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EA Organization Updates: April-May 2022
19 min read ·
These monthly posts originated as the "Updates" section of the EA Newsletter. Organizations submit their own updates, which we edit for clarity.
Job listings that these organizations highlighted are at the bottom of this post. Some of the jobs have extremely pressing deadlines.
You can see previous updates at the "EA Organization Updates (monthly series)" topic page, or in our repository of past newsletters. Notice that there’s also an “org update” tag, where you can find more news and updates.
We’ve decided to cycle through the alphabet in order to showing the same organizations at the top of the updates every month (starting this month). So the organizations here are listed from G-Z, and then from A-F.
This month's update is for all of April and half of May. Going forward, the updates will probably be going out mid-month.
Research updates
Organizational update
GiveWell's managing director, Buddy Shah, has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a major global health organization. Read more in this blog post.
Giving Green recently released four new research reports, covering enhanced soil carbon management, restoring and protecting wetlands, cutting short-lived climate pollutants, and food sector emissions. The research team has identified promising areas for potential charity or offset recommendations, including: restoring and preserving coastal wetlands, reducing methane emissions from livestock, and alternative meats.
Giving Green also wrote a piece for the Stanford Social Innovation Review covering its research into the carbon offsets and removals market. The piece argues that net-zero is an unrealistic goal for most companies, and advocates instead for a focus on (a) sharp emissions reductions and (b) providing catalytic early funding to carbon removal technologies.
Giving Green spoke about its cost-effectiveness analyses and stance on net-zero in a recent webinar, which was quoted in Energy Monitor.
Giving What We Can was featured in a profile from Oxford University which covers the development of the organisation over time and the success that Giving What We Can has seen since it was started.
Head of Marketing, Grace Adams, delivered a presentation as part of EAGxOxford on “What we’re learning about spreading EA ideas”. This presentation and the results of the marketing testing that has been conducted will be available in May.
Giving What We Can has now given out over 800 books on EA in response to the Stuff You Should Know Podcast episode called “How Effective Altruism Works”.
On April 13, Executive Director Seth Baum delivered a remote talk to EA UC Berkeley titled “Limits of the Value Alignment Paradigm” as part of the EA Berkeley AI Value Alignment Speaker Series.
On April 21, Deputy Director McKenna Fitzgerald delivered a remote talk to Let’s Phi titled “Ethics for Preventing Global Catastrophe”.
The Happier Lives Institute updated their cost-effectiveness comparison of psychotherapy and cash transfers to include an estimate of the effects on other household members. They now estimate that StrongMinds is 9 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly (a slight reduction from 12 times in their previous analysis).
HLI also published its 2021 Annual Review. Although the cost-effectiveness analyses of cash transfers, psychotherapy, and StrongMinds consumed most of their research capacity last year, they also published an updated research agenda and a new global priority report on mental health, to accompany their earlier report on pain.
Additionally, HLI is hiring for a Senior Researcher, a Grants Strategist, and an Operations Manager. If you want to get a better feel for what it’s like working at HLI, you may enjoy these blog posts on life as a researcher and an operations manager by members of their team.
The Humane League’s (THL) Restaurant Roast Campaign was a massive success. Bloomin’ Brands, Telepizza, Cheesecake Factory and Panda Express all released cage-free policies. Food Delivery Brands, parent company to Restaurant Roast target Telepizza, made a global cage-free egg policy along with Cheesecake Factory, which also released a global cage-free policy. By the end of this year, it commits to sourcing 100% cage-free eggs in its bakery operations (which account for the majority of its egg usage, while all remaining eggs will be cage-free by 2030). And Panda Express officially released its global cage-free policy.
Major retailers CVS — the 7th largest retailer in North America — and Walgreens committed to sell only cage-free eggs by the end of this year. CVS moved up the date on their commitment by three years first (and published its ESG report, see p. 67), and then THL decided to use this win as an opportunity to quickly take action to influence Walgreens — the closest competitor of CVS — to do the same. Less than one month after the CVS announcement, and after lots of news coverage and outreach by the THL Corporate Relations team, Walgreens announced that they will go 100% cage-free by the end of this year — also three years sooner than their original commitment.
In March, The Open Wing Alliance distributed over $2.1M in grants to 40 organizations worldwide who fight together for better treatment of chickens. Almost 15% of this year’s 40 grantees are first-time OWA grant recipients, representing Ecuador, Hungary, Portugal, India, Tanzania, and South Africa. Thanks to the support of generous donors, the OWA was also able to double the maximum grant size for renewal applicants, from $50,000 to $100,000.
IDinsight is hiring for a number of positions in Dakar, Delhi, Lusaka, Manila, Nairobi, Rabat, and Remote. To view open positions, click here.
IDinsight is also sharing its approach to measuring whether an impact evaluation is worth the cost based on the projected social benefit it may lead to. Read about the approach here.
LPP hired Mackenzie Arnold as Head of Strategy and Community Building, and David Espiritu as Operations Associate. Additionally, Jade Leung joined the board of directors. Former LPP Research Fellow Jonas Schuett joined GovAI as a full-time Research Fellow.
Longview is hiring for:
Longview is delighted to welcome:
Momentum is hiring for several open positions in San Francisco, including a product manager, various software engineers, and a product designer. If you’re interested in having a large impact while working at a fast-growing tech-startup, they’d love to chat. You can read more about their recent updates here. They’re also excited to launch a series of fundraising campaigns this month, including a fundraising partnership with 15 Major League Baseball players and a number of political fundraisers.
One for the World supported successful pledge drives at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill and Columbia University in April. They also started conversations about the next academic year with students from a number of UK, US and Canadian universities and EA Groups, following EAG London and EAGxBoston.
Anya Hunt published a post on Open Philanthropy’s hiring plans for 2022 (with an accompanying FAQ), and Claire Zabel published an update from the Longtermist EA Movement-Building team.
Open Philanthropy also announced grants including $13.3 million to MIT to support research led by Neil Thompson on modeling the trends and impacts of AI and computing, and $5 million to the Atlas Fellowship to support a summer program and scholarship funding for talented high school students.
Ought published three updates on its work:
Probably Good received a grant from Open Philanthropy to hire full-time staff, and has hired Dylan Balfour as a researcher and Anna Beth Lane as a copywriter. You can find out more details in their recent announcement post, and share your priorities for what career profiles or content they should work on here.
Rethink Priorities published several new articles:
The following outlets featured RP's work:
RP recently hosted a conference on Interspecies Comparisons of Welfare with the London School of Economics and Political Science Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT) Project. Conference sessions were recorded and will be made available.
Luisa Rodriguez has written a blog post on her experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it.
This month on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Rob Wiblin interviewed:
In 2013, almost all eggs in every store in Poland came from laying hens kept in cages, including in major retailer Kaufland’s stores. After years of tireless campaigning by AI’s team in Poland, Otwarte Klatki, that is no longer the case. Kaufland announced its decision to phase out caged eggs in 2017 and as of now, that change has been realised in advance of the retailer’s own deadline. This will affect millions of animals for the better.
Sainsbury's, the UK's 2nd biggest supermarket, has pledged to adopt the stocking density of the European Chicken Commitment for all own-brand chicken by March 2023. This commitment will improve the lives of 120,000,000 animals every year by ending overcrowded living conditions. The retailer will then meet 5 out of 6 of the requirements of the ECC, continuing to use fast-growing breeds. AI will continue to campaign for Sainsbury's and all other UK supermarkets to adopt the policy in full. Many dedicated groups worked to achieve this progress, including AI’s Open Cages in the UK which released two high-profile investigations into Sainsbury's chicken farms (here and here.)
ACE’s Menu of Outcomes blog series explores different animal advocacy interventions and highlights real-world examples from charities across the movement. In their latest post, ACE looks at interventions to encourage and support individuals to decrease their consumption of animal products, and highlights some of the ways ACE’s Recommended Charities and Movement Grants recipients encourage people to spare animals' lives by consuming fewer animal products. Learn more here.
ACE is seeking a General Researcher to join its team in evaluating animal charities, assisting with our grantmaking, and keeping up to date with research relevant to ACE program decisions. This position will involve developing and implementing research project activities, executing research projects, and conducting data analysis and program evaluation. If you have strong reasoning, research, and communications skills, ACE invites you to apply! Apply here today.
The Animal Ethics website is available in 10 languages, now including Romanian. Concern for animals and animal advocacy has grown substantially in Romanian-speaking countries in recent decades. Animal Ethics is helping to speed up this process by adding the language to its website.
As part of their participation in the World Day for the End of Fishing, held on March 26, Animal Ethics created and shared a video documenting the suffering of fish caused by the fishing industry.
An increasing number of cryptocurrency donors will match other donations made in cryptocurrency, making donating with crypto very impactful. Not everyone is comfortable working with crypto, so Animal Ethics can walk donors through the entire process. Contact the organization if you would like to help them build an endowment for the future.
BERI published two new efforts at transparency: a blog post titled What does BERI do and why is it important? and results from their first public survey of university collaboratorators.
In addition, BERI received a $135,000 grant from the Long-Term Future Fund to support their collaboration with the Interactive Autonomy and Collaborative Technologies Laboratory (InterACT) at UC Berkeley.
On March 1, Brian Christian spoke with UC Berkeley students as part of the AI Value Alignment Speaker Series, organized by Mahendra Prasad. The talk was a Q&A about his book The Alignment Problem. Read more about the Speaker Series and Brain Christian’s talk here.
On March 29, the LAILEC Conference, co-located with the EUH4D Data Forum and the SAS Project Event, kicked off with parallel panel discussions. On the AI track, Prof. Tom Lenaerts spoke about the challenges of dynamic safety and security risks, the responses and impact of horizontal and sectorial legal instruments (such as the proposed AI Act, Cybersecurity Act, Machinery Directive, product safety legislation) and the need for adapted design approaches, certification/approval frameworks and monitoring requirements and process-oriented standards. Read more about the conference and its program here.
Tristan Cook joined CLR and published a replication and extension of Hanson et al.’s “Grabby Aliens” model, a project he had started during his summer research fellowship.
“Commitment games with conditional information revelation,” a paper on open-source game theory by Anthony DiGiovanni and Jesse Clifiton, was accepted at the “Games, Agents, and Incentives Workshop” at AAMAS 2022.
The events team recently ran EA Global London which, at ~1,400 attendees, was the biggest EA event ever. We’d like to thank everyone who attended and contributed.
Our next community event is EAGxPrague, which takes place on 13 - 15 May (applications have now closed). It’s been five years since the last EAGxPrague conference, which helped launch the Czech EA community. The organisers are particularly excited to welcome members of the EA community from continental Europe who didn’t attend any of the recent conferences in the US and the UK.
GovAI has recently welcomed three new people to the team! Emma Blumke has joined as Research Manager, Georg Arndt has joined as Chief of Staff, and Sam Clarke will join next month to work on high-level strategy questions for the organisation. They are currently hiring for an Operations Manager and Operations Associate (Deadline: 15th May).
They will welcome a cohort of 12 Summer Fellows this June and will announce the first round of Student Research Prizes later this year. See more details and sign up to be notified when submissions open here. Toby Shevlane also recently published The Artefacts of Intelligence: Governing Scientists' Contribution to AI Proliferation.
CSER invites applications for a part-time Research Assistant (0.6 FTE) to support analysis of biological security policy, as well as emerging biological technologies and sectors in the bioeconomy. This appointment is fixed-term for 9 months. CSER supports flexible working, including finding a working pattern for this post that fits around the successful candidate's existing commitments.
Videos of CSER’s 2022 Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk are available online: Day 1 ‘Future Risks, Day 2 ‘Real Catastrophes’, and Day 3 ‘Global Solutions’.
CSER will host a public lecture on May 23. Matthew Adler (Duke) will talk about "Measuring Social Welfare, with Priority for the Worse Off". Professor Adler will talk about using social welfare functions and prioritarian principles to improve government policymaking, with a focus on fatality risk. He will argue that this approach offers considerable benefits over traditional cost-benefit analysis. Professor Adler will also give a workshop on the ethical foundations of fatality risk regulation prior to his lecture, please contact us directly at [email protected] if you are interested in attending.
Some other updates:
Charity Entrepreneurship is scaling and focusing on doubling the quality and quantity of new charities started through their Incubation Program. They are now looking for 3 new team members – Research Analyst, Foundation Program Lead, Recruitment & Outreach Manager – to join them in the London office (remote work also possible, apply by May 8, 2022). The applications to the 2022 Incubation Program are now closed and the applications to the 2023 program will begin in October 2022. The program will take place in February-March 2023 and focus on animal welfare and human health. Fortify Health, a charity launched by CE in 2017, has just received an $8.2 million incubation grant from GiveWell that will support the expansions of the organization’s great work in India to improve health and reduce morbidity among people with iron deficiency and anemia.
The Effective Institutions Project recently published A Landscape Analysis of Institutional Improvement Activities to identify which of the world’s institutions offer the highest-leverage opportunities for philanthropists and professionals seeking to improve world outcomes over the next 10-100 years.
With new support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, EIP is expanding its team and network of experts. Recently added advisors include Jenny Xiao (expert on China-US relations and emerging technologies), Emma Belcher (CEO of the Ploughshares Fund) and Neil “Buddy” Shah (incoming CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative).
FEM has completed its pilot campaign in northern Nigeria, reaching 5.6 million listeners with their evidence-based programs. The best estimate of the campaign's impact is that 16k women who previously had an unmet need for modern contraception now access the services.
Furthermore, FEM has received the Stars in Global Health Grant from Grand Challenges Canada. With this support, they have developed a new technological solution that makes it possible to conduct randomised controlled trials on radio-based interventions.
FEM is now hiring a Director of Operations to join the senior management team and build the organisation’s operational capacity as they scale to new locations.
Faunalytics celebrated their 22nd anniversary by highlighting 22 species that have been previously covered in their Research Library and Original Research. Other recent blog posts include a guest article by Allie Granger from Animal Welfare Institute on Extinguishing Barn Fires, and Including Animals in Health and Environmental Advocacy by NYU’s Animal Studies Program Director Jeff Sebo.
New library summaries include a look at bees surviving in urban ecosystems, noting that flower quality is more important than quantity for wild bees, and research on the aquaculture industry’s double threat of antimicrobial resistance and climate change. EAs can support Faunalytics’ research and resources by joining Faunalytics’ monthly giving program, the DataBASE.
Faunalytics is conducting their annual Community Survey and is requesting feedback from the EAA community. The survey is used to evaluate the impact of their research and learn how to improve the resources they provide. The survey should only take five minutes to complete, and participants have the option of entering to win a $100 gift card or animal charity donation.
In China, FWI recently co-hosted the Aquatic Animal Welfare Forum at the (virtual) World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare. To their knowledge, this is the first conference in China to feature a discussion of aquatic animal welfare, and at one point had over 15,000 attendees.
In India, FWI hosted two more fish welfare workshops for farmers. The purpose of these workshops is both to increase farmer interest and capacity to implement higher welfare practices as well as to increase institutional buy-in to fish welfare. Learn more here.
FWI was also honored to be one of the recipients of a substantial portion of Peter Singer’s $1 million Berggruen Prize.
Founders Pledge published a cause area report on longtermist institutional reform and has recently concluded re-evaluations of a number of its recommended funding opportunities, including the Innovation in Government Initiative, Teaching at the Right Level Africa, and Philip Tetlock’s second-generation forecasting work.
FP’s funds have also been active. In Q1, FP’s Global Health and Development Fund disbursed approximately $350,000, including a grant made at GiveWell’s recommendation to fund follow-up work on the DeWorm3 study. Johannes Ackva, manager of FP’s Climate Change Fund, delivered talks on climate philanthropy for the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative and at EA Global in London. FP will soon be hiring a researcher to work with Johannes on his climate research — keep an eye out for a job posting!
This month, Founders Pledge will release a new report on lethal autonomous weapons systems and the threat they pose to global stability, along with funding recommendations that could help mitigate that threat. For the remainder of the quarter, researchers at FP will be tackling research projects on oral health, lead remediation, and air pollution, and investigating potential funding opportunities to increase childhood vaccination rates, reduce neonatal mortality, and accelerate drug development.
Sorted by organizations, G-Z, A-H
GiveWell:
Happier Lives Institute:
The Humane League:
Longview Philanthropy:
Momentum:
Open Philanthropy:
Ought:
Wild Animal Initiative:
80,000 Hours:
Centre for Effective Altruism - Operations Team:
Charity Entrepreneurship:
Effective Institutions Project:
Family Empowerment Media:
You can also see more job listings at the "Job listing (open)" topic.
MATS is extending applications until May 22nd for its SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program 2022. More info: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nSyvMy3QQTyBzybNx/seri-ml-alignment-theory-scholars-program-2022