2023 June EA Updates
Top Posts
Statement on AI Extinction - Signed by AGI Labs, Top Academics, and Many Other Notable Figures
Lewis Bollard - A Big Supreme Court Win for Farm Animals
Peter Singer - Announcing the Publication of Animal Liberation Now
Richard Y Chappell - Review of The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does
Open Philanthropy with an update on their progress in 2022 and plans for 2023
Joey - Tips for people considering starting new incubators
Probably Good launches improved website & 1-on-1 advising
Eric Neyman - How much do you believe your results?
Upcoming Events
Conferences
9th-11th June - EAGxWarsaw
18th-20th August - EAGxNYC
8th-10th September - EAGxBerlin
20th-22nd October - EAGxPhilippines
27th-29th October - EAG Boston
Virtual
2nd June - Can Large Language Models actually kill us? - Talk by Claire Boine from Successif
5th June - The Radical Flank Effect of Just Stop Oil - By Social Change Lab
11th June - Finance For Good: Session #1 Money Psychology For Do Gooders
2nd July - Giving What We Can Meetup
July - EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship Application - Apply by June 25th
July - August - Virtual Programs - Apply by June 18th
Intro
In Depth
Precipice
17-19th November - EAGxVirtual 2023
Meta
Benjamin Todd - Some thoughts on moderation in doing good
Kelsey Piper - Don’t let AI fears of the future overshadow present-day causes
David Moss & Willem Sleegers - EA Survey 2022: Demographics
Trammell - Ingroup Deference
Joris P & Naomi N - Overview: Reflection Projects on Community Reform
Habiba - If you’d like to do something about sexual misconduct and don’t know what to do
Edo Arad - Should the EA community be cause-first or member-first?
Chi - EAG talks are underrated
Effective Ventures - Apply or refer someone to be a trustee by 4th June
Ezra H - A Different Approach to Community Building: The Spiral Path to Impact
Richard Ngo - From fear to excitement (This is the first post in a twelve-part sequence called Replacing Fear)
Non-Trivial - 8 week fellowship for 14-20 year olds - Apply by June 11th
Vasco Grilo - Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?
Critiques
David Thorstad looking at misleading examples commonly used in EA
Nuno Sempere - A flaw in a simple version of worldview diversification
Hi-Phi Nation podcast - EA and its Critics (including Shakeel Hashim)
Freedom and Utility - Don't optimise for social status within the EA community
Michael Plant - What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?
Effective Giving
Sanjay - Coattailing and Funging to learn: strategies for non-expert donors
Dawn Drescher & Greg Colbourn - Play Regrantor: Move up to $250,000 to Your Top High-Impact Projects!
Adam SteinBerg - Che bello! Charity Elections continues to go global
Ana Diaz - Can we make effective giving a cultural norm?
Balaji donated $500k to GiveDirectly after losing a bet
Jessica McCurdy - Published: Who gives? Characteristics of those who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge
Australian MP Andrew Leigh - Our government has a goal of doubling philanthropy by 2030, and we want to see more effective altruism
Careers
Engineered for Impact is a new podcast from High Impact Engineers
Tereza Flidrova & Booritney - Announcing the EA Architects and Planners Group
Tips for building a network outside of the EA movement (in particular for EU policy)
Benjamin Hilton - Give feedback on the new 80,000 Hours career guide
EA Consulting Network spoke with Friederike Grosse-Holz about investing in the future
Future of Life Institute podcast with Maryanna Saenko on Venture Capital, Philanthropy and Ethical Technology
Organisation Updates
How 80,000 Hours has changed some of their advice after the collapse of FTX
CEA - Community Health & Special Projects: Updates and Contacting Us
Legal Priorities Project – Annual Report 2022
Sasha Berezhnoi & Vaidehi Agarwalla - EA Anywhere Slack: consolidating professional and affinity groups
Kaleem & Ahmed Ghoor - 2023 update on Muslims for Effective Altruism
Successif is the rebranded EA Pathfinders with an updated website
David Thorstad - Blog update: Reflective altruism
Updates from the Dutch EA community
Wytham Abbey have a new website
New Projects
Charity Entrepreneurship have a new Foundation Program - aiming to equip funders and philanthropic professionals with the tools and skills they need to become impactful grant makers
Luke Eure - Announcing the African EA Forum Competition - $4500 in prizes for excellent EA Forum Posts
Ula Zarosa - Presenting: 2023 Incubated Charities (Round 1) - Charity Entrepreneurship
Dr Dan Epstein & Sanjana Kashyap - Introducing The Long Game Project: Tabletop Exercises for a Resilient Tomorrow
Abi Olvera & Shannon - New Facebook Group: EAs from Immigrant Backgrounds
Announcing the Prague Fall Season 2023 and the Epistea Residency Program
Actually Relevant is an online newspaper attempting to only highlight the most relevant stories for humanity
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 28 grants recently, with a value of $20 million
$6.2m - EA Community Growth (Longtermism)
$3m - EA Funds - Long-Term Future and Infrastructure Fund Regranting
$1.8m - Effective Ventures Foundation
$400k - Successif - Career Advising
$5.2m - EA Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing)
$2.4m - Giving What We Can
$2.3m - Founders Pledge
$500k - Probably Good
$2.6m - Longtermism
$2.5m - Global Priorities Institute
$2.5m - South Asia Air Quality
$2m - IBRD — Air Quality in the Indo-Gangetic Plain
$1.8m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$1.25m - Alignment Research Center
$1m - Farm Animal Welfare
Y-RISE Awarded GiveWell Grant of $1.35M for Core Operations
Global Development
Gates Foundation commits $200M to develop affordable childhood vaccines
Ken Opalo - Is `Global Development' dead?
William Worley - Will Europe's climate scheme make Africa poorer?
E-MOTIVE - a new approach to treating postpartum bleeding which could reduce deaths by 20%
The Millennium Challenge Corporation is looking to expand to include 30+ upper-middle-income countries that could receive part of it’s annual $500m development budget
Our World in Data with an overview of influenza
Transform Health Fund Announced with $50m in commitments to finance enterprises that improve health system resilience and pandemic preparedness across Africa
Rachel DuRose - Half the world is at risk of dengue. Why is there no universal way to prevent it?
In 2022 the number of people experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity jumped up by 38%, the fourth consecutive year of increases
With polio eradication in sight, the World Health Assembly fears setbacks
Our World in Data with a collection of posts on Research and Development
EA & Global Development
Why GiveWell funded the rollout of the malaria vaccine
Probably Good with a survey to get a sense of the content and resources the global health and development community would find helpful
Fin Moorhouse - First clean water, now clean air
Supriya Bansal and Chetan Kharbanda have launched ansh, aiming to save newborn lives by implementing the evidence-based intervention of Kangaroo Care
Rethink Priorities - Better weather forecasting: Agricultural and non-agricultural benefits in LMICs
Jesper - On Child Wasting, Mega-Charities, and Measurability Bias (with response from GiveWell)
Nils - Introducing Healthy Futures Global: Join Us in Tackling Syphilis in Pregnancy and Creating Healthier Futures
Charity Entrepreneurship’s research into large-scale global health interventions
Rethink Priorities - An overview of the WHO Essential Medicines List: procedures, usage, and potential improvements
Animal Welfare
Impactful Animal Advocacy have a new website to support their Slack and newsletter
Richard Y Chappell - Review of Animal Liberation Now
Rainer Kravets & Mandy Carter - Introducing Animal Policy International
Brian Tomasik - How much funging is there with donations to different EA animal charities?
Animal Charity Evaluators - Charity Feedback from 2022 Charity Evaluations
Sofia Balderson with the May edition of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Newsletter
Alene - KFC Supplier Sued for Cruelty
Arvomm & Eleos Arete Citrini - Announcing the Animal Welfare Library
Spencer Ericson - A Brief & Recent History of Fish
Karthik Sekar - Getting Cats Vegan is Possible and Imperative
Edie Bowles on HILTL Shrimp podcast discussing utilising the law to support the protection of animals
Hank B - Maybe Family Planning Charities Are Better For Farmed Animals Than Animal Welfare Charities
HILTL Shrimp podcast with Emre Kaplan on starting the first farmed animal focussed organisation in Turkey
Omnizoid - Here's a comprehensive fact sheet of almost all the ways animals are mistreated in factory farms
Nina W - Equalia has opened applications for the Board of Directors
Asia Farm Animal Day - October 8-10, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Wild Animal Welfare
Julia Wise - Who is nature good for?
Meghan Barrett & Hannah McKay - Drawing attention to invasive Lymantria dispar dispar spongy moth outbreaks as an important, neglected issue in wild animal welfare
Clearer Thinking podcast - The capabilities approach to welfare - with Martha Nussbaum
Alternative Proteins
The US Department of Agriculture released their Science & Research Strategy - It focuses on ramping up agricultural research w/ an emphasis on new biotechnologies and protein sources like plant-based, cultivated & fermentation-enabled proteins
Food safety in cultivated meat: everything you need to know about the new FAO report
GFI Europe - Meet the researcher: leading the UKs new £12m cellular agriculture research hub with Prof Marianne Ellis
The Good Food Conference is in San Francisco in September
Introducing Stanford’s new Humane & Sustainable Food Lab
Hugh Irving - How Engineers can Contribute to Alternative Proteins
Biosecurity
Jaime M. Yassif, Shayna Korol and Angela Kane - Preventing State Biological Weapon Development and Use by Shaping Intentions
Erik English - An illustrated history of the world’s deadliest epidemics, from ancient Rome to Covid-19
Jassi Pannu and Jacob Swett writing in the NY Times - What if There Was Never a Pandemic Again?
Jessica Wen & Bryce - How Can Engineers Do Impactful Work in Biosecurity?
Clarissa Rios Rojas notes for a presentation on the risks associated with biotechnology & AI
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Building a Secure and Resilient World: Research and Coordination Hub - £5.5m grant from UKRI- Apply by 27th July
Kayla Lucero-Matteucci - Catastrophic risks are converging. It’s time for researchers to step out of their silos
Book - How Worlds Collapse - What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future
Ben Snodin - The Rethink Priorities Existential Security Team's Strategy for 2023
Jessica Wen & Sean Lawrence - How Engineers can Contribute to Civilisation Resilience
Lunar Society podcast with Richard Rhodes on the Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer & Abolishing Nukes
New CSER Director: Prof Matthew Connelly
The Foresight Institute Podcast with Career Advice from Jaan Tallinn
Environment
Charles Kenney - The International Finance Corporation and it’s inability to scale solar
Jackva, Megan Phelan, Luisa S & Violet - How to evaluate relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts? An update on research methodology & grantmaking of FP Climate
Hannah Ritchie - Electric car sales are rising more quickly than industry analysts expected
Work on Climate have an updated website and an impact report for 2022
Jessica Wen - How Engineers can Effectively Contribute to Tackling Climate Change
Hannah Ritchie - The world is not going to pass its 1.5°C warming target in the next few years, but it's a signal of what's to come
Longtermism
Peter Wygnański - Why secular hope struggles to promote taking responsibility for the long-term future, and how Christian faith can help
The power of long-minded art
AI Safety
Google DeepMind - An early warning system for novel AI risks
Open AI - Language models can explain neurons in language models
Richard Ngo - AGI safety career advice
80,000 Hours podcast with Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us
Yoshua Bengio
AI Scientists: Safe and Useful AI?
How Rogue AIs may Arise
Katja Grace - Will AI end everything? A guide to guessing from EAG Bay Area 23
80,000 Hours podcast with Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world
Future of Life Institute podcast with Roman Yampolskiy on Objections to AI Safety
Marius Hobbhahn - Announcing Apollo Research (interpretability and behavioural evaluation)
titotal - The bullseye framework: My case against AI doom
Froolow - “The Race to the End of Humanity” – Structural Uncertainty Analysis in AI Risk Models
AI Governance
OpenAI - Governance of superintelligence
Holden Karnofsky - Seeking (Paid) Case Studies on Standards
Jamie Bernardi - Implications of the Whitehouse meeting with AI CEOs for AI superintelligence risk - a first-step towards evals?
OpenAI, Inc. is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow
Miles B - Scoring Humanity’s Progress on AI Governance
Daniel Eth - Some quotes from Tuesday's Senate hearing on AI
Zach Stein-Perlman - GovAI: Towards best practices in AGI safety and governance: A survey of expert opinion
Hear This Idea podcast with Ben Garfinkel on AI Governance
U.S. Senator Warner Calls on AI Companies to Prioritise Security and Prevent Malicious Misuse
AI Village at DEF CON announces largest-ever public Generative AI Red Team
White House Fact Sheet - Biden-Harris Administration Announces New Actions to Promote Responsible AI Innovation that Protects Americans’ Rights and Safety
AI Communication
Kelsey Piper - The costs of caution
Joe Carlsmith - Predictable updating about AI risk
Jamie Elsey & David Moss - US public opinion of AI policy and risk
Lizka - List of AI safety newsletters and other resources
Geoffrey Hinton Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead
Melanie Mitchell - Do half of AI researchers believe that there's a 10% chance AI will kill us all?
Chris Scammell & Katrina Joslin - Japan AI Alignment Conference Postmortem
80,000 Hours - The public is more concerned about AI causing extinction than we thought
David Kreuger with takeaways from talking to researchers about AI x-safety at ICLR
Kelsey Piper - Can you safely build something that may kill you?
Tom Davidson - Continuous doesn’t mean slow
Andrew Critch - My May 2023 priorities for AI x-safety: more empathy, more unification of concerns, and less vilification of OpenAI
Center for AI Safety Newsletter #7 - Disinformation, Governance Recommendations for AI labs and Senate Hearings on AI
AI in the Media
The Elders urge global co-operation to manage risks and share benefits of AI, including Ban Ki-moon and Mary Robinson
EconTalk podcast with Tyler Cowen on the Risks and Impact of AI
José Hernández-Orallo in El Pais - We can’t use human measures to evaluate artificial intelligence
Samuel Hammon in Politico - We Need a Manhattan Project for AI Safety
British Medical Journal - Threats by AI to human health and human existence
The New Yorker - Can We Stop Runaway AI?
Katja Grace in Time - AI Is Not an Arms Race
Labour MP Darren Jones - UK needs summit to prevent 'disastrous' artificial intelligence, MPs say
Rishi Sunak on the AI Extinction Statement
Progress, Metascience and Institutional Decision Making
Heidi Williams - Building a better U.S. National Institutes of Health
Clearer Thinking podcast with with Adam Marblestone discussing focused research organisations
Merchants and Mechanics, a blog exploring the history of economic growth
Michael Shermer - Is moral progress a myth?
Jeffrey Mason - Why Developing Country Growth Matters for Progress
Stian Westlake - should governments run more experiments?
Other Causes
Grace Brown - Why Suicide Rates Are Dropping Around the World
Amber Dawn - Why doesn't EA focus on equity, human rights, and opposing discrimination (as cause areas)?
Hannah Ritchie - The end of acid rain
Caleb P - Quick thoughts on AI consciousness work
Jesse Smith - Obstacles to the Implementation of Indoor Air Quality Improvements
Joel Tan - CEARCH Moral Weights Survey: Sodium & Soda Tax
Are We Running Out of Exhaustible Resources? (Probably not)
New open letter on AI - ‘Include Consciousness Research’
Michael Nielsen - How is AI impacting science?
William Spaul - The Effectiveness of Volunteering for Crisis Support Hotlines
Jim Buhler - The Grabby Values Selection Thesis: What values do space-faring civilizations plausibly have?
Regulations reducing lead and copper contamination in drinking water generate $9 billion of health benefits per year, according to new analysis
Forecasting
The Base Rate Times - A new online magazine showing how the front pages would look if people only cared about predictions
Blanka - Announcing the Confido app: bringing forecasting to everyone
The Charity Entrepreneurship top ideas new charity prediction market
Stories
Jai - The Legend of Dr. Oguntola Sapara (about the eradication of Smallpox)
Habiba - ‘I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!’
Rutger Bregman describing his visit to Charity Entrepreneurship and their founding story
Meet the Olympians bringing effective altruism to athlete climate investing
Imma - Frugality did not reduce my productivity but made my social life harder
Amber Dawn - If you find EA conferences emotionally difficult, you're not alone
EA Lifestyles with a collection of EA origin stories
Jonny Spicer - Reflections following EAG London: conference strategy and in/outgroup dynamics
Productivity and Self Help
Cristina Schmidt Ibáñez - Lessons on project management from “How Big Things Get Done”
Luise - How I solved my problems with low energy (or: burnout)
Raphaël Pesah - Effective Self-Help - A guide to improving your subjective wellbeing
Other Links
80,000 Hours podcast with Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
Dylan Matthews interviewing Peter Singer on animal welfare and the ethics of euthanasia
Danny Bressler - U.S. Regulatory Updates to Benefit-Cost Analysis: Highlights and Encouragement to Submit Public Comments
Andy Masley - An EA guide to Washington DC
Rhodri Davies podcast with Ewan Kirk on why it’s important to let charities fail
Maxwell Tabarrok - An Archaeological Dig Through The Extropian Archives
Dean Guzman Wyrzykowski - Philosophy Can Change the World. Peter Singer Proved It. Three Times
Kirsten - I don't want to talk about AI
JWS - Personal reflections on EAG London
Chana Messinger - But "everyone knows"!
Chelmsford runner breaks Guinness World Record for fastest marathon dressed as an insect - (Fundraising for AMF, the insect was a mosquito)
Urszula Zarosa with photos from the Charity Entrepreneurship unconference
Good News
Indonesia has almost completely eradicated absolute poverty
Bangladesh eliminates lymphatic filariasis
New Zealand’s ban on live animal export went into effect on April 30th
Air pollution (PM2.5 levels) in China has fallen below 35 micrograms per cubic metre (from a peak of 60)
Benin and Mali have eliminated trachoma as a public health problem
In 2023, three out of four countries are estimated to see poverty rates decline
India witnessed an 85% decline in malaria cases between 2015 and 2022