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These monthly posts originated as the "Updates" section of the EA Newsletter.
You can also see last month's updates, or a repository of past newsletters (including past organization updates).
80K added over 100 new jobs to their job board. They also released two new podcasts:
They also put out another entry in their “anonymous advice” series: What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?
Animal Charity Evaluators recently published a blog post summarizing the results from their compensation strategy survey. They also published a six-month progress report from their Recommended Charity Fund recipients.
In 2020, BERI’s main focus will be almost exclusively on their collaborations program, which supports projects with the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and the Future of Humanity Institute. In particular, BERI is winding down their grants program. Along with this narrower scope, BERI will reduce their core staff count to between 1 and 1.5 full-time employees before the end of the year. For more details, see this blog post.
“Learning Generalized Models by Interrogating Black-Box Autonomous Agents,” a paper by CHAI affiliate Siddharth Srivastava and PhD student Pulkit Verma, was accepted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020 Workshop on Generalization in Planning.
CHAI researcher Rohin Shah wrote a detailed review of public work in AI alignment in 2019, with some inclusions from 2018.
CEA has now announced four EAGx conferences for 2020, in Berlin, Singapore, Canberra, and New York City. Visit the EA Global website to see conference dates, as well as information about applying or volunteering.
Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) will open the next round of applications for their 2020 Incubation Program in March. Sign up for their newsletter to be notified when applications open. In the meantime, you can take the CE Resource Quiz, which provides a personalized reading list that can help you prepare for the application process and learn more about launching a high-impact charity.
If you’d like to learn more about the types of things CE’s entrepreneurs work on, three of their incubated charities recently published introductory posts on the EA Forum: Good Policies, Animal Advocacy Careers, and Fish Welfare Initiative.
CE recently published an article outlining cost-effectiveness analysis as part of their research process, as well as “Comparing Four Cause Areas for Founding New Charities.” They’ve also begun a series of blog posts on charity entrepreneurship:
Faunalytics published a two-part blog series, "Follow The Money," which explores the economics of plant-based investing and how traditional food companies, venture capitalists, and investment brokers are responding to and driving customer desires.
Additionally, they launched Wildlife Fundamentals, an overview of issues which include public attitudes toward wildlife, exotic animal trading, wild animals used for entertainment, and climate change and conservation.
Applications for FHI’s DPhil scholarships are open until 23 February. Applications for their AI Alignment Visiting Fellowship Program (summer 2020) are open until 28 February.
Researchers at the Centre of the Governance of AI released their full report on the Windfall Clause, a proposed policy lever to mitigate possible negative impacts of transformative breakthroughs in AI capabilities. The Centre also released their 2019 annual report.
Other papers published by FHI researchers and collaborators this month include:
FLI released a podcast with Yuval Noah Harari and Max Tegmark — their most popular episode to date. They also released episodes with David Pearce and Andrés Gómez Emilsson and with Anthony Aguirre. Finally, they released the FLI Book Guide, which lists some of their favorite books on existential risk, technology, and more.
In a recent blog post, GiveWell highlights a case that illustrates how thinking through various factors can lead to surprising information that changes one’s understanding of a charity’s impact.
GiveWell also published pages describing the following grants:
GCRI is hiring for the position of junior research assistant and project manager to support GCRI research and administration, with an initial focus on AI projects. The position is available only to people based in the U.S., on either a full-time or part-time basis.
GCRI also announced an open call for people interested in seeking advice and/or collaborating on GCRI's AI projects, which focus on a wide range of issues: collective action, corporate governance, ethics, expert judgment, global strategy, international institutions, national security, R&D programs, and safety practices.
Open Philanthropy announced grants including $3 million to Essie Justice Group to organize women with incarcerated loved ones for criminal justice reform, $750,000 to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth to hire a director of macroeconomic policy and research staff, $250,000 to Stanford University to support student education about global catastrophic risks, and $100,000 to the Center for Global Development to support an evaluation of past impact.
Rethink Priorities, a project of Rethink Charity, continued to publish analysis of the 2019 EA Survey with an evaluation of the geographic distribution of respondents. They also assessed statistics, welfare considerations, and possible interventions around snail farming, as well as partisan differences in the rates of vegetarianism and veganism in the United States.
Their collaboration with the EA Giving Tuesday team facilitated ~$1.1 million in donations and ~$563,000 in matching funds from Facebook to effective charities. Rethink Charity moved ~$90,000 for EA Giving Tuesday donors, ~$67,000 of which was matched by Facebook.
RC Forward regranted more than $2 million CAD in 2019 across nearly two dozen effective charities.
Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) published their first two papers in academic journals:
TLYCS is working to capitalize on the momentum generated by the launch of the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save by building partnerships, conducting media engagements, and consulting with donors.
The Giving Games Project has supported a number of Giving Games, notably at OxFID 2020, the largest student-led development conference in Europe (a collaboration between The Blavatnik School of Government, the New York Times, and the United Nations Development Programme).
TLYCS staff Jon Behar and Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn ran an "Ask Me Anything" session on the EA Forum, which you can see here.
