Link post for 2022 October EA Updates.
Top Posts
- Holden Karnofsky - EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous
- Eli Lifland - My take on What We Owe the Future
- A post announcing the Future Fund's AI Worldview Prize, with prizes ranging from $15k to $1.5M for work that informs the Future Fund's fundamental assumptions about the future of AI
- A highly upvoted post on the forum red teaming CEA’s community building work
- Sawyer - EA is too reliant on personal connections
- Announcing EA Pulse, large monthly US surveys on EA
- Vadim Albinsky - Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research
- Eleos Arete Citrini - Switzerland fails to ban factory farming - lessons for the pursuit of EA-inspired policies?
Upcoming Events
Global
- September to December - Prague Fall Season
- 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual - Apply by October 19th
- November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
- 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam - Admissions close 23rd October
- 24th-26th November - Eastern Europe Community Building Retreat
- 2nd-4th December - EAGxBerkeley
- 7th-8th January - EAGxLatinAmerica
Virtual
- 6th October - What’s the most effective way to help as many animals as possible?, Talk by Charity Entrepreneurship
- 9th October - Giving What We Can Meetup
- October/November - High Impact Medicine Fellowship, Apply by 9th October
- EA Virtual Programmes
- 29th October - Intro Course to EA for Christians
Meta
- David Manheim - "Doing Good Best" isn't the EA ideal
- Luke Freeman - We’re still (extremely) funding constrained (but don’t let fear of getting funding stop you trying).
- Nathan Young - Summaries are underrated
- Giving What We Can - Marketing Messages Trial for GWWC Giving Guide Campaign
- Sam Freedman - The Politics of Effective Altruism
- Jehan - Chesterton Fences and EA’s X-risks
- Ronja - EA for people with non-technical skillsets
- Rudolf - Much EA value comes from being a Schelling point
- Akash - 13 background claims about EA
- Sabrina C - Young EAs should choose projects more carefully
- Richard Ren - What is neglectedness, actually?
- Jordan Arel - Why Wasting EA Money is Bad
- Vaidehi Agarwalla - Sprinting & Marathoning: Two Strategies for Volunteering your Time
- Thomas Kwa - EA forum content might be declining in quality. Here are some possible mechanisms
- Jeremiah Johnson asking why EA isn't spending more effort on influencing individual donations
- Chana Messinger
- Evie Cottrell - "Agency" needs nuance
- High Impact Professionals
- Fundraising Campaigns at Your Organization: A Reliable Path to Counterfactual Impact
- Key Factors for Success in Organizing a Fundraising Campaign at Your Company
- If you're interested in seeing what a campaign could look like at your organisation, you can contact federico@highimpactprofessionals.org
New Projects
- Research in Effective Altruism and Political Science aims to create a community of researchers interested in governance, politics and EA
- Asterix are sending out their first quarterly EA inspired magazine soon, sign up here
- Rachel Norman - Announcing the Rethink Priorities Special Projects Program
- High-Impact Psychology are piloting a global network for psychologists
- Effective Developers aims to help software developers and people running software projects in the EA community
- The Tarbell Fellowship - A one year programme for early-career journalists intent on improving the world - 9th October
- Pineapple Operations has expanded to include anyone interested in operations work in EA
- Céline Galletti and Camille Fayet have launched Better Matters, a student magazine based on effective altruism
- There are new sub forums on the EA forum for bioethics and software engineering
- Carson Ezell, Madeleine Chang and Olaf Willner - Announcing the Space Futures Initiative
- Luca Parodi introducing School of Thinking, an English and Italian media startup
- There is an effective jobs board that you can vote on, set up by Nathan Young
- CEA Ops is now Effective Ventures - a federation of organisations and projects working to have a large positive impact in the world
- Sofia Fogel - Announcing the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program
- Quantified Intuitions: An epistemics training website including a new EA-themed calibration app
Movement building
- A post by me on the mistakes of focusing too much on student community building
- Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from an EA India retreat
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups
- Cold Button Issues - Smart Movements Start Academic Disciplines
- Amy Labenz - CEA's Events Team is Hiring!
- Chana Messinger - Transparency for undermining the weird feelings around systematizing community building
EA Ideas Explained
- Luke Muehlhauser - Reasoning Transparency
- Alana Horowitz Friedman
Critiques
- Peter Wildeford - 21 criticisms of EA I'm thinking about
- Ruth Grace - Evaluating large-scale movement building: A better way to critique Open Philanthropy's criminal justice reform
- Rohit - Effective Altruism is a constant fight against Knightian uncertainty
- Yonatan Cale - Criticism of the 80k job board listing strategy
- Thomas Aitken - The Role of "Economism" in the Belief-Formation Systems of Effective Altruism
- Connor Tabarrok - EA Worries and Criticism
- Akash - Criticism of EA Criticisms: Is the real disagreement about cause prio?
- Francis - Prediction Markets are Somewhat Overrated Within EA
EA Global
- Scott Alexander with a suggestion to make EA global open access
- Dion with her closing speech at EAGx Singapore
- Constance Li - Case Study of EA Global Rejection + Criticisms/Solutions
- Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from EAGx Singapore
Careers
- Madhav Malhotra - Internship Lessons at the Happier Lives Institute
- Hear This Idea podcast with Michael Aird on how to do impact-driven research
- 80,000 Hours - Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career?
- Gabriel Mukobi - Levelling Up in AI Safety Research Engineering
- Dan Pandori - Offering FAANG-style mock interviews
Prizes
- GiveWell have announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of their cost-effectiveness analyses
- The Truman Prize: Rewarding Anonymous EA Work ($100,000 in prizes)
- $13,000 of prizes for changing our minds about who to fund (Clearer Thinking Regrants Forecasting Tournament)
- $5,000 challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career paths
Grants
- Open Philanthropy have made 24 grants recently, with a value of $25 million
- $8,000,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
- $3,600,000 - Compassion in World Farming - Broiler Chicken Welfare and Efforts to End Cages and Crates
- $2,500,000 - Sinergia Animal - Farm Animal Welfare in Southeast Asia and Latin America
- $1,500,000 - World Animal Protection - Farm Animal Welfare in Asia
- $6,800,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
- $4,800,000 - Center for a New American Security - Work on AI Governance
- $2,000,000 - Epoch
- $4,600,000 - Global Health & Development
- $3,400,000 - Bridges to Prosperity - Trailbridge Building RCT in Rwanda
- $1,000,000 - Center for Global Development
- $4,000,000 - Transformative Basic Science
- Oregon Health and Science University - Research on Oocyte Production
- $550,000 - Effective Altruism Community Growth
- Apollo Fellowship - Effective Altruism Debate Camp
- University of Edinburgh - Effective Altruism Psychology Course
- Universidad de Sevilla - Course on Effective Altruism
- Peter McIntyre - Effective Altruism Community Building Projects
- $400,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
- $400,000 - Longtermism
- Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative - SERI Summer Fellowships
- $8,000,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
- The Future Fund has made 14 grants in August, with a value of $6.4 million
- $2,900,000 - Longview Philanthropy
- $1,000,000 - Fund for Alignment Research
- $800,000 - VIVID
- $350,000 - University of California, Santa Cruz, Cihang Xie
- $300,000 - ALLFED
- $290,000 - University of Pennsylvania, Professor Geoff Goodwin
- $200,000 - HR Luna Park
Global Development
- The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria didn't hit its $18 billion replenishment target, although the final tally of $14.25 billion exceeded the amount raised in the last pledging cycle
- Open Philanthropy have announced the winners of their cause exploration prizes
- Top prize - Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants by Ben Stewart.
- Second prizes
- Violence against women and girls by Akhil Bansal
- Sickle Cell Disease
- Shareholder activism by S Behmer
- Bastian Herre - The world has recently become less democratic
- Charles Kenny with a post suggesting that people interested in EA should work at the Centre for Global Development
- GiveWell - The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund
- Leo - Assessing Cost Effectiveness: malnutrition, famine, and cause prioritization
- Rosie Bettle - How Founders Pledge use (and sometimes don't use) DALYs
- The Gates Foundation with an update on the Sustainable Development Goals
- India develops its first cervical cancer vaccine
- Yonatan Cale - Zzapp Malaria: More effective than bed nets? (Wanted: CTO, COO & Funding)
- Joel Tan - Value of Statistical Life Estimates vs Community Perspective Evaluations
Animal Welfare
- Kenny Torrella looking at the history and future of animal product consumption
- An Evaluation of Animal Charity Evaluators
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project
- Sofia Balderson with the September edition of Impactful Animal Advocacy Newsletter
- Max Carpendale - Pathways to victory: How can we end animal agriculture?
- Animal Ask and Ren Springlea - CCTV cameras in slaughterhouses: Modest benefits for animal welfare
- GWWC podcast with Neil Dullaghan on using research & strategic thinking to help animals effectively
- Animal Advocacy Careers - The impact we achieved to date
Alternative Proteins
- Fai - Could it be a (bad) lock-in to replace factory farming with alternative protein?
- Seren L. Kell - How researchers can join the race to develop new ways of making meat
- The UK's Ivy Farm has opened the largest cultivated meat pilot plant in Europe
Biosecurity
- The World Bank has set up a new financial intermediary fund for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response to strengthen capabilities in low- and middle-income countries with over $1.4 billion in financial commitments already announced
- Byron Cohen - Biosecurity challenges posed by Dual-Use Research of Concern
- Hear This Idea podcast with Tessa Alexanian and Janvi Ahuja on synthetic biology and GCBRs
- Andy Graham and Tsmilton - Developing Next Gen PPE to Reduce Biorisks
- Open Philanthropy Biosecurity Scholarships - Apply by 11th October
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
- Kelsey Piper - How to stop rolling the dice on the destruction of human civilization
- Ethan Siegel - The biggest challenges of redirecting a killer asteroid
- Rani Martin - The Pugwash Conferences and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a case study of Track II diplomacy
- James R looking at what potential fellowship schemes/secondments could look like for tackling existential threats
- NASA’s DART mission hits asteroid in first planetary defense test
- WHO has released a global guidance framework for the responsible use of the life sciences: mitigating biorisks and governing dual-use research
- The Neoliberal podcast with Christine Parthemore discussing the risks from nuclear and biological weapons
- Lingnan University has set up the Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre
- The Future of Life Institute has a request for proposals targeting research on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons use and nuclear war, initial deadline 15th November. They are planning on granting at least $3,000,000
Improving Institutions & Metascience
- Sophia Brown - Improving "Improving Institutional Decision-Making": A brief history of IIDM
- Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg - Tearing down the academic research paywall could come with a price
- The Foresight Institute podcast with Tom Kalil, Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures
- The Center for Open Science looking at the new policy update from the White House Office of Science Technology & Policy ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research
Progress Studies
- Big Think has an issue focused on progress, including contributions from Tyler Cowen, Hannah Ritchie, Jason Crawford, Saloni Dattani and Rutger Bregman
- Jason Crawford - Towards a philosophy of safety
Environment
- Hannah Ritchie - Why being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one
- Turchin - A Pin and a Balloon: Anthropic Fragility Increases Chances of Runaway Global Warming
- A new report analysing the environmental benefits of agricultural research and development
- Vasco Grilo - Longterm cost-effectiveness of Founders Pledge's Climate Change Fund
- Cullen O'Keefe - Contra Appiah Defending Defending "Climate Villains"
Longtermism
- Future Matters newsletter on Supervolcanoes, AI takeover and What We Owe the Future
- Cold Button Issues - The Base Rate of Longtermism Is Bad
- Julian Hazell - A more convincing case for longtermism
- Thomaaas - The discount rate is not zero
- Brian Kateman - Optimistic “Longtermism” Is Terrible For Animals
- Dan Luu - Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
- Benjamin Todd on four types of Longtermism
- Garrison Lovely - The Socialist Case for Longtermism
- Michael Dickens - Should Patient Philanthropists Invest Differently?
- Dwarkesh Patel - Evaluation of Longtermist Institutional Reform
- William Macaskill writing in the Big Think - What NASA’s Spaceguard can teach us about our uncertain future
- Sigal Samuel writing for Vox about longtermism
- Richard Ren - Systemic Cascading Risks: Relevance in Longtermism & Value Lock-In
AI Policy
- Mauricio - AI Governance Needs Technical Work
- Matthijs Maas - Artificial Intelligence Governance under Change
- Haydn Belfield - The Rival AI Deployment Problem: a Pre-deployment Agreement as the least-bad response
- Michaël Trazzi interviewing Shahar Avin on how to strategically regulate advanced AI systems
Technical AI
- Thomas Larsen and Eli Lifland - What Everyone in Technical Alignment is Doing and Why
- Janus with a post on what it would look like if self-supervised learning created AGI or its foundation
- Akash - 7 traps that (we think) new alignment researchers often fall into
AI & Forecasting
- David Roodman with a review of Ajeya Cotra's Forecasting TAI with biological anchors
- Eli Lifland - Samotsvety's AI risk forecasts
- Michaël Trazzi interviewing Alex Lawsen on forecasting AI progress
Other AI
- Nuno Sempere - An experiment eliciting relative estimates for Open Philanthropy’s 2018 AI safety grants
- Eleni A - Alignment is hard. Communicating that, might be harder
- Fergus Q - Reasons for my negative feelings towards the AI risk discussion
- Henry J - A California Effect for Artificial Intelligence
- Mathieu Putz and Rudolf - Why we're not founding a human-data-for-alignment org
- Kat Woods & Amber Dawn - Two reasons we might be closer to solving alignment than it seems
- Michaël Trazzi interviewing Katja Grace on Slowing Down AI, AI Expert Surveys And Estimating AI Risk
Philosophy
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
- Calvin Baker - A dilemma for Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness
- Larks - The Long Reflection as the Great Stagnation
- Richard Y Chappell - Puzzles for Everyone
- William D'Alessandro - Deontology, the Paralysis Argument and altruistic longtermism
Will MacAskill Interviews
- The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
- The Atlantic
- Max Roser interviewing Will MacAskill for Intelligence Squared
Stories
- Eleni A - Talking EA to my philosophy friends
- Carmen Csilla Medina on her experience teaching at Condor Camp, an introductory retreat to EA for Brazilian students
- GWWC Podcast with Michael Noetel discussing the mistakes he made when trying to improve the world
- Sam Brown - My emotional reaction to the current funding situation
- Giving What We Can member profiles
- Fernando Martin-Gullans - Professional ballet dancer
- Rupal Ismin - Director of a research commercialisation centre at the University of Sydney
- Peter Jensen - Retired U.S. Army officer
Other Links
- A post reconciling the EA and Financial Independence movements
- Econ Talk podcast with Erik Hoel on EA, utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion
- Charlotte - Exploring (EA) Donation Parliaments
- Interview with author Rutger Bregman on effective altruism and philanthropy
- Vipul Naik - Levels of donation
- Julia Wise looking at moral aesthetics of EA compared to Quakers
- An obituary for Peter Eckersley
- Elizabeth - Impact Shares For Speculative Projects
- Sam Stowers - Altruist Dreams - a collaborative art piece from EAG SF
- Habiba Islam - A peek into the EA Forum if Hamilton characters wrote the posts
Good News
- Measles cases declined by 92% between 2002 and 2020 in southeast Asia and the death rate decreased by 97% - saving an estimated 9.3 million lives during this period
- Maternal mortality rates in Zimbabwe declined from 657 deaths per 100,000 births in 2007, to 217 per 100,000 births in 2019
- Togo has become the first country to eliminate four neglected tropical diseases
- Wind and solar top 10% of global power generation for the first time
- Italy bans slaughter of male chicks, sparing up to 40 million birds a year
- Deaths due to malaria in Tanzania have decreased by 71% from 2015 to 2021
- The murder rate in El Salvador has dropped from 18.2 per day in 2015 to 3.1 per day in 2021
- Equatorial Guinea abolishes death penalty