EA Updates for September 2020

UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS

If you're interested in finding out about events as they are posted, you can stay up to date with the EA Online Events Facebook group or EA Events Google calendar.
 

2nd October - How We Can do The Most Good? With Will MacAskill

3rd & 4th October - Giving What We Can 5,000 Member Celebration

7th October - Introduction to Effective Altruism with Will MacAskill and Habiba Islam

7th October - Anthropogenic Biorisks with Chris Bakerlee

16th October - How much can we give? With Julia Wise and Steve Hind

24th - 25th October - EA Student Summit 2020

30th October - What could end the world and what can we do about it? With Toby Ord

2nd November - Animal Advocacy Careers Workshop (One session a week for 9 weeks)

9th November - Chloe Cockburn: Effective Giving and BLM

21st - 22nd November - EAGxAsia-Pacific 2020

LATEST RESEARCH AND UPDATES

META

• Giving What We Can have hit the 5,000 member milestone with people pledging to give at least 10% of their lifetime incomes to effective charities. See the update and video message from Giving What We Can here
• William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord with a new book on moral uncertainty, available to download for free
• Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it
• 80,000 Hours with five philosophies of career success
• The Legal Priorities Project has been set up to conduct legal research that tackles some of the world’s most pressing problems 
• Founders Pledge on their plans for seed funding promising nonprofits
• EA organisation updates for August 2020
• 80,000 Hours with notes on good judgement and how to develop it
• A transcript of a talk by Owen Cotton-Barratt on how effective altruism can improve the world, discussing some key EA related concepts
• Benjamin Todd with more empirical data on 'value drift'
• David Bernard with an introduction to global priorities research for economists
• Marcus Daniell is looking to set up a new organisation for pro-athletes interested in effective altruism
• Rachel Baxter on why you should think carefully before setting up a nonprofit
• Grayden Reece-Smith on giving now vs later

GRANTS

• Open Phil have made 13 grants recently with a total value of $7,004,000
  • $2,763,000 - Scientific research
    • $2,000,000 - VST Bio — Stroke Treatment
    • $415,000 - Universal Flu Drug Research
  • $1,865,000 - Criminal justice reform
    • $1,500,000 - Movement Voter Project
  • $1,389,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
    • $500,000 - RSPCA - Farm Animal Welfare Advocacy in Asia
    • $350,000 - Catalyst — Farm Animal Welfare in Thailand
  • $987,000 - Early-Career Funding for Global Catastrophic Biological Risks — Scholarship Support
• Long-Term Future Fund, September 2020 and April 2020 grants

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

• The Gates Foundation have released their 2020 Goalkeepers report, looking at how we have regressed on many of the sustainable development goals for the first time
• The OECD with their State of Fragility 2020 report
• Grow is a new job board for opportunities in global health
• The Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre has been set up to enhance the understanding of modern slavery and transform the effectiveness of laws and policies designed to overcome it
• GiveWell has updated the Maximum Impact Fund, formerly known as "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion"
• The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation with visualisations of global health financing for 2019 and pandemic preparedness investment
• Think Global Health looking at how COVID-19 compares to other causes of death around the world
• IHME looking at universal healthcare coverage around the world
• EA Global transcript: Rachel Waddell on GiveDirectly’s emergency cash response to COVID-19
• Kelsey Piper writing for Vox on how extreme poverty is getting worse across the globe for the first time in decades
• Sendwave is expanding to Bangladesh
• Saloni Dattani with The story of Viktor Zhdanov, who spearheaded the project to eradicate smallpox

ANIMAL WELFARE

• Lewis Bollard looking at political opportunities for farm animals in Europe
• Animal Advocacy Careers have an online course looking at the key considerations involved in working to help animals
• A new series of the Future Perfect podcast looking at animal welfare
• Abraham Rowe looking at the scale of direct human impact on invertebrates

EXISTENTIAL & CATASTROPHIC RISKS

• Seth Baum with the paper 'Quantifying the Probability of Existential Catastrophe: A Reply to Beard et al.'
• EA Global transcript: Kevin Esvelt on mitigating catastrophic biorisks

ENVIRONMENT 

• David Roberts with a road map for building a US energy innovation ecosystem
• Our World in Data with an overview of greenhouse gas emissions, they also joined up with Kurzgesagt to make a video about climate change
• EA Global transcript: Johannes Ackva on Founders Pledge update to their thinking on climate change
• Scott Carpenter writing for Forbes on new nuclear reactor designs

LONG TERM FUTURE

• The BBC with an article looking at whether we are living at the 'hinge of history'
• The Open Philanthropy Project have early-career funding for individuals interested in improving the long-term future
• 80,000 Hours podcast looking at varieties of longtermism
• An ask me anything with Tobias Baumann, co-founder of the Center for Reducing Suffering
• Sam Hilton looking at potential mistakes that could be made when thinking of an uncertain future
• Ben Garfinkel asking 'Does economic history point toward a singularity?'
• An ask me anything with Owen Cotton-Barratt, Research Scholars Programme director at the Future of Humanity Institute

EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

• The Future of Life Institute with an overview of lethal autonomous weapons
• A podcast with Peter Railton on moral learning and metaethics in AI systems
• Dahlia Peterson from Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology discussing facial recognition technology and it's uses
• The National Quantum Computing Centre has been set up with a £93 million investment by UK Research and Innovation
• Open Philanthropy with a new report on how much computational power it takes to match the human brain
• An ask me anything with Markus Anderljung, project manager at the Centre for the Governance of AI
• Allan Defoe with a post on opportunity and theory of impact in AI governance
• Julia Chen with an article exploring deepfakes across the United States and China
• An interview with Sébastien Krier discussing AI and the UK government

IMPROVING INSTITUTIONS

• An overview of the UK's Strategic Priorities Fund, consisting of 34 programmes with a combined total investment of around £830,000,000. These cover areas including environment, productivity, AI, infrastructure, health and biology
• A paper looking at whether laypeople can predict which social-science studies will be replicated successfully
•  Nick Bostrom, Haydn Belfield and Sam Hilton have submitted written evidence to the UK Parliament Science & Technology Committee's inquiry on a new UK research funding agency

OTHER LINKS

• Clearer Thinking with the principles of prioritisation
• José González with a musical livestream raising funds for charities supported by The Life You Can Save 
• A profile of Chuck Feeney who has given away the vast majority of his wealth, over $8,000,000,000, to charity
• Stefan Schubert on how people react when they first encounter global priorities research
• A post looking at correlations between cause prioritisation and the big five personality traits
• Michelle Hutchinson on asking for advice
• Lynette Bye with a post for people trying to improve the world who are burdened with the persistent, negative feeling of never doing enough
• Founders Pledge with a report on psychedelic-assisted mental health treatments
• Michelle Hutchinson on parenting - 'Things I wish I could tell my past self'
• Rob Wiblin on 'those tasks you can't even bear to think about'
• Jess Whittlestone on building collaborative research teams
• Max Daniel with a post on giving and receiving feedback

GOOD NEWS

• Togo is the first African country to end sleeping sickness as a public health problem
• Poland is set to ban fur farming
• Pneumonia vaccine price has dropped by 43%, expanding the protection against one of the world’s deadliest diseases for millions of children