2023 March Updates
Top Posts
Holden Karnofsky - Taking a leave of absence from Open Philanthropy to work on AI safety
Julian Hazell - No injuries were reported
Charity Entrepreneurship - Announcing our 2023 Charity Ideas
Saulius - Why I No Longer Prioritise Wild Animal Welfare
Evan Hubinger - Bing Chat is blatantly, aggressively misaligned
Jessica Rumbelow & Matthew Watkins - SolidGoldMagikarp - An investigation into strange behaviours elicited from AI tools using prompt generation
Lars Doucet - No Silver Bullet Solutions for the Werewolf Crisis
Looking at how "Sometimes you need to stop overthinking everything and just try an idea and see if it works"
Events
Conferences
17th-19th March - EAGx Cambridge - Applications close 3rd March
14th-17th April - EA for Christians 2023 Annual Conference (London) - with key note speaker Rory Stewart
21st-23rd April - EAGxNordics
19th-21st May - EAG London
9th-11th June - EAGxWarsaw
Virtual
2nd March - The Alternative Protein Industry - Jobs, Careers & Opportunities - Organised by Tälist
5th March - Giving What We Can Meetup
March to April - EA Virtual Programs - Sign up by February 26th
Meta
Tom Bill, Sophie-Gulliver - How will we know if we are doing good better: The case for more and better monitoring and evaluation
Sigal Samuel talks with Holden Karnofsky about effective altruism
Should EVF consider appointing new board members?
David Manheim - EA Deconfusion, Part 2: Causes, Philosophy, and Social Constraints
David Manheim - EA Deconfusion Part 3: EA Community and Social Structure
Rockwell - EA Community Builders’ Commitment to Anti-Racism & Anti-Sexism
Linda Linsefors & Amber Dawn - There can be highly neglected solutions to less-neglected problems
Amber Dawn - In (mild) defence of the social/professional overlap in EA
Kelsey Piper writing in the Vox newsletter about sexual harassment in EA and other communities
A link post for a Time piece on EA and harassment
Catherine Low with a comment on how the CEA community health team have dealt with cases they've known about from the Time article
Max Ra - Learning from Amnesty International's management malpractice crisis
Owen Cotton-Barratt - A statement and an apology
Jeff Kaufman - Make Conflict of Interest Policies Public
Catherine Low, Anubhuti Oak & Łukasz Grabowski - Plans for investigating and improving the experience of women, non-binary and trans people in EA
Lincoln Q - Don't Over-Update On Others' Failures
Severin - Community building: Lessons from ten years of facilitation experience
Benjamin Todd - Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness
Careers
GWWC podcast with Rob Mather on how he founded and operates a highly effective charity (Against Malaria Foundation)
Clearer Thinking podcast with Tom Kalil - Becoming a policy entrepreneur
Marie Firgau - Funding opportunity: 100x Impact Accelerator (LSE) - 10th March deadline
New Projects
Nick Anyos - New Podcast: Critiques of EA
Introducing EASE, a managed directory of EA Organisation Service Providers
The EA Mental Health & Productivity Survey 2023
Jemima & Tom Blake - Flourish Student Journal - Open for Submissions (15th March deadline)
Tyrone-Jay Barugh - Some initial work to evaluate the merits of an EA legal service
Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute launched a newsletter
Organisation Updates
EA Giving Tuesday Hibernation
EA Philippines' Progress in 2022
Eli Nathan - EA Global in 2022 and plans for 2023
Max Dalton (executive director of CEA) - Transitioning to an advisory role at CEA (Ben West is stepping in as transition coordinator)
EV UK board statement on Owen's resignation
Update from the EA Good Governance Project
Critiques
Grayden - Bad Actors are not the Main Issue in EA Governance
Ozzie Gooen - Select Challenges with Criticism & Evaluation Around EA
EA's weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior
Grants
Open Philanthropy have made 15 grants recently, with a value of $20.1 million
$7m - Global Development & Wellbeing
$4.2m - GiveWell
$1.3m - University of Pennsylvania - Adrenal Cell Research
$1.2m - World Resources Institute - City Government Support for Air Quality
$5.6m - Longtermism Community Growth
$5.5m - Effective Ventures Foundation UK
$3m - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
$2.9m - Council on Strategic Risks - Biosecurity Fellowships and Policy Work
$3m - University of California, Berkeley - Aging Research
$750k - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$690k - Animal Welfare
The EA Funds have made 166 grants in the last quarter of 2022, with a value of $6.8 million
$3.2m - EA Infrastructure
$590,000 - Training for Good
$300,000 - Effective Thesis
$2.3m - Long-Term Future
$300,000 - SERI MATS program
$1.3m - Animal Welfare
$210,000 - Shrimp Welfare Project
$200,000 - Anima International
$160,000 - Animal Charity Evaluators
Global Development
The global report on neglected tropical diseases 2023 has been released
Tyler Cowen with a review of 'Why Education, Electricity and Fertility are Key to Escaping Poverty' by Charlie Robertson
Giving What We Can added to their top-rated charities list, including Teaching at the Right Level Africa and Lead Exposure Elimination Project
Scott Smith - How WHO estimate malaria cases and mortality
Asian Development Bank's president has proposed up to $25 billion development support to India
Witold Więcek - GiveWell's Change Our Mind contest and water quality interventions
Animal Welfare
Join a new slack for impactful animal advocacy
A paper published - Estimating global numbers of farmed fishes killed for food annually from 1990 to 2019
Kyle Lucchese - Book Post: The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism
Zoe Williams - Animal Welfare - 6 Months in 6 Minutes
The Movement Grants program from Animal Charity Evaluators is looking for applications
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wants to develop a cultured meat industry
Dustin Crummett - Announcing the Launch of the Insect Institute
Ben West - EU Food Agency Recommends Banning Cages
Sentience Institute podcast with Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion
Sagar K Shah & Jacob Peacock - How meat-free meal selection varies with menu options: an exploration
Moritz Stumpe - What do we know about animals being farmed outside the food system in Africa?
Why animal welfare laws do not apply to insects - and the reason they should - Matilda Gibbons, Andrew Crump & Lars Chittka
Biosecurity
Wellcome commits £22.7m for tools to predict climate-fueled outbreaks
Mathias KB - H5N1: thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Sophie Rose - The UK must prepare for the biosecurity threats to come (FT)
J Vivian Belenky - What are our genetic engineering detection capabilities?
Jam Kraprayoon - Does the US public support ultraviolet germicidal irradiation technology for reducing risks from pathogens?
Bridget Williams & Rowan Kane - Preventing the Misuse of DNA Synthesis
Kelsey Piper - What should be kept off-limits in a virology lab?
Buhl - Speedrun: Develop an affordable super PPE
Nuclear Risks
Paul Ingram - Public awareness of ‘nuclear winter’ is too low given current risks
Adam Thomson and Paul Ingram - Philanthropy and Nuclear Risk Reduction
Joel Tan - Shallow Report on Nuclear War (Arsenal Limitation)
Michael A & Will Aldred - Technological developments that could increase risks from nuclear weapons: A shallow review
Hear This Idea podcast with Carl Robichaud on reducing the risks of nuclear war
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk - Building a Science-Policy Interface for tackling the Global Governance of Catastrophic and Existential Risks
Stanford Existential Risks Conference, April 20th - 22nd
Ben Snodin - What are the best examples of object-level work that was done by the longtermist EA community that concretely and legibly reduced existential risk?
Max Görlitz - FYI there is a German institute studying sociological aspects of existential risk
Improving Institutions, Metascience and Progress
Clearer Thinking podcast with Stuart Ritchie - How can we make science more trustworthy?
An Ask Me Anything with Matt Clancy from Open Philanthropy, working on metascience
Works in Progress interviewed ARIA's chief executive Ilan Gur and chairman Matt Clifford
Lada Nuzhna, Alice Wu & Matt Hourihan - Enabling Faster Funding Timelines in the National Institutes of Health
Ben Reinhardt introducing Speculative Technologies, a new ARPA-style lab
David Reinstein - Unjournal's 1st eval is up: Resilient foods paper (Denkenberger et al)
Environment
The European Court of Auditors found that the €729 million Global Climate Change Alliance had little impact
Giving Green - How to Think Beyond Net Zero - concrete strategies that a business can take to maximise its climate impact
Jackva - A response to "On the Differences between Ecomodernism and Effective Altruism"
Hannah Ritchie - China is adding solar and wind faster than many of us realise: three charts that put it in perspective
Longtermism
Future Matters newsletter on AI timelines, AI skepticism and lock-in
Richard Fisher - HG Wells and the perils of a techno-centric long view
Clearer Thinking with a long-term future quiz
Fin Moorhouse - Summary of What We Owe The Future
Artificial Intelligence
Holden Karnofsky - Jobs that can help with the most important century
Max Roser - AI timelines: What do experts in artificial intelligence expect for the future?
The Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence has launched at the University of Cambridge
Cinera - Google invests $300mn in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic
Kelsey Piper - Are we racing toward AI catastrophe?
Holden Karnofsky - What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
AI Safety Training - a database of AI safety events
Richard Hanania - Can a Paperclip Maximizer Overthrow the CCP
Technical AI Safety
Robert SK Miles - AI Safety Info Distillation Fellowship - Apply by March 6th
Future of Life Institute podcast with Neel Nanda on avoiding an AI catastrophe with mechanistic interpretability
Kat Woods, Peter Barnett - What is it like doing AI safety work?
AI Governance
Zach Stein-Perlman looking at an American public survey on AI, 55% say AI could eventually pose an existential threat
Jasmine Wang - Launching The Collective Intelligence Project
OpenAI - How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?
Andrea Miotti - AGI in sight: our look at the game board
Julian Hazell - Assessing China's importance as an AI superpower
Elizabeth Seger - What Do We Mean When We Talk About “AI Democratisation”?
The Netherlands government hosted the first global summit on responsible AI in the military domain, REAIM 2023
Other Causes
Massive Earthquake in Turkey: Comments on the situation from the EA Community in Turkey
Australia's medical regulator has approved the use of psychedelics to treat some mental health conditions, making the country one of the first in the world to 'officially recognise MDMA and psilocybin as medicines'
Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret - Immigration reform: a shallow cause exploration
David D - Sanity check - effectiveness/goodness of Trans Rescue?
80,000 Hours podcast with Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable
Shallow Report on Coronary Heart Disease
Lukas Gloor - AI alignment researchers may have a comparative advantage in reducing s-risks
Stefan Shaw & Louise Kihlberg - Turkey and Syria earthquake: Effective donation advice
Em - Shallow investigation: Loneliness
Stories
GWWC member story with Luke Furness, an Australian lawyer who started his effective giving journey after picking up a book during COVID lockdowns
Jon Lumer, a former attorney, on why they started giving
Sophia the Phirst - A Manifesto (and origin story)
Nate Soares - A personal reflection on SBF
Kirsten - EA Lifestyles: Filial Piety and EA
Other Links
Benjamin Hilton - Is the world getting better or worse?
Daniel Filan - Podcast with Oli Habryka on LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure
Joe Carlsmith - Why should ethical anti-realists do ethics?
Wil Perkins - Solidarity for those Rejected from EA Global
Adam Binks - The Estimation Game: a monthly Fermi estimation web app
Ren Springlea - Five tools that make our research lives easier
Robert Long - What to think when a language model tells you it's sentient
Aella - People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You
Someone looking for advice as an alcoholic interested in EA
Kat Woods - Impostor syndrome: how I cured it with spreadsheets and meditation
Michelle Hutchinson - Appreciation thread Feb 2023
Good News
India reports 98.7% decline in Kala-azar cases in the last 15 years, from 44,533 in 2007 to 834 in 2022
Zambia and Mauritius banned all corporal punishment of children
Eliminating neglected diseases in African countries
The democratic Republic of Congo eliminated Guinea worm disease
Benin, Rwanda and Uganda eliminated sleeping sickness
Malawi eliminated trachoma