2023 December EA Updates
Top Posts
GWWC's evaluations of evaluators
AGB - 10 years of Earning to Give
Now the 6th most upvoted EA forum post of all time
ZD Groff - How Long Do Policy Changes Matter?
Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
The Navigation Fund launched, with plans to grant ~$100m a year
Includes programs on safe AI, open science, criminal justice reform, climate and farm animal welfare
Abraham Rowe - A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for EA
Ariel Simnegar - Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare
Effective Giving
This time of the year is when people often start thinking more deeply about where they will donate. On the EA Forum there is the Effective Giving tag for conversations about this.
Below there are a variety of charity evaluators and funds with resources to help you decide.
Global Development
Happier Lives Institute’s Giving Season 2023 Research Overview
Animal Welfare
Animal Charity Evaluators - Our 2023 Charity Recommendations
The EA Animal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Significant Room For More Funding
Climate Change
Giving Green’s 2023 Top Climate Nonprofit Recommendations
Global Catastrophic Risks
Giving What We Can - Risks and Resilience Fund
Longview Philanthropy - Emerging Challenges Fund
EA Funds - Long-Term Future
Other
The Giving What We Can Donor Lottery is now open with a block size of $100,000
And more general posts related to effective giving
There are quite a few fundraising posts
Where CEA staff are donating in 2023
Giving What We Can has a new pledge option that focuses on wealth rather than income
JP Addison and Eric Neyman with a dialogue on donation splitting
Kyle J. Lucchese - #GivingTuesday: My Giving Story and Some of My Favorite Charities
Michael Townsend - How I feel about my GWWC Pledge
Jeff Kaufman - AMA: Earning to Give
Vox - Want to donate to charity? Here are 10 guidelines for giving effectively
GWWC's new recommendations and cause area funds
Kelsey Piper - Don’t wait: The case for giving sooner rather than later
Lizka - Notes on not taking the GWWC pledge (yet)
Virtual Events
8th December - Lightning talks: Al in Charity and Health Care - Organised by EA for Christians
12th December - Ask GFI: Alt Protein Careers
13th December - Welfare Footprint Workshop - Organised by Impactful Animal Advocacy
Conferences
2nd-4th February - EAG: Bay Area (Global Catastrophic Risks)
16-18th February - EAGx LATAM 2024 - Mexico City
31st May - 2nd June - EAG: London 2024
Fellowships & Programs
The Center on Long-Term Risk - Intro fellowship on risks of astronomical suffering - Jan to Feb 2024, apply by December 7th
Gov AI - Summer Fellowship 2024 - December 17th
AI Safety Fundamentals: Alignment (Early 2024) - Apply by January 10th
Meta
David Moss - Are 1-in-5 Americans familiar with EA?
Rethink Priorities’ Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model: Introduction and Overview
Julia Wise - Takes from staff at orgs with leadership that went off the rails
Project on organisational reforms in EA: summary
Elizabeth - EA orgs' legal structure inhibits risk taking and information sharing on the margin
Astral Codex Ten - In Continued Defense Of EA
Zakariyau Yusuf - Reflections on Bottlenecks Facing Potential African EAs
State of the East and Southeast Asian EA ecosystem
SoGive launches expanded advising and custom research service: Feel more confident in your giving, across cause areas
AMA: GWWC research team
Amy Labenz - EA is good, actually
Marcus A Davis & Peter Wildeford - How Rethink Priorities is Addressing Risk and Uncertainty
Talks from EAG Boston have been released
Jack Malde - Rethink's CURVE Sequence - The Good and the Gaps
Richard Y. Chappell - ‘Why not effective altruism?’
Careers
Emily Grundy - I went on a (very) long walk, and it was a great career decision
Yonatan Cale - I quit trying to have direct impact and took a zero-impact tech job instead
Organisation Updates
EV US has made a court motion to settle with the FTX estate for 100% of the funds received in 2022 for a total of $22.5M
Rethink Priorities’ 2023 Summary, 2024 Strategy, and Funding Gaps
EA Poland has funding gaps
Atlas Fellowship are shutting down their program
Giving What We Can - How we approach charity staff pay and benefits
High Impact Medicine - Impact Survey Results and Marginal Funding
The Effective Ventures Foundation UK’s Full Accounts for Fiscal Year 2022 has been released via the UK companies house filings
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 10 grants recently for $5.6m
$4.6m - Global Health & Wellbeing
$3.5m - University of Amsterdam — HCV Vaccine Research
$560k - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$400k - Farm Animal Welfare
The EA Funds made 35 grants recently for $970k
Includes grants to Equalia, EA Australia, EA Italy, EA Czechia and individuals
Global Development
For more in depth updates I also write the Global Development & EA newsletter.
Nick Laing - Clean Water - the incredible 30% mortality reducer we can’t explain
Dengue rates drop 77-95% after release of bacteria-infected mosquitoes in Colombia
Deaths from particulate pollution have dropped 16% since 2005
Our World in Data - The Human Development Index and related indices: what they are and what we can learn from them
UK unveils white paper to set approach to global development
endTB trial found new drug regimens that can deliver similar efficacy while reducing treatment time by up to two-thirds
CGD - The Future of Official Aid Flows
Somalia has joined the East African Community (the regional trading bloc)
The Infectious Disease R&D pipeline tracker contains a comprehensive list of approved health products and technologies as well as candidates
Our World in Data with an update to their Child and Infant Mortality page
Charles Kenny - The Future of Global Development and Implications for Aid
Google DeepMind introduced GraphCast, an AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting, potentially helping billions of people
Hear This Idea podcast - Richard Bruns on Indoor Air Quality
Bezos family gives $137 million to Edesia Nutrition
EA & Global Development
Jamie Elsey & David Moss - Incorporating and visualising uncertainty in cost effectiveness analyses: A walkthrough using GiveWell’s estimates for StrongMinds
Spiro - New TB charity raising seed funds
GiveWell - How we work: We look at specific opportunities, not just general interventions
80,000 Hours podcast - Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths - and how to get that number down
A review of GiveWell’s discount rate
Habiba Banu and Roxanne Heston has launched a new charity - Spiro - focused on TB screening and prevention in children
Against Malaria Foundation – Reflecting on 2023 and looking ahead to 2024
Maternal Health Initiative with updates on their mini pilot, upcoming plans and fundraising
Akhil - A new fund to help prevent violence against women and girls
Animal Welfare
For a more regular and comprehensive updates of animal news I recommend the Impactful Animal Advocacy newsletter and slack space.
Lewis Bollard - What could AI mean for animals?
Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum 2023 Summary
Atlantic bluefin tuna are being domesticated: what are the welfare implications?
Can a social media “pigfluencer” turn people off bacon?
Ben Stevenson with a review of recent animal welfare related UK politics
How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast with Monica Chen, Executive Director of New Roots Institute
Hear This Idea podcast - Michelle Lavery on the Science of Animal Welfare
Researchers are attempting to develop an AI model for testing novel drugs rather than use animals
Only 20% of Germans eat meat every day. That's down from 34% eight years ago
Alternative Proteins
Denmark Introduces World’s First National Action Plan to Promote Plant-Based Foods
Germany invests €38 million in the protein transition
GFI Europe - Over 50% of Europeans are eating less meat, but taste and price remain biggest barriers to plant-based uptake
Eden Stiffman with a brief overview and history of the Good Food Institute and alternative meats
Biosecurity
Alvea Wind Down Announcement
Kyle Fish - Alvea’s Story, Wins, and Challenges
Complementary notes on Alvea
80,000 Hours podcast - Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
Propaganda or Science: A Look at Open Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk
Global Catastrophic Risks
Institute for Technology and Humanity launches in Cambridge
Lara Mani, Mike Cassidy & Anders Sandberg - The Ethics of Volcano Geoengineering
Chatham House - China–US talks offer optimism at bleak time for nuclear arms control
Simon Institute - Hazards with escalation potential - governing the drivers of global and existential catastrophes
Environment
China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy
Hannah Ritchie - Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay’s numbers
Probably Good have a new section on climate change
The Rockefeller Foundation announces $11 million towards climate solutions as part of it’s $1 billion climate strategy
Last year, philanthropic funding to climate change mitigation experienced a slowdown in growth
Tom Ough - The earth’s core is hot. So hot, that if we drilled deep enough, we could power the world millions of times over with cheap, clean energy. But getting there is tough
Longtermism
Hypothetical grants that the Long-Term Future Fund narrowly rejected
Fin Moorhouse - Where do people come from?
Beatrice Erkers reads six Existential Hope Scenarios
Richard Fisher - The seven dangers of long-term thinking
Tom Barnes - Mildly against the Longtermism to Global Catastrophic Risk shift
AI Safety
For more regular updates I recommend the AI Safety Newsletter from the Center for AI Safety.
Gavin - Shallow review of live agendas in alignment & safety
Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity researchers have released a resource to help identify and mitigate the risks and potentially harmful impacts of AI
Matthew Barnett - My thoughts on the social response to AI risk
Darren McKee - New Beginner-friendly Book on AI Safety and Risk
Open Philanthropy - Two new requests for proposals: Understanding the real-world capabilities and impacts of large language models
AI Safety Research Organisation Incubation Program - Expression of Interest
Claire Short - Announcing Athena - Women in AI Alignment Research
AI Governance
The Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety
The UK, US, and Singapore have announced national AI safety institutions
The U.K. government will invest £225 million into an AI supercomputer
The Centre for Long Term Resilience with reflections on the AI summit
Barack Obama on the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on AI
Matt Clifford with a thread on some reactions to the AI safety summit
Open AI
Zvi - OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend
Rhodri Davies - OpenAI and the challenges of combining profit with purpose
Sigal Samuel - OpenAI’s board may have been right to fire Sam Altman - and to rehire him, too
Progress, Metascience and Institutional Decision Making
The UK government is launching a metascience unit, a £10 million commitment delivering a grants programme and generating evidence to support policymaking and R&D funding
The Effective Institutions Project with a horizon scanning newsletter - The Observatory
Vitalik Buterin - My techno-optimism
Jason Crawford - Neither EA nor e/acc is what we need to build the future
Statecraft - How to Predict the Future - an interview with Jason Matheny
Stuart Ritchie with a roundup of bad science
The Royal Society intends to deliver a new mid-career Fellowship, funded by a £250 million endowment from Government. The funding will support researchers and scientists for up to ten years to pursue ground-breaking discovery-led research in STEM subjects
Ulkar Aghayeva - What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?
Other Causes
80,000 Hours podcast - Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleep walking into a major moral catastrophe
Wellcome Leap has a new $50 million program focused on addiction, they are looking for abstracts and proposals
Road safety: Landscape of the problem and routes to effective policy advocacy
The world’s largest child displacement crisis is in Sudan
Vox - Psychedelics can have enormous benefits, but the risks shouldn’t be ignored
Amber Dawn - Careers advocating for open borders (or helping more people migrate)?
Sentience Institute 2023 End of Year Summary
Mano Majumdar on the history of asbestos
Foresight Institute Podcast - David Dalrymple - Rethinking Uploading Given 10-Year AI Timelines
Bio(un)ethical podcast with Jeff Sebo about what it would mean to take seriously the possibility that non-human animals (including insects) and future AI systems might matter morally
Questions for Reflection on Gaza
Fabienne - Paper out now on creatine and cognitive performance
Stories & EA Around the World
Joy Bittner - A Thanksgiving gratitude post to EA
Dylan Matthews - I give 10 percent of my income to charity. You should, too
Jordan Stone - Embracing Our Cosmic Responsibility: A Journey Towards EA
Jonny Spicer on why he has taken the GWWC pledge
Michelle Hutchinson - A note of appreciation for your efforts to help others
Samie Dorgham - Reflections On Giving 10% Of My Income To Effective Charities
Diego Troya on how he discovered effective giving and GiveWell
José Oliveira on ten years of the GWWC pledge
The Life You Can Save had their inaugural in person event in Sydney, raising over $100k
Barbara Kayondo leading an introductory EA course in Uganda
Highlights from EAGx Phillipines
Other Links
The State of Global Giving by U.S. Foundations: 2022 Edition
U.S. foundations awarded globally focused grants totaling $8 billion in 2019
The Gates Foundation accounted for 44% of global giving by U.S. foundations
Liv Boeree - TED talk on the multipolar trap and AI
80,000 Hours podcast - Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Good News
Bangladesh achieves historic milestone by eliminating kala-azar as a public health problem
Rwanda On Track to Achieve Zero Malaria in 2030
Maldives is the first country to verify an interruption of the transmission of leprosy
Malaysia - the proportion of households in extreme poverty has decreased from 1% in 2020 to 0.2% currently
Liberia President George Weah concedes election defeat to Joseph Boakai, Liberia's second democratic transfer of power
The global HPV vaccination coverage of girls has increased to 21% in 2022 – exceeding the pre-pandemic levels for the first time. If this rate of progress is maintained the world would be on track to meet the 2030 target to make HPV vaccines available to all girls everywhere
The Democratic Republic of Korea has eliminated endemic rubella virus