2024 May EA Updates

EAG London, FHI shutting down and reflections from MacAskill

May 01, 2024

EA Global London is happening in a few weeks and applications are closing soon. Around 1400 people are expected for the largest EA event in Europe this year.

Apply Here - Apply by 19th May

Effective Giving

GWWC - Considering pledging but haven't? Help us understand!
doebem: Cause Prioritisation Research in Brazil
GWWC - Donors from Australia can now make tax deductible donations
JWS - What's in a GWWC Pin?
How parents can help to introduce ideas of effective giving to young people
Fight Against Malaria - Donate for every punch David Nyika lands during his (boxing) fight on May 18th
Effektiv Spenden have passed the €60 million donations mark
The Life You Can Save 2023 report

Careers

AIM’s new guide to launching a high-impact non-profit policy organisation
Open Philanthropy - Day in the Life
- Sam Anschell - Writing about my job on the Global Aid Policy program
- Phillip Greene - Finance Operations Coordinator
- Alex Bowles - Senior Program Associate - Science and Global Health R&D
- Abhi Kumar - Program Associate - Farm Animal Welfare
- Anna Maybach Sullivan - Grants Associate
- Kiana Snekcim-Shields - People Operations Coordinator - Immigration and Global Workforce
Probably Good - Core Advice for Having a Positive Impact With Your Career
Adam Howes - Advice on doing a PhD
Hi-Med's Career Fellowship - 12th May
Emergent Ventures
Open Philanthropy - Career development and transition funding
Hannah Ritchie - Why being a writer at Our World in Data has been a transformative experience
80,000 Hours - Particularly impactful career paths you might have overlooked
Ávila Carmesí - On failing to get EA jobs: My experience and recommendations to EA orgs
Jacob Trefethen - Conferences are great for scientific entrepreneurs
Eli Nathan - Why you might be getting rejected from (junior) operations jobs

Grants

Open Philanthropy added 159 grants for $179m to their database
- $69m - Global Health & Development
  - $8m - Alliance for International Medical Action - Malnutrition Treatment in Chad
  - $7.5m - International Rescue Committee
  - $5m - Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute - Emodepside Phase III Trial
- $39m - Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building
  - $6.8m - Centre for Effective Altruism
  - $5m - EA Funds
  - $3m - Rational Animations
- $36m - Animal Welfare
  - $13m - Anima International
  - $2.5m - Plant Based Foods Association
  - $2.5m - Wild Animal Initiative
- $24m - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
  - $6m - OpenMined — Software for AI Audits#
  - $2.9m - Future House — Benchmarks for Biology Research and Development
  - $2.9m - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- $6.9m - Innovation Policy
- $5.2m - Global Catastrophic Risks
- $870k - Land Use Reform
EA Funds made 61 grants for $2.5m
- $1.8m - Long-Term Future
- $400k - Animal Welfare
- $240k - EA Infrastructure

Global Development

For more in depth updates I also write the Global Development & EA newsletter.

Global immunisation efforts have saved at least 154 million lives over the past 50 years
Advocacy for salt intake reduction - AIM top idea 2024
How an unheralded civil servant triumphed against big tobacco [ban on smoking in workplaces]
Shruti Rajagopalan - A New Engine(AI) for Human Learning and Growth
Rachel Glennerster - The Pandemic Financing Developing Countries Need
Tarrina Health, set up by Corrina Vali, are looking for seed funding

Animal Welfare

For more comprehensive animal news I recommend Impactful Animal Advocacy.

GFI - Alternative protein research grants - 23rd May
Republican-led U.S. states are looking to ban lab-grown proteins
Tälist’s have launched an Alt Protein Careers Navigator
May 7th deadline to give feedback on the UK Mandatory Welfare Label Scheme
Pet food startup Meatly expects approval for its cultivated meat products soon
Charity Navigator now has a recommended charities list for animal welfare in partnership with ACE
Robert Yaman on three pre-hatch technologies that can make poultry supply chains more humane
Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law
Announcing The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness
Nicoll Peracha - Bringing Monitoring, Evaluation and, Learning to animal advocates: 6 months of lessons learned
Omnizoid - If You're Going To Eat Animals, Eat Beef and Dairy
Farmed Animal Funders is soliciting proposals for pooled fund ideas that will fill unmet, yet high-impact, charitable intervention playing a critical role in the movement to end factory farming. Proposals due by May 31st
Lewis Bollard - Lessons from two pioneering advocates for farmed animals
UK moves toward mandatory animal welfare labelling
Animal Advocacy Careers
- Earn & Give More for Animals
- Free guidebook on careers in animal law
World Bank’s funding of factory farms is facing claims that it contributes to global heating and the undermining of animal welfare
82% of EU farm subsidies bolster high emissions foods

Biosecurity

GCBR Organisation Updates - my recommendation for updates on biosecurity

OpenAI - Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation
Should you infect yourself with Zika?
Biosecurity Fundamentals - Pandemics Course - Apply by 5th May
White House publishes framework for Nucleic Acid Screening
The Asia Centre for Health Security has been established in Singapore
Katy Glass interviewing Sofya Lebedeva on pursuing ambitious projects in biosecurity
Conrad K
- How Well-Funded is Biosecurity Philanthropy?
- Antimicrobial Surfaces For Pandemic Prevention?

Global Catastrophic Risks

The Monist - Volume 107, Issue 2 - Existential Risk, including articles by Hilary Greaves, SJ Beard and Karim Jebari
Over 33,000 near-Earth asteroids have been detected since 1990
Jamie Harris - Reasons for optimism about measuring malevolence to tackle x- and s-risks
Tom Chivers - Asteroid spotting
FLI Podcast - Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War - a Second by Second Timeline

Environment

Charity Navigator now has a recommended charities list for Climate Change Mitigation in partnership with Giving Green
Ken Opalo - Energy poverty is very bad for humans and the environment
Global coal consumption will defy expectations
Eric Mathison - Why Divestment Doesn't Work
Hannah Ritchie - How effective are policies in reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture?
Rethink Priorities
- Carbon capture landscape and challenges
- Clean energy price trajectories
- Climate philanthropy landscape
Thailand, Philippines embrace nuclear power to cut emissions
Let's Fund: Impact of our $1m crowdfunded grant to the Center for Clean Energy Innovation
SSRN - An Empirical Analysis of Cloud Computing and Energy Efficiency - In the US in 2017, it was estimated cloud computing reduced electricity use somewhere between 30 to 140 (billion kilowatt-hours)

AI Safety

For more regular updates I recommend the AI Safety Newsletter.

ARIA - Safeguarded AI - Backed by £59m, this programme aims to develop the safety standards for transformational AI - 28th May deadline for funding applications
AI Safety Careers Course India - Apply by 19th May
How Vitalik Buterin funded AI activism (with $665m)
Tom Houlden - The AI Dilemma: Growth vs Existential Risk
CAIS - Reassessing AI and Biorisk (and other topics)
80,000 Hours Podcast - Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
Emerging Technology Observatory - The state of global ‘AI safety’ research
OpenAI Cybersecurity Grant Program - $1m initiative to boost AI-powered cybersecurity capabilities
CAIS is distributing $250k in prizes for benchmarks that empirically assess AI safety
AI Impacts - Essay competition on the Automation of Wisdom and Philosophy - $25k in prizes
C Tilli - Cooperative AI: Three things that confused me as a beginner
Matthew Barnett - Analysing the moral value of unaligned AIs
New online course developed by Dan Hendrycks - Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society
Introducing AI Lab Watch
Azeem Azhar with Connor Leahy - Does AI present an existential risk?
Stanford - Measuring trends in AI
Joseph Miller - Why I'm doing PauseAI
Axiom Futures - helping to enable talent in India to join the AI safety field
Kelsey Piper - AI “agents” could do real work in the real world. That might not be a good thing
Announcing new Microsoft AI Hub in London
FLI Podcast - Liron Shapira on Superintelligence Goals

AI Governance

Expansion of U.S. AI Safety Institute leadership team announced (with Paul Christiano)
Maxwell Tabarrok - AI Regulation is Unsafe
CMA outlines growing concerns in markets for AI Foundation Models
Cecil Abungu & Marie Iradukunda - Some underrated reasons why the AI safety community should reconsider its embrace of strict liability
The US Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of the AI Safety and Security Board
The US Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking for comments on drafts of AI Governance proposals
AI Safety in China - UN resolution, expert agreement on red lines, draft of national AI law, and strong safety remarks by two luminaries
Consortium for AI and Existential Risks has been launched
Securing Canada’s AI advantage - Includes a new Canadian AI Safety Institute, with a $50m budget
Science - Regulating advanced artificial agents (including Bengio, Russell)
The 2024 Machine Learning, AI & Data Landscape

Progress, Innovation & Metascience

Stuart Buck
- How to Fund More Innovative Research
- Do We Fund New Research or Not?
- Hot Dogs, Cancer Cells, Replication, and AI
Matt Clancy - Can we learn about innovation from patent data?
HBR - How People Are Really Using GenAI
Kelsey Piper - So you’ve found research fraud. Now what?
Reason - A movement [progress studies] promoting scientific, technological, and economic solutions to humanity's problems
Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?
Nature - Scientists rise up against statistical significance
Wendi Yan - Discovering an Antimalarial Drug in Mao’s China
Michael A. Fischbach - Scientists and engineers often spend days choosing a problem and years solving it. This imbalance limits impact. Here, we offer a framework for problem choice
Jed Kolko - The economic research policymakers actually need
Mandatory data and code sharing for research published by The BMJ

Biotech

Michael Elowitz on the early years of synthetic biology and the programmability of living cells
Gene-editing crops to grow purple or red could aid AI-powered robotic weeding, boosting crop yields while reducing herbicide use
AI spots smaller cancers missed by doctors - it successfully flagged all of those with symptoms, as well as an extra 11 the doctors did not identify
Sarah Zhang - The Bone-Marrow-Transplant Revolution
Foresight Institute Podcast - Hannu Rajaniemi on being a sci-fi author and biotech entrepreneur

Longtermism

Matthew Rendall
- Space settlement and the time of perils: a critique of Thorstad
- Extinction risk and longtermism: a broader critique
Book review: Deep Utopia
Fin Moorhouse - Goodbye to FHI
Nature - What’s next for ‘deep future’ research?
Arepo - Two tools for rethinking existential risk
Leah Pierson - Accounting for future populations in health research
Foresight Institute Podcast - David Pearce on a future without suffering
Nicholas Kruus - Summary: Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Existential Risk (David Thorstad)
What novel, actionable advice does longtermism offer?

Forecasting

Weekly minutes for Alert’s foresight team - the risk of an H5N1 pandemic emerging over the coming decade is increasing
The State of Forecasting: Dynamics, Challenges, Hopes
The Rationale-Shaped Hole At The Heart Of Forecasting
Nathaniel Cooke & Nuño Sempere - A Gentle Introduction to Risk Frameworks Beyond Forecasting

Other Causes

Huw - Therapy without a therapist: Why unguided self-help might be a better intervention than guided
NBER - Evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes
Fin Moorhouse - Anthropic reasons for digital mind scepticism?
Bryan Walsh -Why the death of the honeybee was greatly exaggerated
Vox - Democracy won in Senegal. Here’s why it matters
Noah Smith - Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war
Hannah Ritchie - How many people died from disasters in 2023?
Nearly half of China's major cities are sinking
India-China-US Relations in an Era of Strategic Competition
Getting people to donate their organs
Vox - A hack nearly gained access to millions of computers. Here’s what we should learn from this
Florian Jehn - Trade collapse: Cascading risks in our global supply chains
Christina Krawec - Would your project benefit from OSINT, satellite imagery analysis, or international security-related research support?

Stories & EA Around the World

Bishop - Guilt at EA
Vikrant Bhargava speaking about the highs and lows after exiting [$8.5b IPO] and how he’s creating impact (video)
Oliver Sabot - In Defense of a Humble and Human EA
Jeff Kaufman - Trying to Do More Good
Alix Pham - 10 Lessons Learned - One Year at EA Switzerland
EAGxLATAM 2024: Retrospective

Muloongo Stella Mwanahamuntu - I have started an EA community in Zambia
Michel - Sharing Reality with Walt Whitman (poetry/video)

Good News

OWID - Cancer mortality has declined in many countries
Cambodia - The mortality rate from tuberculosis had dropped by 45 percent from 42 cases per 100,000 people in 2000 to 23 in 2022
Between 1990 and 2021, Cambodia’s income per capita increased fourfold and life expectancy rose by more than 14 years
Nepal's poverty rate fell from 25% to 3.6% between 2011 and 2023
In 15 years, Rwanda has increased its electricity access to 75% from 6% in 2009
Max Roser - Thanks to improvements in global health, more than 130 million children have been saved since 1990

Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism

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