• Giving What We Can have hired Luke Freeman as their new director
• EA Asia have a new newsletter with updates from groups in Singapore, India, Philippines, Middle East, Japan, Israel, Malaysia and Indonesia
• EA Giving Tuesday donation matching initiative 2019 retrospective. Within 14 seconds, 330 donors had donated $1,100,000, of which 52% was successfully matched
• EA Global London will now take place 30th April - 2nd of May 2021
• Angela Aristizábal looking at whether region-level cause prioritisation research is valuable to spot promising long-term priority causes worldwide
• There is a new EA group on FocusMate, a platform that provides one-to-one video calls for accountability regarding focused work
• EA Survey Series 2019: How many people interested in EA live in the main EA hubs?
• Eve McCormick, Sanjay Joshi, Neel Nanda and Jaime Sevilla Molina on a new EA related podcast created by Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti
• Founders Pledge have set up their own donor funds, one for global development and another for climate change
• Aaron Gertler with EA organisation updates for June
• Vaidehi Agarwalla with a step-by-step guide to running independent projects
• An annotated list of effective altruism related career advice resources
• An anonymous retrospective on career choice after thinking about it for 300+ hours
• A post with objections to value alignment between people interested in effective altruism
• EA Global transcript of a talk by Marcus Davies: Rethink Priorities — empirical research on neglected causes
• Jessica Watson Miller with a post looking at three possible future for the effective altruism movement
• EA Global transcript of Charity Entrepreneurship graduate lightning talks
• Gregory Lewis on why they think people should use resilience, instead of imprecision, to communicate uncertainty
• Saulius Simcikas with a collection of good 2012-2017 EA forum posts
• Sjir Hoeijmakers on the case for investing to give later
• A transcript of a talk by Karolina Sarek at EA Global: How to do research that matters
Grants
• Open Phil have made 31 grants recently with a total value of $10,393,000
$3,299,000 - Global Priorities Institute
$2,498,000 - Farmed animal welfare
$1,686,000 - Scientific research
$1,440,000 - Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness
$1,000,000 - Immigration policy
$335,000 - Criminal justice reform
$135,000 - Other areas
Global Development
• The 2020 State of Food Security and Nutrition report, with the number of people affected by hunger globally has been on the rise since 2014
• The Gates Foundation with a Q&A looking at the scope of the locust crisis in East Africa, potentially affecting a tenth of the world's population
• The UN's Philip Alston on failed global poverty eradication efforts
• A post from someone considering a career plan rethink in global poverty eradication and systemic change
• Melissa Dell and Tyler Cowen discussing what factors effect economic development
• EA Global transcript of a Q&A with Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder of GiveWell
• Amit Varma with a podcast looking at problems with decision makers in India copying public policy from abroad without considering whether it would work in local conditions
• Malaria Consortium with a report on dengue, the world’s fastest growing vector borne disease
• The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation looking at interventions that could have a big impact on food security
• David Miliband on the Founders Pledge podcast discussing the imminent threat of COVID-19 to the world’s most vulnerable populations
• Think Global Health with an article on the difficulties of making the global health field more representative
• EA Global transcript of a talk by Sam Carter: Are cash transfers the best policy option?
• Innovations for Poverty Action on the lack of evidence on interventions relating to forced displacement
• Exemplars in Global Health, a new organisation looking at positive outliers in public health to help inform decision makers
• EA Global transcript of a talk by Ruth Levine and Caitlin Tulloch: The good, the bad, and the ugly of evidence-informed decision making in global development
• Founders Pledge with a report on the impact of COVID-19 in poorer countries
Animal Welfare
• Sentience Institute with a literature review on health behaviour interventions and a report on social movement lessons from the US prisoners' rights movement looking at how they could apply to the farmed animal movement
• Jennifer Kirsch with a report for Fish Welfare Initiative highlighting the most significant knowledge gaps hampering effective fish welfare work
• EA Global transcript of a Q&A with Leah Edgerton, executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators
• Faunalytics with a post looking at institutional attitudes towards wild animal welfare
• The Good Food Institute have created PISCES, a new data navigation tool to inform alternative seafood development
• EA Global Transcript of a talk by Richard Parr on the international expansion of the Good Food Institute
• Jason Schukraft on the welfare implications for animals of the subjective experience of time
• EA Global transcript of a talk by Alexandria Beck: How the Open Wing Alliance is driving progress worldwide
• Jamie Harris with a post on interventions animal advocates can use to build communities in other countries
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
• The Global Challenges Foundation has a 2020 survey on global catastrophic risks
• EA Global Transcript of a fireside chat with Bonnie Jenkins, looking at current risks and improvements in nuclear security and biosecurity
• Live Science interviewing Luke Kemp, Cassidy Nelson and Sabin Roman on existential risks
• Think Global Health on how three standard measures didn't predict how countries fared with COVID-19, and what could be done to be better prepared for the next pandemic
• Michael Aird with a post visualising the differences between existential, global, and suffering catastrophes
Environment
• SoGive with their climate change donation recommendations
• Vox with a deep dive into why getting to net-zero carbon emissions will require rapid, radical innovation
• A long post looking at how 2020 is affecting fossil fuels
• The U.K. government’s development finance institution will no longer put aid money into coal or oil investments
• UK Research and Innovation announced the first projects to receive funding as part of its £149,000,000 transforming foundation industries challenge. The foundation industry sector combined produce 75% of all the materials in the UK economy and account for around 10% of the UK total CO2 emissions
• Maritime engineers have trained an energy shipping app to save over a 250,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions by applying machine learning to its predictive system
Improving Institutions
• Government Outcomes Lab on whether citizens or scientists should set the terms for social projects
• The Social Science Prediction Platform with a new forecasting challenge for academics
• A paper looking at the impact of 'Nudge Unit' interventions as they are scaled up
• A project to see to what extent a “Red Team” - people hired to criticise a scientific study with the goal to improve it - would improve the quality of the resulting work
• The Skoll Centre for Social Enterprise on strategies for implementing systems change
• John Halstead with a post on mainstream political philosophy and billionaire philanthropy
Emerging Technologies
• Markus Anderljung and Ben Garfinkel discuss their paths into the field of AI governance, and how the field has developed in recent years
• Jaime Sevilla Molina with a paper assessing the impact of quantum cryptanalysis
• Ask Me Anything with Ben Garfinkel, a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute
• DeepMind have released their 2020 lecture series with UCL
• The Centre for Security and Emerging Technology with a brief mapping out the AI-related company landscape
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
Long Term Future
• EA Global transcript of a talk by David Rhys Bernard: Estimating long-term effects without long-term data
• Michael Aird with a list of history topics it might be valuable to investigate
• EA Global transcript a Q&A with Toby Ord
• The Global Priorities Institute with recordings of their recent seminars
• ‘The Precipice’ book review
Other Links
• 80,000 Hours podcast on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system
• Innovations for Poverty Action on how to reduce police violence by building effective police organisations
• Clement Kao with a product managers guide to effective altruism
• Clearer Thinking with a new program to help create new daily habits
• A new paper looking at how donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness
