilities and Interest Approach’ to stop wasting money and start making progress
Africa CDC publishes its first list of priority pathogens
Prabhu Pingali - Beyond Staple Grains
Daniel Björkegren - How could AI impact developing economies?
WHO - Over 1 billion in 43 nations at risk amid cholera outbreaks
Ken Opalo - The World Bank African Countries Need
GiveDirectly is experimenting with a model to give people cash aid before climate disasters hit
World Happiness Report 2022 has been released
'Uninformative research' is the global health crisis you’ve never heard of
Charles Kenny and Ian Mitchell - Is it time to challenge the Development Assistance Committee
Ken Opalo - On America's structural inability to effectively compete with China in Africa
Laura Keen - How AI helped 6x the GiveDirectly disaster response speed
Susannah Hares & Gabriela Smarrelli - What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Violence against Girls and Boys in School
Evidence Action with an overview of how their accelerator process works to discover potentially high-impact interventions
Gallup World Poll - 86% say they are treated with respect
EA & Global Development
EA for Christians are organising the Impact Professionals Conference in Washington D.C. on the 20th-21st of April
Happier Lives Institute - Immigration reform: a shallow cause exploration
Rory Fenton - Make RCTs cheaper: smaller treatment, bigger control groups
Lauren Gilbert - Every Generator Is A Policy Failure
Alex Cohen, GiveWell - Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
Jenny Kudymowa, Ruby Dickson & Tom Hird - Exposure to Lead Paint in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Morgan Fairless with a database of resources for global health research
Barry Grimes with a spreadsheet collecting happiness research in one place
Joseph Pusey - Shallow Investigation: Stillbirths
Alejandro Acelas - Comparing Health Interventions in Colombia and Nigeria: Which are More Effective and by How Much?
HLI - Can we trust wellbeing surveys? A pilot study of comparability, linearity, and neutrality
Ishaan - Why SoGive is publishing an independent evaluation of StrongMinds
Taylor Sweeney - Shallow Investigation: Slums
Tom Drake - Marginal Aid and Effective Altruism
Our research process: an overview from Rethink Priorities’ Global Health and Development team
Kelsey Piper - How oral rehydration therapy was developed
Nick Laing - Remote Health Centers In Uganda - a cost effective intervention?
Help GiveDirectly kill "teach a man to fish"
Animal Welfare
Stijn - Animal welfare certified meat is not a stepping stone to meat reduction or abolition
David Thorstad - review of 'The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does'
Focus Philanthropy, a new organisation that connects philanthropists with giving opportunities to reduce the harms of factory farming
Veganuary review of their 2023 campaign (700,000 signups)
6th April - Inclusive Hiring Skills Program - Organised by Animal Advocacy Careers
Vasco Grilo - Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
BBC - World's first octopus farm proposals alarm scientists
Garrison Lovely - Why pescetarianism is bad for animal welfare
Alternative Proteins
18th-20th September - Good Food Conference 2023 - San Francisco
Investment in sustainable protein up 24% in Europe for 2022
Italy introduces bill to ban lab-grown meat
Martina Helmlinger - Alt Protein Project: join the students driving sustainable protein research across Europe
Robert Yaman - Is Cultivated Meat For Real?
Wild Animal Welfare
Ozy Brennan - The Virtue of Wonder: Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals
Jordan Hampton - Animal Welfare in the Anthropocene
Eradicating rodenticides from U.S. pest management is less practical than we thought
Govind Pimpale - The global biomass of wild mammals
There is a new ban on hunting birds with lead shot in EU wetlands, which is hoped to stop an estimated 1m waterbirds a year dying of lead poisoning
Biosecurity
Elika - Advice on communicating in and around the biosecurity policy community
Juan Cambeiro - What Comes After COVID
Kelsey Piper - The Covid mask wars have left us unprepared for the next pandemic
New York Times - How To Prepare for the Next Pandemic
Matt Field - Can a 1975 bioweapons ban handle today’s biothreats?
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Introducing the new Riesgos Catastróficos Globales team
Global catastrophic risks law approved in the United States
Matt Boyd & Nick Wilson - Revolutionising National Risk Assessment: improved methods and stakeholder engagement to tackle global catastrophe and existential risks
Hundreds of Incidents of Lost Nuclear and Radioactive Material Logged in Latest CNS Trafficking Database between 2020 and 2021
John von Neumann - Can We Survive Technology?
Mike Hinge - Feeding the World Without Sunlight
Fellowships
The Centre on Long-Term Risk - Summer Research Fellowship 2023 - 2nd April
The Existential Risk Alliance - Cambridge Fellowship - 5th April
Swiss Existential Risk Initiative - Research Fellowship - 16th April
Improving Institutions, Metascience and Progress
Hauke Hillebrandt - Let's Fund: Better Science impact evaluation. Registered Reports now available in Nature
Matt Reynolds - Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children
The Long Game Project has been set up, aiming to improve institutional decision-making, planning and creative thinking using tabletop exercises and scenarios
David Lang - What should science cost?
Stuart Buck - Controversy Alert: We Should Think About Loosening Conflict-of-Interest Requirements at NIH
Saloni Dattani - The success of chickenpox vaccines
MHRA unveils big shakeup in UK clinical trials regulations, including running regulatory and ethics reviews in parallel, which could potentially halve the time from application to recruiting a first patient
An ask me anything with Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
80,000 Hours podcast with Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
Metascience Conference 2023 - Washington D.C. - May 9th-10th
Environment
Recent paper on climate tipping points
Giving Green - 3 ways to improve our climate giving research
Hannah Ritchie - We need the right kind of climate optimism
Longtermism
EJT & Car Shulman - How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role
Hillary Greaves & Christian Tarsney - Minimal and Expansive Longtermism
The Long View by Richard Fisher is now on sale
Cody Fenwick - Longtermism: a call to protect future generations
Future Matters with their last newsletter update (for now)
Hayden Wilkinson - Can an evidentialist be risk-averse?
Buhl (Rethink Priorities) - What longtermist projects would you like to see implemented?
Lara - Call for Cruxes by Rhyme, a Longtermist History Consultancy
Richard Fisher - Building a longtermism that works for the people of tomorrow - and the people of today
Jim Buhler - Predicting what future people value: A terse introduction to Axiological Futurism
Petra Kosonen - Tiny probabilities and the value of the far future
Paper summary: Are we living at the hinge of history? (William MacAskill)
Artificial Intelligence Pause
Katja Grace - Let's think about slowing down AI
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
Gary Marcus & Michelle Rempel Garner - Is it time to hit the pause button on AI?
Sigal Samuel - The case for slowing down AI
OpenAI
OpenAI - Planning for AGI and beyond
Scott Alexander blog on "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
Beth Barnes - More information about the dangerous capability evaluations we did with GPT-4 and Claude
Nate Soares - Comments on "Planning for AGI and beyond"
Kelsey Piper - OpenAI wants to build systems smarter than us
Haydn Belfield - If your AI model is going to sell, it has to be safe
Benjamin Hilton - What Bing’s chat bot can tell us about AI risk - and what it can’t
Holden Karnofsky - What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?
Cleo Nardo - An explanation of the Waluigi Effect and other bizarre "semiotic" phenomena which arise within large language models
OpenAI - GPTs are GPTs: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models
Helen Toner explaining the tentacle monster diagram representing ChatGPT
AI Safety
Jason Schukraft & Peter Favaloro - Announcing the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest
Yudkowsky on AGI risk on the Bankless podcast
Quintin Pope - My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky"
AI Alignments Awards have a new research contest, submit by May 1st
Holden Karnofsky - Discussion with Nate Soares on a key alignment difficulty
Adam Gleave - AI Safety in a World of Vulnerable Machine Learning Systems
Zoe Williams - AI Safety - 7 months of discussion in 17 minutes
Anthropic: Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How
Matthew Barnett - Why I think it's important to work on AI forecasting
Chris Scammell - Japan AI Alignment Conference
Apart Research with an overview of the Japanese AI alignment conference
Ben Landau-Taylor - Against AGI Timelines
Erich Grunewald - The Prospect of an AI Winter
Steven Pinker and Richard Hanania on Alignment and Intelligence as a "Magical Potion"
AI Governance
Holden Karnofsky - How major governments can help with the most important century
The UK government creates an AI taskforce to look at foundation models, chaired by Matt Clifford
Michael A & Max Ra - Survey [results] on intermediate goals in AI governance
Haydn Belfield - There’s no libertarian approach to preventing the end of the world
CLTR - Response to the UK’s Future of Compute Review: A missed opportunity to lead in compute governance
Larks - A Windfall Clause for CEO could worsen AI race dynamics
Reflection Mechanisms as an Alignment Target - Attitudes on “near-term” AI
Leopold - Want to win the AGI race? Solve alignment
Paul Scharre - US and China can show world leadership by safeguarding military AI
bob - Legal Assistance for Victims of AI
Jordan Schneider on why the CCP stands in the way of China leading the world in AI
AI Communication
Ezra Klein on taking AI risk seriously
Erik Hoel - How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person
Ajeya Cotra and Kelsey Piper have launched a new blog about AI futurism and AI alignment called Planned Obsolescence
Announcing the European Network for AI Safety (ENAIS)
Otto - Paper Summary: The Effectiveness of AI Existential Risk Communication to the American and Dutch Public
Gideon Futerman - We are fighting a shared battle (a call for a different approach to AI Strategy)
Zvi Mowshowitz - Response to Tyler Cowen's Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history
Kelsey Piper interviewing Holden Karnofsky on the speed of AI
Akash - The Overton Window widens: Examples of AI risk in the media
Patrick L - Scoring forecasts from the 2016 “Expert Survey on Progress in AI”
Holden Karnofsky - Success without dignity: a nearcasting story of avoiding catastrophe by luck
Gary Marcus - AI risk ≠ AGI risk
Amber Dawn - Where I'm at with AI risk: convinced of danger but not (yet) of doom
Hear This Idea podcast with Chris Miller on the History of Semiconductors, TSMC, and the CHIPS Act
"Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization" Yudkowsky on Lex Fridman podcast
Michael Huang - Misalignment Museum opens in San Francisco
oxalis - Potential employees have a unique lever to influence the behaviors of AI labs
Other Causes
Send funds to survivors of the Turkey-Syria earthquake via GiveDirectly
Jakob P - Shallow Problem Review of Landmines and Unexploded Ordnance
Future of Life Institute Podcast with Tobias Baumann on artificial sentience and reducing the risk of astronomical suffering
Yuval Shapira - Cause Exploration: Support for Mental Health Carers
The Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio program is looking for projects to support with $50m in funding
80,000 Hours podcast with Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious
Forecasting
Nikos - Predictive Performance on Metaculus vs. Manifold Markets
Max Reddel - Model-Based Policy Analysis under Deep Uncertainty
Vasco Grilo - Exploring Metaculus’ community predictions
Hear This Idea podcast with Jaime Sevilla on trends in machine learning
Jan Klenha - Forecasting in the Czech public administration - preliminary findings
Stories
Rockwell - On the First Anniversary of my Best Friend’s Death
Dion - The Middle Way: Existing Between Two Worlds
Amber Dawn interviewing Tyler Johnston on helping farmed animals, consciousness, and being conventionally good
Video overview of EAGxLatAm highlights from Mexico
Other Links
From the Guardian - In a disaster, bad help can be worse than no help at all
B Garfinkel - Getting Better at Writing: Why and How
Toby Ord - Casting the Decisive Vote
The billionaires’ philanthropy index
Arden Koehler - Why you should think about virtues - even if you’re a consequentialist
Vox has a series called 'Against Doomerism'
Good News
California has banned the sale of all newly produced fur
India’s Covid vaccination drive saved over 3.4 million lives