Link post for 2022 September EA Updates.
Top Links
- What We Owe The Future is now out, with Will MacAskill arguing for longtermism
- Giving What We Can and Longview Philanthropy have launched the Longtermism Fund, for donors looking to support longtermist work
- GiveWell with changes to their top charity recommendation criteria
- Froolow with a critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model
- John G. Halstead - Climate Change & Longtermism: new book-length report
- Rose Hadshar - What happens on the average day?
- Michael Cassidy and Lara Mani with a paper in Nature arguing that we should prepare for huge volcanic eruptions
- Benjamin Todd - Do recent breakthroughs mean transformative AI is coming sooner than we thought?
- DeepMind alignment team opinions on AGI ruin arguments
- Martin B looking at a referendum in Switzerland on whether very strict regulations should apply to agricultural animal husbandry
Events
- 16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin
- 23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.
- September to December - Prague Fall Season
- November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
- 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam - Applications now open
- 2nd-4th December - EAGxBerkeley
Virtual Events
- 4th September - Giving What We Can Meetup joined by Leah Edgerton
- 8th September - Fauna Connections: Using Data to Help Animals
- 13th September - Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share? - a debate with Peter Singer and Bryan Caplan
- 13th September - How To Get Your Project Funded - A talk by Joey Savoie from CE
- 19th September - Animal Advocacy Course - Sign up by September 18th for this 9 week course
- EA Virtual Programmes - Apply by September 25th
- 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual
Meta
- Kelsey Piper - Caring about the future doesn’t mean ignoring the present
- Tyler Maule - Historical EA funding data
- Dylan Matthews looking at the critiques of billionaires within effective altruism
- Pia Voltz - We need more recruiters in EA
- Scott Alexander - Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions
- Peter Wildeford - Notes on how prizes may fail and how to reduce the risk of them failing
- Anya Hunt and Katie Glass - Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape
- Allen Bell - EA Culture and Causes: Less is More
- Zoe Williams has started weekly summaries of EA Forum and Less Wrong posts
- Falk Lieder and Joel McGuire - Finding before funding: Why EA should probably invest more in research
- Julian Hazell - We are still in triage
- Peter Hartree - Some core assumptions of effective altruism, according to me
- Jack Lewars - EA in the mainstream media: if you're not at the table, you're on the menu
- Julian Hazell - Why I view effective giving as complementary to direct work
- Hailey Dickson - Driving Education on EA Topics Through Khan Academy
- CEA have made a new intro to EA
- James Ozden and Sam Glover - Protest movements: How effective are they?
- Sam Coggins - Should we call ourselves 'Effective Altruists'?
- If you are interested in contributing to China-related global priorities outreach you can find out more here
- CEA are looking for feedback on the updated EA Handbook
- David Janku with an update on what Effective Thesis have been up to
- Sid Efromovich with a post suggesting we should fund more infrastructure support for impactful giving
- Kirsten - 4 Ways to Give Feedback to Job or Grant Applicants
- Freedomandutility - EAs underestimate uncertainty in cause prioritisation
- Owen Cotton-Barratt - How and when should we incentivize people to leave EA bubbles and explore?
- Peter Elam - What a Large and Welcoming EA Could Accomplish
- Cinera - Are "Bad People" Really Unwelcome in EA?
- Dan Epstein - Leveraging Defaults and Social Norms in EA giving
- Kat Woods and Amber Dawn - An EA guide to hiring
- Megan Jamer - EA Giving Tuesday will likely hibernate in 2022
- Freedomandutility - Prioritisation should consider potential for ongoing evaluation alongside expected value and evidence quality
- Kendrea Beers asking if there is too much EA advertising
New Projects
- Effective Altruism Psychology Lab, a team of researchers focused on empirically studying the psychology of EA
- The Tarbell Fellowship - A one year programme for early-career journalists intent on improving the world. Apply by 9th October
- Davit Jintcharadze has set up the Opportunity Center, aiming to help Georgian students to work on the world's most pressing issues
- The Atlas Fellowship India has been set up for Indian students who want to help change the world
- James Ozden has started the Social Movement Digest, a monthly roundup of social movement related content
- There is a new community for data science/ML/AI people interested in EA
- Giving What We Can are running charity elections again this year, for school students to vote on impactful charities to donate to
- Julian Hazell with a call for people to summarise EA content
- Yonatan Cale and Soof Golan have created a new view for the 80,000 Hours job board
- A post introducing Squiggle, a programming language for probabilistic estimation
- Radio Bostrom: Audio narrations of papers by Nick Bostrom
- SEADS - a data science consultancy that offers services to EA organisations
Fellowships, Programs & Scholarships
- Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation Online PhD Short Course by the Institute for Progress - 6th September
- Effective Institutions Project - Fellowship - 9th September
- Center for AI Safety Philosophy Fellowship - 7 month fellowship for philosophy Ph.D. candidates and graduates - 30th September
- Open Philanthropy Biosecurity Scholarships - 11th October
Careers
- Toby Jolly with a post looking at how to have impact in the UK civil service
- Charity Entrepreneurship have started their own career coaching service
- Mark Xu - How to do theoretical research, a personal perspective
- Lukas Jasiunas and Isaac Esparza - A subjective account of what it's like to join an EA-aligned org without previous EA knowledge
- Pia Voltz with a job profile for people considering recruiting as a career
- Nat Goldthwaite - How avoiding drastic career changes could support EA's epistemic health and long-term efficacy
- Kevin Wei and Saad Siddiqui - A review of the Schwarzman Scholars program for EAs
- Molly - Military Service as an Option to Build Career Capital
- If you're seeking operations roles in EA in the next 1-6 months you can list yourself on the new EA operations database
- Probably Good with the career profile - Civil Service Careers in Low- and Middle-income Countries
Community building
- Kearney Capuano - Why You Should Give a TEDX Talk
- Philip Hall Andersen - Red teaming introductory EA courses
- Advice the CEA groups team gives to new university group organisers
- Sofya Lebedeva - Workflows: an experimental alternative to introductory fellowships
- A post announcing the EA Gather Town Event Hall as a global hub for online events
- Eli Rose - Open Philanthropy is still seeking proposals for outreach and community-building projects
- Julia Wise - The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community
- Open Phil is seeking bilingual people to help translate EA/EA-adjacent web content into non-English languages
Critiques
See all the entries to the Criticism and Red Teaming contest here
- Rhodri Davies - Why am I not an Effective Altruist?
- Erik Hoel - Why I am not an effective altruist
- TheOtherHannah - demographics and power structures in EA
- Aaron Bergman - Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools
- Joseph Lemien - Should EA shift away (a bit) from elite universities?
- Parth Thaya - Effective altruism is no longer the right name for the movement
- Carla Zoe Cremer with a Twitter thread critique on the lack of institutional safeguards in EA
- A post critiquing EA on the lack of expertise generally, and the 'Risks from Nuclear Weapons' series by Luisa Rodriguez specifically
- Julian Hazell - The EA community might be neglecting the value of influencing people
- Clearer Thinking podcast with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra - Critiquing Effective Altruism
- Freddie deBoer - Effective Altruism Has a Novelty Problem
- Wei Dai - Questioning the Foundations of EA
- Richard Y Chappell - The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism
- Étienne Fortier-Dubois - Aesthetics as Epistemic Humility
- Hamish Huggard - Crowdsourced Criticisms: What does EA think about EA?
Grants
- Open Philanthropy have made 112 grants recently, with a value of $132 million
- $47,300,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
- $25,000,000 - The Humane League
- $6,000,000 - Anima International
- $3,000,000 - Albert Schweitzer Foundation
- $3,000,000 - Food and Agriculture Research - Keel Bone Damage Reduction
- $37,700,000 - Human Health and Wellbeing
- $13,600,000 - New Incentives - Nigeria
- $4,600,000 - University of Connecticut Health Center - Syphilis Vaccine Development
- $4,000,000 - International Vaccine Institute - Hepatitis E Vaccine Trial
- $2,500,000 - International Vaccine Institute - Cholera Vaccine Clinical Trial
- $2,500,000 - Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur - Rural Air Quality Monitoring
- $1,000,000 - Center for Global Development
- $14,300,000 - Effective Altruism Community Growth
- $7,000,000 - Effective Altruism Funds - Re-Granting Support
- $4,250,000 - 80,000 Hours
- $1,600,000 - Charity Entrepreneurship
- $600,000 - Giving What We Can
- $8,900,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
- $2,700,000 - Rethink Priorities
- $5,700,000 - Other Areas
- $5,500,000 - Metaculus
- $5,400,000 - Longtermism
- $3,000,000 - Kurzgesagt
- $500,000 - Longview Philanthropy - Nuclear Security Grantmaking
- $3,600,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
- $3,100,000 - Land Use Reform
- $2,500,000 - Macroeconomic Stabilisation Policy
- $1,900,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
- $1,300,000 - Scientific Research
- $47,300,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
- EA Long-Term Future Fund made 34 grants worth $2,100,000
- $305,000 - EA Switzerland/PIBBSS Fellowship
- $250,000 - Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
- $250,000 - Kristaps Zilgalvis
- EA Animal Welfare Fund have made 25 grants with a value of $2,200,000
- $400,000 - Wild Animal Initiative
- $250,000 - Rethink Priorities
- $185,000 - Southeast Asia Farm Animal Welfare Fellowship
- $130,000 - Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC
Global Development
- GiveDirectly with a response to the top charities update from GiveWell
- Shakeel Hashim - Should GiveWell still recommend GiveDirectly?
- Dylan Matthews on the rise of GiveDirectly
- Lucas Lewit-Mendes - Economic losers: SoGive's review of deworming, and why we're less positive than GiveWell
- Siobhan McDonough with an article on USAID and how they are evaluating impact
- Matt HR - The Case for Funding New Long-Term Randomised Controlled Trials of Deworming
- Karthik Tadepalli - Inequality is a (small) problem for EA and economic growth
- Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, Michael Plant - To WELLBY or not to WELLBY? Measuring non-health, non-pecuniary benefits using subjective wellbeing
Animal Welfare
- The Animal & Vegan Advocacy Summit will take place in Washington, DC on October 20th-23rd, with speakers including Peter Singer, Bruce Friedrich, Leah Garcés and Lauren Mee
- The neoliberal podcast spoke to Lewis Bollard about reducing animal suffering
- Rose Hadshar - What’s alive right now?
- Kenny Torrella looking at a new study that suggests bees can feel pain
- Brian Katemen - Conservation Biologists Need To Start Caring About Actual Animals - Not Just Species
- Clearer Thinking podcast with Alene Anello discussing human bias in the definition of intelligence
- Saulius Simcikas - Lobbying governments to improve wild animal welfare
- Animal Advocacy Careers have launched a volunteer referral program
- Rachel Norman and Meghan Barrett - Research summary: brain cell counts in Black Soldier Flies
- Toby Tremlett - Philosophical Argument Isn't Enough In Animal Ethics
- Animal Ask - Maximising impact: the case for research to support animal advocacy efforts
Biosecurity
- CEA have a new service to connect people interested in using their careers to mitigate global catastrophic biological risks with people who work in the field
- Hear This Idea podcast with Kevin Esvelt and Jonas Sandbrink on risks from biological research
- A post suggesting that antiviral photodynamic therapy seems underfunded
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
- Gregory Lewis - Most* small probabilities aren't pascalian
- A post introducing the Existential Risks Introductory Course, an 8 week programme
- The 2022 Future of Life Award winners have been announced, for 8 people who reduced 'the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter'
- Luis Enrique Urtubey - Superforecasting Long-Term Risks and Climate Change
- Will Aldred - Feedback I've been giving to junior x-risk researchers
- Eli Lifland - Prioritizing x-risks may require caring about future people
- Catherine Brewer - On the Vulnerable World Hypothesis
- David Thorstad - Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils
- A post interactively visualising existential risks
- Kurzgesagt Video - Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse? (with 6 million views already)
- A new paper from CSER exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
- Matthew Allcock - Cosmic rays could cause major electronic disruption and pose a small existential risk
- HTC - What if states don't listen? A fundamental gap in x-risk reduction strategies
- Matt Boyd & Nick Wilson - Islands, nuclear winter, and trade disruption as a human existential risk factor
Improving Institutions & Metascience
- Tyler Cowen - Will open science matter?
- Stuart Buck - Advice For New Scientific Funders (ARPA-H, ARIA, NSF TIP, Etc.)
- A study looking at whether international treaties have been able to produce their intended affects
- Alisha Lewis - How should we invest in democracy as an EA-adjacent issue? Some early thoughts
- Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in The Economist explain innovations at the new research agency Advanced Research and Invention Agency
Environment
- Bryan Walsh - What could a nuclear war do to the climate - and humanity?
- An article in the BBC arguing for more studies on catastrophic climate change
- Gideon Futerman - What 80,000 Hours gets wrong about solar geoengineering
- Erola Pons - The case for Green Growth skepticism and GDP agnosticism
Longtermism
- Will MacAskill writing in the New York Times with the case for longtermism
- Future Matters Newsletter - AI timelines, AGI risk, and existential risk from climate change
- Matthew Yglesias - What's long-term about "longtermism"?
- Christian Ruhl - Explaining a Small Patient Philanthropy Fund Grant on Nuclear Security
- Sam Hilton - Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund
- A collection of articles from a recent symposium on longtermism and the law, including contributions from Christoph Winter, Jeff Sebo, Renan Araújo and Leonie Koessler
- Richard Pettigrew - Longtermism, risk, and extinction
- Tyler Cowen - Eternal economic growth and Effective Altruism
- Dwarkesh Patel - Response to Tyler Cowen on eternal growth
- Maxwell Tabarrok - The Most Important Century Is Not Unlikely
- A post with a proposed tweak to the longtermism pitch
- Siméon Campos & Amber Dawn Ace - Longtermists Should Work on AI - There is No "AI Neutral" Scenario
- Jordan Arel - How I Came To Longtermism On My Own & An Outsider Perspective On EA Longtermism
WWOTF Interviews And Reviews
- Time
- Wired
- BBC Future
- The Atlantic
- The Guardian
- Freakonomics
- Boston Review
- Foreign Affairs
- The New Yorker
- Modern Wisdom
- Daily Stoic Podcast
- Richard Y Chappell
- The Tim Ferris Show
- Think with Krys Boyd
- NY Mag: Intelligencer
- 80,000 Hours Podcast
- Making Sense Podcast
- Wild with Sarah Wilson
- Reddit Ask Me Anything
- United Nations Dispatch
- NPR with Malaka Gharib
- Five Books: Longtermism
- The Lunar Society Podcast
- Michael Townsend Review
- EA Forum Ask Me Anything
- Conversations With Coleman
- Conversations with Tyler Cowen
- New York Times: The Ezra Klein Show
Longtermism Critiques
- Magnus Vinding - Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?”
- Pablo Rosado - A critique of strong longtermism
- Robert Wright - The case for Shorttermism
- Roh - A Quick Qualitative Analysis of Laypeople’s Critiques of Longtermism
- Brian Lui - Against longtermism
- A post with several arguments against longtermism
- Benj Azose - We’re really bad at guessing the future
AI Policy
- Haydn Belfield and Shin Shin Hua - How can EU competition law influence AI development and help ensure that its future development is safe and beneficial?
- Cullen O’Keefe, Jade Leung and Markus Anderljung - How technical safety standards could promote TAI safety
- Matthijs Maas - The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and lessons for AI
- Jan Leike on the windfall clause
- Markus Anderljung and Charlotte Siegmann - The Brussels Effect and AI: How EU AI regulation will impact the global AI market
Technical AI
- Open AI with 'Our approach to alignment research'
- Katja Grace - What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022?
- Jacob Hilton - Common misconceptions about OpenAI
- Nuño Sempere - A concern about the “evolutionary anchor” of Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines
- Richard Ngo - The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective
- Thomas W, Dan Hendrycks and Oliver Zhang have created an introduction to ML safety course
- José Luis Ricón with an in depth post attempting to clarify his thoughts on AGI risks
- Will Aldred - AI timelines via bioanchors: the debate in one place
- The Center for AI Safety is announcing a $20,000 bounty for the best publicly-understandable explainers of topics in AI safety
Other AI
- Benjamin Hilton with a new 80,000 Hours problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe
- Kelsey Piper - There are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided
- Bryan Walsh looking at recent breakthroughs in AI and what good it can do
- Jamie Harris - The History of AI Rights Research
- Neel Nanda - Concrete Advice for Forming Inside Views on AI Safety
- Alex Lintz - Three pillars for avoiding AGI catastrophe: Technical alignment, deployment decisions, and coordination
- Olivia Addy - Why does no one care about AI?
- Steven Pinker and Scott Aaronson debate AI scaling
- Matthew Barber - Could realistic depictions of catastrophic AI risks effectively reduce said risks?
- Holden Karnofsky -
- AI strategy nearcasting
- How might we align transformative AI if it’s developed very soon?
Cause Exploration Prize
You can see all of the cause exploration prize entries here
- Global Development
- Rosie Bettle - Oral healthcare in LMIC is a promising new cause area
- Lee Crawfurd and Susannah Hares - The Economic Benefits of Promoting and Protecting the Rights of LGBTQ+ Communities in Developing Countries
- Vastav Ratra - Reducing Judicial Delay in India
- Jamie Simonson - Internal Migration: A Cost-Effective Method for Raising Wages, Improving Living Standards, and Promoting Economic Growth
- Kristof - Tobacco harm reduction
- Alex Hill - Maternal morbidity
- Denise Melchin - Preventing stillbirths
- Sickle Cell Disease
- Road Safety: The Silent Epidemic Impacting Youth
- Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart and Josh C Morrison - Indoor Air Quality to Reduce Infectious Respiratory Disease
- Rich to Poor Country Spillovers
- Michael - Occupational Health and Safety in the Developing World
- Jeffrey Mason - Economic Growth and State Capacity
- Jackson Wagner - Radio Ads Against Cousin Marriage in LMIC
- Shen Javier - Child and Adolescent Mental Health in LMICs
- Kelly Geddes - Transnational Surrogacy
- Surbhi B - Adapting to Extreme Heat Exposure in South Asia
- Ben Stewart - Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants
- Arushi Gupta and Jendayi - International Macroeconomic Policy
- Johannes Haushofer - Large-scale International Educational Migration: A Shallow Investigation
- Sarah H and Ben Williamson - Family Planning: A Significant Opportunity for Impact
- Mental Health & Biology
- John Boyle - Short-sleeper genes
- Karolina Soltys - Improving diagnosis and treatment of bipolar spectrum disorders
- Milan Griffes and Sandra Sobanska - Jhana meditation
- Tim Farkas - Mind Enhancement Cause Exploration
- Courtney Colston - Potential Risks of Advanced Gene Editing Technologies
- Hauke Hillebrandt - Developmental Cognitive Neuroepidemiology
- Animal Welfare
- David Lang with a post exploring genetic rescue as a way to protect wildlife from extinction
- Enginar - Mitigating chicken and fish suffering by closing the “dairy gap” in Asia and Africa
- Akash Kulgod - Free-Ranging Dog Welfare in India as a Cause Area
- More Animal Advocacy R&D
- Movable Virtual Fencing Systems and Livestock Welfare
- Other
- Anna Harvey and Stuart Buck - Social and Behavioural Science R&D
- Markus Over - Distribution of Information Among Humans
- Jeremy R - New cause area: Traffic congestion
- Wim - Steering and Stabilising Status Games
- Sbhemer - Shareholder activism
- Ben Yeoh - Advanced Market Commitments for public goods
- Em Walz and Iska Knuuttila - Resilience & Biodiversity
- Sebastian Joy - The importance of Intercausal Impacts
- Benj Azose - Fix Prison Telecom
- Minh Nguyen - Social Relationships: A Neglected Factor in Wellbeing
- Marcus Ogren - Voting Methods
- Sam Abbott and Nikos - Training experts to be forecasters
Other Causes
- Luis Mota and Charlotte - Justice and Global Priorities Research Reading List
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
- Benjamin Hilton with an 80,000 Hours problem profile - Risks from atomically precise manufacturing
- Charlie Dougherty - Peacebuilding and Violent Conflict
- Geoffrey Miller - Could a 'permanent global totalitarian state' ever be permanent?
- Ruth Grace on the abundance agenda movement
- Nathan Barnard - Intelligence failures and a theory of change for forecasting
- Elias Au-Yeung - The Possibility of Microorganism Suffering
- Robert Long - Digital people: biology versus silicon
Philosophy
- Luis Mota with a moral progress reading list
- Lukas Gloor - Population Ethics Without Axiology: A Framework
- Khai - What reason is there not to accept Pascal's Wager?
- Luca Stocco - The repugnant conclusion is not a problem for the total view
- Jared Riggs - Why I Hope (Certain) Hedonic Utilitarians Don't Control the Long-term Future
- Levin - Common-sense cases where "hypothetical future people" matter
- Jason Crawford - Against population ethics
- Cold Button Issues - Toby Ord’s The Scourge, Reviewed
- Stijn - Avoiding the demandingness of total welfarism with rights-based discounted welfarism
- Applied Divinity Studies - The Repugnant Conclusion Isn't
- Sanjay with an attempt to solve Pascal's Muggings
Productivity
- Ben Kuhn - Some tips for good one-on-ones
- Abi Olvera - An Exercise in Speed-Reading
Other Links
- Dylan Matthews - How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force
- The Economist - What to read to understand “effective altruism”
- Adam Steinberg - Using expected value when donating to charity - and day-to-day
- Florence - Let’s not glorify people for how they look
- Tyler Alterman - Effective altruism in the garden of ends
- Founding the Against Malaria Foundation: Rob Mather's story
- Nuño Sempere - Introduction to Fermi estimates
- Anna Stadlerova - Translating The Precipice into Czech: My experience and recommendations
- Rob Bensinger - Have faux-evil EA energy
- Duncan S - The danger of good stories
- Michael Dickens - Philanthropists Probably Shouldn't Mission-Hedge AI Progress
- Michel Justen - Psychological Obstacles to Doing Good (Better)
- Clearer Thinking podcast discussing the use of stories for impact with Cate Hall, co-founder of Alvea
- Kat Woods - The most important lesson I learned after ten years in EA
- Simran Dhaliwal from Longview Philanthropy on the Giving What We Can Podcast
- Rosie Bettle on why she switched from academia to Founders Pledge
- Podcast with Joey Savoie on making it easier for great charities to exist
Tweets & Social Media
- Alexander Berger with a thread on what he learned from What We Owe The Future and key questions about longtermism that are unresolved
- Julian Hazel with 100 EA-related takes as a way of reflecting after ~2 years in the EA community
- Kelsey Piper with over 200 opinions on EA and it's critics
- Jess Whittlestone with thoughts on the difficulty of learning from criticism, inspired by recent critical discourse around EA
- Raquel Kasham Daniel on her experience with the intro to EA virtual programme
- Surbhi B with reflections from her first EA conference
- Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from the first EA India retreat
- Hayley Worsham - How to Survive EAG: San Francisco FOMO
- Bhagyashree Prabhutendolkar with her experience of the Leaf EA course at Oxford