After recent events in Ukraine, Samotsvety convened to update our probabilities of nuclear war. In March 2022, at the beginning of the Ukraine war, we were at ~0.01% that London would be hit with a nuclear weapon in the next month. Now, we are at ~0.02% for the next 1-3 months, and at 16% that Russia uses any type of nuclear weapon in Ukraine. At the end of the post, we reflect on the size of our update, and what this means about our accuracy. 

Expected values are more finicky and more person-dependent than probabilities, and readers are encouraged to enter their own estimates, for which we provide a template. We’d guess that readers would lose 2 to 300 hours by staying in London in the next 1–3 months,...

Hi everyone, 

I have been interested in EA for quite some time but up until now just sticked to donating and haven’t actively worked on a project so far.

Now I recently stumbled upon an idea based on the fact that more and more people in extreme poverty have access to their own smartphones as they are getting more affordable. The idea is basically as if GiveDirectly and DonorSee had a baby which is an app that connects donors and people in need directly that allows them to communicate via chat and audio/video call so they can get to know each other and become friends and enables donors to send money directly to his match through the app which uses the the mobile banking systems prevalent in many African...

Cross-posted from Bessie O'Dell - Blog.

According to a flagship Effective Altruism (EA) organisation, you have 80,000 hours in your career over a lifetime: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. But does this hold true for women? And if not, what are the implications of this (and related assumptions) for the EA research community and the practical EA community?
 

Executive Summary

• Effective Altruism is a movement centred around facilitating people doing the most amount of good.
• A number of organisations and groups are dedicated to offering careers advice guided by EA principles. This includes 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can.
• Women* are often not explicitly considered when EA-focused organisations provide life & careers advice. The default for earning potential (and contributing work hours) appears centred on

epistemic status: I am fairly confident that the overall point is underrated right now, but am writing quickly and think it's reasonably likely the comments will identify a factual error somewhere in the post. 

Risk seems unusually elevated right now of a serious nuclear incident, as a result of Russia badly losing the war in Ukraine. Various markets put the risk at about 5-10%, and various forecasters seem to estimate something similar. The general consensus is that Russia, if they used a nuclear weapon, would probably deploy a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, probably in a way with a small number of direct casualties but profoundly destabilizing effects. 

A lot of effective altruists have made plans to leave major cities if Russia uses a nuclear weapon,...

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Plant, Matt Lerner and Rosie Bettle for their helpful comments and advice.

Summary

Understanding the relationship between wellbeing and economic growth is a topic that is of key importance to Effective Altruism (e.g. see Hillebrandt and Hallstead, Clare and Goth). In particular, a key disagreement regards the Easterlin Paradox; the finding that happiness^[1] varies with income across countries and between individuals, but does not seem to vary significantly with a country’s income as it changes over time. Michael Plant recently wrote an excellent post summarizing this research. He ends up mostly agreeing with Richard Easterlin’s latest paper arguing that the Easterlin Paradox still holds; suggesting that we should look to approaches other than economic growth to boost happiness. I agree with Michael Plant...

I'd like to thank John Mori and Mckay Jensen for their helpful feedback. Any errors are my own.

Note: I am not an expert on this topic, and I have little background knowledge on corporate governance. Please be skeptical and point out mistakes.

This post is about doing good by changing the behavior of for-profit companies. The main examples of this within EA are corporate animal welfare improvements. For popular EA causes, plenty of other possibilities exist, such as improving the labor standards of companies operating in poor countries or improving the safety standards of AI and biotechnology companies^[1].

One possible way to bring about corporate behavior change is through shareholder activism. Shareholder activism has been covered in a few recent EA articles. Relative to those articles, the contribution of this...