2023 July EA Updates
Top Posts
UK to host first global summit on AI safety
Claire Zabel - EA and Longtermism: not a crux for saving the world
Sean - A note of caution about recent AI risk coverage
Lab-grown meat is cleared for sale in the United States
Jakub Stencel - EA’s success no one cares about (in animal advocacy)
Akhil - Cause area report: Antimicrobial Resistance
Justin Sandefur - How economists got Africa’s AIDS epidemic wrong
Jenn - Things I Learned by Spending Five Thousand Hours In Non-EA Charities
Luke Freeman - We can all help solve funding constraints. What stops us?
Vandemonian - I made a news site based on prediction markets
Upcoming Events
Global
18th-20th August - EAGxNYC
8th-10th September - EAGxBerlin
22nd-24th September - EAGxAustralia
20th-22nd October - EAGxPhilippines
27th-29th October - EAG Boston
Virtual
July - September - Virtual Programs - Apply by July 16th
Intro
In Depth
Precipice
17-19th November - EAGxVirtual 2023
Fellowships & Programs
Legal Priorities Project Summer Research Fellowship in Law & AI 2023 - 6th July - For graduate law students, PhD candidates, and postdocs working in law
GovAI Winter Fellowship - 23rd July
Charity Entrepreneurship Research Training Program - 27th July
GovAI Blog Editing - Expression of Interest
Meta
Lincoln Quirk - Why Altruists Can't Have Nice Things
Peter Wildeford & Marcus A Davis - Five Years of Rethink Priorities: What We've Learned
William MacAskill - Decision-making and decentralisation in EA
Ozzie Gooen - Downsides of Small Organisations in EA
Shakeel Hashim - How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment
Luise - Large epistemological concerns I should maybe have about EA a priori
Joey - EA organisations should avoid using “polarizing techniques”
Luis Mota Freitas - How does AI progress affect other EA cause areas?
Michael Plant - Strawmen, steelmen, and mithrilmen: getting the principle of charity right
Arden - On focusing resources more on particular fields vs. EA per se - considerations and takes
MHR - Improving EA Communication Surrounding Disability
Joey - EA organisations should have a transparent scope
Ben West & Emma Richter - How has FTX's collapse affected public perception of EA?
Chana Messinger - Correctly Calibrated Trust
Rockwell - What would it look like for AIS to no longer be neglected?
Ben West - Third Wave effective altruism
Advice for Undergraduates Interested in US Policy
William MacAskill with some thoughts on FTX
Jack Lewars - Open Board recruitment should be a norm
Habryka - My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
Jessica Wen - STEM in EA: Online Panel Recording
David Friva - Presentación Introductoria al Altruismo Eficaz
Arden - FAQ on the relationship between 80,000 Hours and the EA community
Community Building
Vaidehi Agarwalla - The flow of funding in EA movement building
Brian Tan - Growth and engagement in EA groups: 2022 Groups Census results
National EA groups shouldn’t focus on city groups
Joey - Question and Answer-based EA Communities
James Herbert - What we talk about when we talk about community building
Rob Gledhill - Why EA Community building
Kuhan J - AI Safety Field Building vs. EA Community Building
Jaime Sevilla - An update on the Spanish-speaking EA community
Effective Giving
Ask Me Anything with Luke Freeman, ED of Giving What We Can
Sjir Hoeijmakers - Four claims about the role of effective giving in the EA community
Organisation Updates
Lincoln Quirk has joined the EV UK board
Claire B - Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers
Bob Fischer - Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigation Team: Introductions and Next Steps
EA Organisation Updates: June 2023
Julia Wise, Sam Donald & Ozzie Gooen - Update on project on reforms at EA organisations
New Projects
Marieke dev - Mindmap with overview of EA organisations
Demystify is a new group focused on mental wellbeing & empowerment for women in EA
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 50 grants recently, with a value of $55 million
$14.1m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$6.9m - Epoch
$5m - National Science Foundation - Safe Learning-Enabled Systems
$12.2m - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
$10m - Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
$1.7m - Evotec - Henipavirus Antivirals
$9.5m - Innovation Policy
$9m - Institute for Progress
$7.3m - Farm Animal Welfare
$2.9m - L214 - Corporate Campaigns in France
$1.25m - Welfare Footprint Project
$4.7m - EA Community Growth (Longtermism)
$2.8m - Effective Ventures Foundation USA
$1m - Rational Animations - Video Production
$3.6m - Global Health and Wellbeing
$1.5m - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center - Long COVID Therapy Trial
$924k - Khon Kaen University - Tuberculosis Diagnostic via Raman Spectroscopy
$3.6m - Longtermism
$3 - Metaculus
Global Development
Jonathan Harris - Global Innovation Fund projects its impact to be 3x GiveWell Top Charities
Large Study Examining the Effects of Cash Transfer Programs on Population-Level Mortality Rates
Kelsey Piper - How $900,000 in direct cash giving was stolen from the poorest of the poor
CATO Institute - Global Inequality in Well‐Being Has Decreased across Many Dimensions
Berk Özler - Is it time for development economists to start considering the welfare of non-human animals?
The Economist - The choice between a poorer today and a hotter tomorrow
In Nepal, 40% of the decline in poverty between 2001 & 2011 was attributed to increases in migration to the Persian Gulf & Malaysia
China scaling back development spending in Southeast Asia, falling from $7.6bn in 2015 to $3.9bn in 2021
The world's most neglected displacement crises in 2022
Rachel DuRose - We finally have malaria vaccines. The next hurdle: Distributing them
Gates Foundation and Wellcome fund $550m trial of first new TB vaccine for 100 years
There are now 110 million people forcibly displaced, with one third in other countries
World is short of progress needed to meet UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals
G-20 report says multilateral development banks are holding back hundreds of billions in new lending
Anti-Corruption Evidence - Using a ‘Power Capabilities and Interest Approach’ to stop wasting money and start making progress
£50,000 for bold/novel/weird ideas to accelerate mental health research
Our World in Data released updated reports on
EA & Global Development
I’ve started a newsletter just focusing on the intersection of EA & Global Development
80,000 Hours podcast - Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of Give Well’s approach, and six lessons from their recent work
Tom Drake - Beyond Cost-Effectiveness: Insights for EA from Health Economics
Yelnats T.J. - Taxing Tobacco: the intervention that got away
Tom Davidson - Could AI accelerate economic growth?
Greer Gosnell & Melanie Basnak - Family Empowerment Media: track record, cost-effectiveness, and main uncertainties
Ryan C Briggs - Seeking important GH or IDEV working papers to evaluate
Erin Braid, Melanie Basnak & Bruce - Historical Global Health R&D “hits”: Development, main sources of funding, and impact
The impact of mobile phones & mobile money for people in poverty
Taking happiness seriously: Can we? Should we? Would it matter if we did? A debate between Michael Plant and Mark Fabian
The Mental Health Funding Circle recently completed their second round of funding, disbursing $790k
Animal Welfare
Laura Duffy - A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Historical Farmed Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives
Peter Singer with a new Ted Talk - A modern argument for the rights of animals
Sagar K Shah - Survey evidence on the number of vegans in the UK
Animal Charity Evaluators with an update to their strategy
utilistrutil - Wild Animal Welfare Scenarios for AI Doom
Naoki & Philipp Ryf - Abolishing factory farming in Switzerland: Postmortem
The Danish government has agreed to phase-out fast-growth chickens
Alternative Proteins
UK based Uncommon (previously Higher Stakes) has raised $30m for cultivated meat products
JBS says they will build the world’s largest cultivated meat plant in Spain
Biosecurity
Open Philanthropy has a Request for Information - Evaluation of Germicidal Far-UVC: Safety, Efficacy, Technology, and Adoption - Respond by July 24th
Call for papers: Biosafety and Biosecurity for Synthetic Genomics
Kelsey Piper - How AI could spark the next pandemic
Sophie Rose - Response to the UK Government’s refreshed Biological Security Strategy
Vitalik Buterin and Sandeep Nailwal are allocating $100m to pandemic prevention projects
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Nick Anyos - Podcast Interview with David Thorstad on Existential Risk, The Time of Perils, and Billionaire Philanthropy
schethik - Announcing the University of Chicago’s $2m Market Shaping Accelerator’s Innovation Challenge: Biosecurity, Pandemic Preparedness, and Climate Change - Apply by July 21st
David Manheim - ALTER Israel - 2023 Mid-Year Update
Carl Robichaud - The Puzzle of Non-Proliferation
There has been an increase of 86 usable nuclear warheads in military stockpiles globally since January 2022
Richard Y Chappell - X-risk Agnosticism
Kuhan - Upcoming speaker series on emerging tech, national security & US policy careers
Florian U Jehn - Introducing a living literature review on societal collapse
SoGive rates Open-Phil-funded charity NTI “too rich”
Carl Robichaud speaking about nuclear weapons issues on Liv Boeree's new podcast Win-Win
Buhl & Jam Kraprayoon - 20 concrete projects for reducing existential risk
Environment
Turkmenistan moves towards reducing methane leaks, it was the country with highest number of methane “super-emitter” events in the world in 2022
Global additions of renewable power capacity are expected to jump by a third this year
A World Bank report on Repurposing Environmentally Harmful Subsidies
Longtermism
Joshua Blake - My doubts about longtermism
Bruce F - Longtermism and alternative proteins
Ollie Base - Longtermists are perceived as power-seeking
The Future Generations Commissioner for Wales has created the Future Generations Policy Leader Toolkit
Habryka - Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th)
AI Safety
Holden Karnofsky - A Playbook for AI Risk Reduction (focused on misaligned AI)
Ted Sanders - Transformative AGI by 2043 is <1% likely
Anthropic - Charting a Path to AI Accountability
UK Foundation Model Task Force - Expression of Interest (With £100m in funding, they aim to unite industry, academia & gov to pioneer the safe development of AI in the UK)
Matthew Barnett - A compute-based framework for thinking about the future of AI
Eric Martínez - Re-Evaluating GPT-4's Bar Exam Performance
You can now listen to the “AI Safety Fundamentals” courses
80,000 Hours career profile on AI safety technical research careers
Ted Sanders - What can superintelligent ANI tell us about superintelligent AGI?
Omega - Critiques of prominent AI safety labs: Conjecture
Habryka - Lightcone Infrastructure/LessWrong is looking for funding
Beth Barnes - Safety evaluations and standards for AI - Talk from EAG Bay Area
Anneal - Critiques of non-existent AI safety labs: Yours
80,000 Hours career profile on working at leading AI labs
Benjamin Hilton - Practical steps to take now that AI risk is mainstream
AIS Governance
Ian Hogarth has been appointed as the Chair of the UK's AI Foundation Model Taskforce
Cory Fenwick with an 80,0000 Hours career profile on AI governance and coordination
Kevin Zu looking at the Beijing Academy of AI Conference, with speakers including Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell
A summary of current work in AI governance
GovAI - New Survey: Broad Expert Consensus for Many AGI Safety and Governance Practices
Helen Toner, Jenny Xiao & Jeffrey Ding - The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess
The AI Policy and Governance and Working Group has been set up to address multiple concerns about AI, including present day harms and future hazards
Riesgos Catastróficos Globales - a literature review and an expert elicitation exercise to categorise concrete risks associated with AI
80,000 Hours podcast with Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
Sam Clarke - Some talent needs in AI governance
Emilia Javorsky - Treat AI Like a Biological Weapon, Not a Nuclear One
Abi Olvera - Announcing the AIPolicyIdeas.com Database
Michael Aird - RP’s AI Governance & Strategy team - June 2023 interim overview
AIS Communication
Jamie Elsey & David Moss - US public perception of CAIS statement and the risk of extinction
Hear This Idea with Katja Grace on Slowing Down AI and Whether the X-Risk Case Holds Up
Yoshua Bengio - FAQ on Catastrophic AI Risks
Center for AI Safety - Policy Proposals from NTIA’s Request for Comment
Daniel Eth - Given Extinction Worries, Why Don’t AI Researchers Quit? Well, Several Reasons
Geoffrey Miller - A moral backlash against AI will probably slow down AGI development
80,000 Hours podcast with Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
Michael Aird on Hear This Idea discussing Strategies for Reducing AI Existential Risk
Kelsey Piper - Four different ways of understanding AI - and its risks
Renan Araujo - Thoughts about AI safety field-building in LMIC
Dan Hendrycks - Catastrophic Risks from AI #1: Summary
Lucretia - Why I Spoke to TIME Magazine, and My Experience as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley
Karl von Wendt - A Friendly Face (Another Failure Story)
Giving What We Can - Rapid progress in AI: A call to action and what you can do
Andrew Ng in conversation with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio on AI x-risks
Asterisk with an issue on AI
Sarah Constantin - Moore’s law may be coming to an end. What happens to AI progress if it does?
Avital Balwit - How We Can Regulate AI
Robert Long - Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart AIs Are?
Scott Alexander - Through a Glass Darkly (AI Forecasts)
Jeffrey Ding - What We Get Wrong About AI & China
Beth Barnes - Crash Testing GPT-4
AIS in the Media
Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Carl Shulman
Tyler Cowen - Where the AI extinction warning goes wrong
Steven Byrnes - Munk AI debate: confusions and possible cruxes
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, mentioning AI x-risks at a press briefing
Progress, Metascience and Institutional Decision Making
The Great Stagnation Summit is happening in Oxford in July with speakers including Tyler Cowen and Matt Clifford
Matt Clancy & Tamay Besiroglu - The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth
Other Causes
Luke Ding - Moral Injury
Stephen Clare problem profile on great power conflict
Global inequality at lowest level in nearly 150 years
Jeff Sebo - Principles for AI Welfare Research
Adam M. Mastroianni & Daniel T. Gilbert - The illusion of moral decline
Vitalik Buterin interview on longevity and AI
Helene K - Everything I didn't know about fertilizers
Stories
Kirsten - EA Origin Story Round-Up
Luisa Rodriguez - Rejection thread: stories and tips
Deena Englander - A Belated Post-Mortem of My Entrepreneurial Journey
EA for Christians interview with Wanjiru
Productivity and Self Help
Chi - Probably tell your friends when they make big mistakes
Nicole Ross - Crisis Boot Camp: lessons learned and implications for EA
Other Links
Ask Me Anything with Ed Mathieu, Head of Data & Research at Our World in Data
Clearer Thinking podcast with Peter Singer
Max Görlitz - Map of maps of interesting fields
Tyler Cowen interviewing Peter Singer
Christians for Impact with a new podcast having conversations on impactful careers
Michael Lewis podcast - Effective Altruism Still Has Friends
Maxwell Tabarrok - A Double Feature on The Extropians
The talks from EA Global London 2023 are now online
Good News
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have reached hepatitis B control targets, bringing the WHO European Region closer to eliminating it as a public health threat
Canada Passes Measures To Phase Out The Use Of Animals In Chemical Toxicity Testing
The rate of new HIV infections in South Africa has fallen to one third of the rate in 1999