2024 August EA Updates
Pledge Rebrand, Precipice Revisited and Benevolent Beasts
Top Posts
Center for Effective Aid Policy has shut down
Toby Ord - The Precipice Revisited - (4 years later) Climate risk is down, Nuclear is up, and the story on Pandemics and AI is mixed
The Giving What We Can Pledge is now the 🔸10% Pledge
Giving What We Can presentation at EAGxUtrecht Ask Me Anything - Beast Philanthropy's Darren Margolias, Executive Director of the charity founded by the world’s most popular YouTuber MrBeast
Introducing Rethink Priorities’ Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence
Conferences
16-18th August - EAGxToronto
6-7th September - EA Nigeria Summit
7-8th September - EAGxBerkeley
12-15th September - CARE 2024 - Warsaw & online
13-15th September - EAGxBerlin
17-18th September - Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk
20-21st September - Foresight Space Futures & Governance - Bay Area
9-11th October - Asia Farm Animal Day (Hanoi, Vietnam)
18-19th October - Progress Conference, Berkeley
19-20th October - EAGxIndia - Bengaluru
1st-3rd November - EAG Boston
22nd-24th November - EAGxAustralasia
5-8th December - AVA Summit Latin America (São Paulo, Brazil)
6-8th December - Foresight Institute Vision Weekend - California
Meta
AMA: Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigation Team
Ask Me Anything with Peter Singer
Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool
Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis
Besceli - Thoughts on EA Epistemics Projects
Case-control survey of EAGx attendees finds no behavioural or attitudinal changes after six months
Taking Uncertainty Seriously (or, Why Tools Matter)
Data from the 2023 EA Forum user survey
Organisational Updates
Rethink Priorities announced that Marcus A. Davis is now RP’s sole CEO
Introducing Mieux Donner: A new effective giving initiative in France
High Impact Engineers is Transitioning to a Volunteer-Led Model
CEEALAR: 2024 Update
Happier Lives Institute - 2022-23 Annual Review
Careers
Thank You For Your Time: Understanding the Experiences of Job Seekers in EA
Lynette Bye - How to make career decisions and have impact
Ambitious Impact with a quiz on career discovery
80,000 Hours - Mental health and your career: our top resources
My Experience as a Full-Time EA Community Builder in NYC
Grants
Open Philanthropy added 32 grants for $33m to their database
$23.5m - Global Health & Development
$12.5m - Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention
$6.6m - International Vaccines Institute — Cholera Vaccine Phase II Trial
$1.5m - The University of Chicago — EPIC Air Quality Fund
$1m - University of Washington — Syphilis Vaccine Development
$940k - Gi Effektivt
$580k - WHO — Syphilis Treatment for Pregnant Women
$300k - One for the World
$2.6m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$1.1m - Princeton University — Software Engineering LLM Benchmark
$750k - Trustees of Boston University — LLM Research Benchmark
$600k - Yale University — LLM Persuasiveness Evaluation
$130k - UC Santa Barbara — LLM Use Case Database
$4.5m - Animal Welfare
$1.3m - Compassion in World Farming USA
$960k - Wakker Dier — Farm Animal Welfare Litigation
$900k - Eurogroup for Animals — Chicken Welfare Advocacy
$500k - Essere Animali — Farm Animal Welfare in Italy
$400k - We Animals Media — Content for Farm Animal Welfare Advocacy
$400k - Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal — Corporate Campaigns in Brazil
$300k - Land Use Reform
Global Development
Intergenerational Impacts of Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana - 45% reduction in under-three mortality
With a seven-year funding arrangement from Wellcome, Our World in Data will expand the work they are delivering in global health data
Seema Jayachandran - Dismantling restrictive gender norms in low-income countries as an EA opportunity
Côte d’Ivoire makes history as first nation to deploy R21/Matrix-M Malaria Vaccine
Animal Welfare
Coller Foundation - $10 million prize for Interspecies Two-Way Communication using generative AI models announced
Lewis Bollard - How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?
UK Voters for Animals is a new organisation aiming to mobilise voters to win legislative changes for farmed animals
FarmKind has launched, a new way to donate to effective charities
Sofia Balderson - What I wish I knew when I started out in animal advocacy
Report on the Use of AI in Animal Advocacy
Why is animal consciousness controversial? Talking to my inner sceptic
Animal Welfare as a Field of Economics
Cass Sunstein - Regulators Should Value Nonhuman Animals
We should campaign to restrict AI use in animal agriculture
Raising Welfare for Lab Rodents
Animal welfare outside of EA - numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024
How the Open Wing Alliance has helped free hundreds of millions of chickens from cages
Federal Bill to Ban Commercial Octopus Farming and Imports Introduced in U.S.
Alternative Proteins
Boosting alternative protein research at Imperial College London’s new Bezos Centre for Sustainable Proteins with Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro
Tyler Cowen - Will technology improve animal welfare?
What the Alternative Protein Industry Can Learn from EV Companies
First-ever regulatory submission made for cultivated meat in the EU
11 Dutch Supermarkets Commit to Selling 60% Plant-Based Proteins by 2030 (representing 90%+ of the market share)
Global Catastrophic Risks
80,000 Hours - Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US
Hiroshima-ICAN Academy on Nuclear Weapons and Global Security - 12th August
FLI podcast - Mary Robinson (Former President of Ireland) on Long-View Leadership
Drone that detects chemical, nuclear threats in 40 mins developed
Biosecurity
Insights from Sentinel - a foresight team and an associated emergency response team which will seek to identify and react to potential large-scale catastrophes
How to Catch a Lab Leak
Dwarkesh podcast with Patrick McKenzie - How a Discord Server Saved Thousands of Lives
Operation Warp Speed for Cows
US pays Moderna $176m to develop bird-flu jab
Notes on NTI x Dr. Luciana Borio's Discussion on H5N1 Bird Flu
Environment
Evolving the Giving Green Fund: Expanding our climate impact
New bipartisan superhot rock energy legislation advances out of committee, marking important step toward deployment
Africa EV Readiness and Impact Index
How to decarbonise the world’s cement
Bill Gates - The Clean Industrial Revolution has arrived
How many people die from extreme temperatures, and how this could change in the future
Tyler Cowen - Which are the most effective subsidies for green energy?
A better way to fund climate breakthroughs
Enhancing the Cyber Resilience of Offshore Wind
AI Safety
Richard Ngo - Towards more cooperative AI safety strategies
Anthropic - A new initiative for developing third-party model evaluations
FLI launching new grants to oppose and mitigate AI-driven power concentration
Ada Lovelace Institute - Examining the evaluation of foundation models
80,000 Hours podcast - Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government
AI & Communication
Against Aschenbrenner: How 'Situational Awareness' constructs a narrative that undermines safety and threatens humanity
Kelsey Piper - Two ways to go wrong in predicting AI
AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy
Fathom - Convening the Voices of Society to Navigate the AI Transition
Yoshua Bengio - Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously
AGI Rising wargame held in London, participants included Stan McChrystal, Mark Sedwill, Jaan Tallinn and Yuval Harari
AI Governance
Announcing Open Philanthropy's AI governance and policy Request for Proposals
Notes on new UK AISI minister
Applications open for 2025 Horizon Fellowship cohort - Washington, DC
FLI podcast - Emilia Javorsky on how AI Concentrates Power
80,000 Hours podcast
AI safety was mentioned in a comprehensive overview of China’s top domestic priorities for the next five years
Hear This Idea - Elizabeth Seger on Open Source AI
Introduction to French AI Policy
Concordia AI holds the Frontier AI Safety and Governance Forum at the World AI Conference
On the Limitations of Compute Thresholds as a Governance Strategy
AI Seoul Summit Stocktake: Reflections and Projections
CAIS - Implications of a Trump Administration for AI Policy
Security without Dystopia: Structured transparency
Lawrence Lessig is very worried about freely available AI model weights
China announced new AI dialogue efforts with Russia, Arab countries, and BRICS
GovAI - Winter Fellowship 2025 - 11th August
Progress, Innovation & Metascience
Toby Ord - On the Value of Advancing Progress
Case study: The Lübeck vaccine
How to write for Works in Progress - We're looking for new authors and article pitches
Stuart Buck - The Good Science Project is launching a reform project to provide government officials with steps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of federal research and development. And they want your ideas for R&D reform
Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption (in government)
ARIA call for proposals, with up to £500k in funding - apply by 27th August
‘Smarter Robot Bodies’ - exploring how we can build robots that approach the capabilities of living bodies
Nature Computes Better - asks how we can redefine the way computers process information by exploiting principles found ubiquitously in nature
Matt Clancy - Incentives to Invent at Universities
The Rational Optimist Society has been launched
Why haven't biologists cured cancer?
The Royal Society - On the economic value of research
Jason Crawford - Introduction to The Techno-Humanist Manifesto
Deena Mousa - Why a hotter world might be a more dangerous, violent, and less productive one
Cate Hall - Come rebuild the machinery of science for our abundant future
How AI Revolutionised Protein Science, but Didn’t End It
Zvi Mowshowitz - Medical Roundup
Doctors using nuclei.io to diagnose endometritis or metastatic colon cancer were 62% faster at making diagnoses and 72% more accurate than they were without the AI tool
UK Science Secretary Peter Kyle has commissioned an Action Plan to identify how AI can drive economic growth
Asimov Press - Where's the Synthetic Blood?
Grim Old Days - Collection of contemporary accounts of daily life in the past.
The Anthology Fund is a $100 million initiative created through a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic to fuel the next generation of AI startups
AI infrastructure
Frontier/novel applications of AI
Consumer AI solutions
Trust and safety tooling
AI apps and tech that maximize societal benefits
Longtermism
Matthew Yglesias - Human history in the very long run
Vacuum decay, a process that could end the universe as we know it, may happen 10,000 times sooner than expected (10^790 years, instead of 10^794)
The Good Ancestors Project - Australian organisation advocating for policies that could impact many people by responding to government requests for input
Other Causes
Lucia Coulter, Lee Crawfurd, Tammy Tan - Addressing Childhood Lead Poisoning in the UK
Vox - The world’s emotional status is actually pretty good, a new global report finds
NBER - The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States
Millions have died in conflicts since the Cold War; most of them in Africa and intrastate conflicts
Adverse Selection by Life-Saving Charities
Peak global population and other key findings from the 2024 UN World Population Prospects
New antidote for cobra bites discovered using CRISPR technology
Nature - Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation
Making AI Welfare an EA priority requires justifications that have not been given
How do AI welfare and AI safety interact?
Destabilisation of the United States: The top X-factor EA neglects?
Rethink Priorities' Digital Consciousness Project Announcement
Posts from the EA Forum’s AI welfare debate week
Science - The benefits of GLP-1 drugs beyond obesity
Sarah Constantin - Artificial Wombs When?
Other Links
Peter Singer & Kasia de Lazari-Radek podcast with Tyler Cowen
Kelsey Piper - Warren Buffett’s breakup with the Gates Foundation will hurt the world
Stefan Schubert - Epistemic discipline can transform worldviews
Noah Smith - Lifting humanity out of poverty is Job #1
Patrick McKenzie interviews Kelsey Piper on tech reporting
Introducing Peter Singer AI - an interactive platform that invites users to explore complex ethical issues, from animal rights to global poverty
Jonny Spicer - Concrete Ways I Use AI
GiveDirectly has merch
BigThink - “Alive and well”: Peter Singer on effective altruism after FTX
Clearer Thinking - Are people less moral than they used to be?
Stories & EA Around the World
Do What You Can (A Poem)
EA Indonesia has launched
Richard Y Chappell - Imperfection is OK
Seven Philanthropic Wins: The Stories That Inspired Open Phil’s Offices
Nat Kiilu - Reflections on some experiences in EA
GWWC Member Profile: Duncan Hamra
EA Poland are fundraising
Nina Friedrich - Turning Privilege into Effective Donations
Good News
Between 2021 and 2023 there was a decrease of 2.45 million Filipinos living in poverty
Reports show threefold drop in annual diarrheal cases in Nepal, between 1996 and 2023
Statistics Indonesia has reported that the number of poor people in Indonesia has declined by 3 million in the last 10 years
Chad Ends Sleeping Sickness as a Public Health Problem
Child Air Pollution Deaths Down 53 Percent since 2000
Namibia Court Decriminalises Consensual Same-Sex Conduct