2024 July EA Updates
Good Ventures update, situational awareness and a world record
Top Posts
Alexander Berger - An update from Good Ventures (Cari and Dustin’s philanthropy) - “we have decided to exit a handful of sub-causes (amounting to less than 5% of our annual grantmaking), and we are no longer planning to expand into new causes in the near term by default.” - includes comments from Dustin Moskovitz
Elliot - Maybe let the non-EA world train you
Vincent van der Holst - I doubled the world record cycling without hands for AMF
Leopold Aschenbrenner - Situational Awareness - The Decade Ahead
Summary by Oscar D
Ilya Sutskever is starting Safe Superintelligence Inc
The Chinese AI Safety Network has been set up
Animal Advocacy Careers - You can still use your career to help animals even if you don't work in charities
Introducing the AI for Animals newsletter
Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from May 2022 to March 2024 - $7,000,000 in funding recommendations
Cate Hall - AI is about to change everything & Astera is on a mission to rebuild the machinery of science... We’re hiring a visionary team to help leverage our $2.5B endowment to make science better, faster, cheaper & more widely shared
Conferences
5th-7th July - EAGxUtrecht
12-14th July - Vision Weekend (Germany) - Foresight Institute
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
18-19th October - Progress Conference, Berkeley
1st-3rd November - EAG Boston
22nd-24th November - EAGxAustralasia
Meta
17 talks from EAG London have now been uploaded
Magnify Mentoring - applications are open for new mentees until July 10th
Peter Wildeford - Eight Fundamental Constraints for Growing a Research Organisation
JWS - Looking at Forum trends across 2023
Advice for EA org staff and EA group organisers interacting with political campaigns
Jan Kulveit - Distancing EA from rationality is foolish
80k will sponsor conference trips for 10 people who refer others to 80k advising
Asterix Magazine - The "TESCREAL" Bungle
Mikolaj Kniejski - Charity Entrepreneurship Is Overestimating the Value of Saving Lives by 10%
Effective Giving
Julia Wise - Still donating half
GWWC - The general population cares more about effective giving than you might think: Results from a 2024 study in Australia
Effective Giving have rebranded to Ergo Impact
The Life You Can Save podcast with Joshua Ross and Adam McCurdie of Humanitix (who recently donated $4m AUD to TLYCS)
Maximum Impact has launched in Israel to support effective giving
Review of Past Grants: The $100,000 Grant for a Video Game?
Kaleem - On Estimates of how much Zakat there is
Meta Charity Funders: Second round retrospective (including funding for EA UK)
Careers
80,000 Hours with an advanced series with their most in-depth research on careers
Maggie Lloydhauser - The hardest part about fundraising for GiveWell
Julia Wise - Advice for early-career people seeking jobs in EA
Researcher spotlight: Erin Crossett, GiveWell Program Officer
Grants
Open Philanthropy added 41 grants for $27m to their database
$13.7m - Global Health & Development
$4.3m - Evidence Action - Deworm the World Initiative
$2.8m - Harvard - Antimalarial Bednet Development and Evaluation
$2.6m - University of Pennsylvania - Human Germ Cell Research
$940k - Gi Effektivt
$900k - Kyle House Group - Aid Policy Strategy
$660k - Fund for the Global Fund - Global Fund Awareness in Japan
$500k - UC Davis - Insectary for Malaria Gene Drive Research
$250k - Probably Good
$210 - Bouisson-Bertrand Institute - Loiasis (African Eye Worm) Impact Study
$190k - Pahle India Foundation - Lead Policy Research
$100k - Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine - Malaria Chemoprevention in School-Aged Children
$40k - Government Relations Group - Japanese Support for NTD Elimination
$20k - Big Picture - Global Health Aid Advocacy in Japan
$6.2m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
$2.2m - Apollo Research
$1.1m - Northeastern University - LLM Interpretability Research
$880k - Stanford - LLM-Generated Research Ideation Benchmark
$550k - Sage - AI Explainers
$530k - Metaculus
$270k - Carnegie Mellon University - LLM Use Case Database
$200k - AI Standards Lab - AI Standards and Risk Management Frameworks
$90k - Faculty AI - Wargame for AI Documentary
$3.3m - Forecasting
$2.8m - Metaculus
$550k - Sage
$2m - Animal Welfare
$1.3m - Eurogroup for Animals — European Union Trade Strategy
$210k - Humane Canada — Farmed Animal Standards
$200k - People for Animals Uttarakhand
$200k - Solutions for Our Climate Korea — Alternative Protein R&D
$1.6m - Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building
$1.1m - Successif
$300k - UChicago — Existential Risk Laboratory Fellowship Program
$80k - Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy
Positive Money Europe
$70k - Innovation Policy
Monash University — Academia and Policymaking Living Literature Review
Global Development
For more in depth updates I also write the Global Development & EA newsletter.
HIV trial shows injectable prevents 100% infection in women and girls
Nick Laing - Is Nigerian nurse emigration really a "win-win"? Critique of a CGD article
GiveWell - Are our Top Charities saving the same lives each year?
YouTube’s biggest creator has teamed up with GiveDirectly to give $300k to a Ugandan village
The EU will contribute over €750 million to the African Vaccines Manufacturing Accelerator
Launching the Global Health Funding Circle
Suvita received a $500k grant from Mulago
The Studies Show - Lead and IQ
Energy for Growth Hub - How We’re Going to Track the Modern Energy Minimum
Kartik Akileswaran & Jonathan Mazumdar - When It Comes to Promoting Prosperity, Production Beats Consumption
When growth does, and does not, reduce poverty - Growth fails to reduce poverty when the economic linkages to the lives of the poor are weak, and governments fail to use the proceeds to encourage the spread of economic activity or for anti-poverty programmes
Saloni Dattani - Trachoma: how a common cause of blindness can be prevented worldwide
Do the GiveWell charities need money currently?
Katie Auth - Ten Takeaways for Global Energy Poverty from the IEA’s 2024 World Energy Investment Report
Rachel Abbott - Kaya Guides pilot results
We should value income doublings equally across time and place
Animal Welfare
For more comprehensive animal news I recommend Impactful Animal Advocacy.
A landscape analysis of wild animal welfare
Our World in Data - What are the trade-offs between animal welfare and the environmental impact of meat?
Can AI power the Global Mapping and Quantification of Animal Suffering? The Pain Atlas Project
Vasco Grilo - Farmed animals are neglected
Faunalytics - Pathways To Impact: An International Study Of Advocates’ Strategies And Needs
How to change the law to have a large-scale impact on animal welfare?
Help Fund Insect Welfare Science
How much funding do invertebrate welfare organisations get?
Leah Garcés and Sharon Núñez: Timeless lessons from 40+ years of animal advocacy
The Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein has been launched at Imperial College London with a $30m grant
The UN says more aquatic animals were farmed than fished in 2022
170 to 700 billion fish raised and fed live to mandarin fish in China per year
What hurts shrimp the most? (Quantifying and prioritising shrimp welfare threats)
Fish Welfare Initiative - Satellite Imagery Study Findings
Global Catastrophic Risks
Holden Karnofsky - Case studies on social-welfare-based standards in various industries
Lucius Caviola - The social disincentives of warning about unlikely risks
U.S. and China hold first informal nuclear talks in five years
Owen Cotton-Barratt
AI takeoff and nuclear war
In favour of exploring nagging doubts about x-risk
Sean Illing - What nuclear annihilation could look like
A mission to find 10 million near-Earth asteroids every year
Biosecurity
How can I donate to biorisk prevention?
The Novo Nordisk Foundation is providing funding for exploratory research projects within pathogenic fungi, novel AMR tools and harnessing innate immunity
Jeff Kaufman - Detecting Genetically Engineered Viruses With Metagenomic Sequencing
Alastair Fraser-Urquhart - Making the UK the Global Centre for Challenge Trials
Statecraft - How to Ban Biological Weapons
Alix Pham - Scope-Sensitive Biosecurity Policy in France: An Opportunity?
Martin Rees - Why challenge prizes can solve our most pressing issues
Environment
Effective Environmentalism newsletter
Statistical Review of World Energy 2023
Casey Handmer - 18 industrial applications of cheap energy
Bezos Earth Fund - AI for Climate and Nature
Todd Moss - Time to end the World Bank’s nuclear blind spot
Brian Potter - Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?
Denmark to charge farmers €100 a cow in first carbon tax on agriculture
Norway discovers Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth metals
How important are emissions in emerging economies?
Harmful gases destroying ozone layer falling faster than expected
AI Safety
For more regular updates I recommend the AI Safety Newsletter.
Andrew Critch - Safety isn’t safety without a social model
Tom Barnes - Navigating Risks from Advanced AI: A Guide for Philanthropists
FLI are offering up to $4m to support projects that work to mitigate the dangers of AI-driven power concentration
Coordinated Disclosure of Dual-Use Capabilities: An Early Warning System for Advanced AI
80,000 Hours - Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI
ChinaTalk - Can the US build a “national moat” around AI innovation?
John Wentworth - My AI Model Delta Compared To Yudkowsky
Ryan Greenblatt - Getting 50% (SoTA) on ARC-AGI with GPT-4o
Kelsey Piper - Where AI predictions go wrong
Existential Hope Podcast - Roman Yampolskiy on the case for narrow AI
AI & Communication
The Transformer - Trump on AI, Labour’s plans and Apple Intelligence
Time - Inside Anthropic, the AI Company Betting That Safety Can Be a Winning Strategy
FLI - Superintelligence Imagined - A contest for the best creative educational materials on superintelligence, its associated risks, and the implications of this technology for our world
Announcing The Midas Project - and our first campaign (which you can help with)
Talk in Japan - AI safety field building at MATS
AI Governance
Concordia AI at the AI Seoul Summit
Lawrence Lessig - Opinion: The risks of AI could be catastrophic. We should empower company workers to warn us
Dean W. Ball - The Political Economy of AI Regulation
CAIS - Voluntary Commitments are Insufficient
Toby Ord has joined AI Governance Initiative as a senior researcher
Reactions to Situational Awareness
Progress, Innovation & Metascience
Asterisk - Progress Studies vs Effective Altruism
The Market Failure that Will Force Doctors to Keep Writing Opioid Prescriptions
Nan Ransohoff - How to start an advance market commitment
Andrew Leigh MP (Australia) - Randomised trials are our path to effective spending
Nature - Mapping philanthropic support of science - philanthropic funders tend to focus locally and funding relationships tend to last once started
The Bottlenecks Summit is an unconference bringing together thinkers, builders, creators and policy entrepreneurs working to overcome bottlenecks to human progress and abundance - California, September 6th
Nature - Is science’s dominant funding model broken?
Genome Design: The Bridge to Our Biological Future
Maxwell Tabarrok - Contra Acemoglu on AI
Mathematical optimisation for cargo ships - Shipping Network Design API is able to double the profit of a container shipper, deliver 13% more containers with 15% fewer vessels
Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science
Macroscience is starting a new podcast - interviewing researchers, scientists, policymakers and entrepreneurs working in metascience
Stuart Buck
Four exciting metascience developments, with huge potential for improving science and medicine at NIH and elsewhere
Strip Clubs vs. Academic Fraud - Which is worse?
Statecraft - How to Shape a Market
Kyle Chan - "Managed competition" in China's state firms
The Roots of Progress is now the Roots of Progress Institute
New AI detects 13 cancers with 98% accuracy from tissue samples
Matt Clancy - Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge
Jacob Trefethen - FDA, ARPA-H, & CDC – policy ideas part 2
The Up Wing has launched, covering progress related news
Longtermism
Long-Term Future Fund: March recommendations - $5.3m paid out
A Catholic Vision for a Positive Future with Divine, Human, and Artificial Intelligence
Forecasting
The Researcher (Jaime Sevilla at Epoch) Trying to Glimpse the Future of AI
Why so many “racists” at Manifest?
Open Sourcing Metaculus
Maniano - My experience at the controversial Manifest 2024
Metaculus - Announcing the AI Forecasting Benchmark Series - $120k in Prizes
Vox - 10 big things we think will happen in the next 10 years
Vasco Grilo - I bet Greg Colbourn €10k that AI will not kill us all by the end of 2027
Other Causes
Scientists find further evidence that climate change could make fungi more dangerous
Novo Nordisk weight loss drug Wegovy approved in China (where 50%+ of the adult population is overweight)
Anders Sandberg - How volcanoes could change the world
Gallup’s 2024 Global Emotions Report
Our World in Data - Is the number of natural disasters increasing?
Kelsey Piper - Can we be actually normal about birth rates?
AI and satellite imager can spot fires 500 times faster than on-ground
Our World in Data - How much progress has been made in protecting the rights of LGBT+ people?
The Impact & Value of Hurricane Forecasts
Nicholas Reville - Addiction is largest cause of death and DALYs in the USA... and maybe worldwide?
Constance Li - AI, Animals, and Digital Minds - Retrospective
Philosophy
Richard Y Chappell - Astronomical Cake
Rafael Ruiz - Impartialist Sentientism and Existential Anxiety about Moral Circle Explosion
80,000 Hours podcast - Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
Jeff Sebo - Announcing The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why
Other Links
Andy Masley - Productivity advice that's worked for me
80,000 Hours - Does your vote matter? What the research says
The Left and EA Should be Natural Allies
Spencer Greenberg with Garrison Lovely - What do socialism and EA have in common?
Why isn’t all philanthropy trust-based philanthropy?
Dwarkesh podcast with Tony Blair, discussing governing, AI and leadership
Clearer Thinking
How to decide between competing explanations and theories
Podcast with Emmett Shear on worldviews, altruism and embracing variance
How to think about group differences
35 Interactive Learning Modules Relevant to EA
UKGrantmaking seeks to provide insight into grantmaking in the UK
Stories & EA Around the World
Julia Wise - Conversations I often have about parenting
JWS - Reflections on EA & EAG following EAG London
Lovkush - My first EAG: a mix of feelings
TED Conferences founder Chris Anderson spoke with Natalie Cargill on his podcast
EA Netherlands' Annual Strategy for 2024
EA Finland Annual Review
Richard Y Chappell - What "Effective Altruism" Means to Me
Omnizoid - Be Proud To Be An Effective Altruist
Good News
From 1990 to 2022, the under-five child mortality rate declined by 72 per cent in Southern Asia
Deaths from tetanus have been reduced massively
Rapid UTI Test Cuts Detection Time to 45 Minutes (down from 2 days)
Cambodia lifts 2.8 million out of poverty in over 7 years
Zimbabwe Turns Tide on HIV, prevalence in adults has fallen from its peak of 26.5% in 1997 to 11% in 2021
65% reduction in suicide mortality in China from 1990 to 2017
Gene therapy trial gives deaf children hearing in both ears
More than half of patients with advanced forms of lung cancer who took lorlatinib were still alive after five years with no progression