Upcoming Virtual Events

• 11th July - Giving What We Can Virtual Meetup
• 12th July - EA Cambridge Intro Fellowship - 8 week course open to anyone
• 15th July - Giving What We Can Open Forum
• 2nd August - Nuclear X Risk Seminar Programme - 8 week discussion course
• 13-16th August - European Effective Altruism Unconference (Germany) - Retreat for 40-60 people to learn, connect & collaborate
• August to September - Three virtual programs, consisting of weekly meetings over two months
  • Introductory EA Program - For those new to EA, or who have some familiarity, but want to go through the core ideas
  • In-Depth EA Program - For graduates of the intro program or those with a similar level of experience, who want to dive deeper into EA ideas and examine their key uncertainties about how to best improve the world
  • The Precipice Reading Group - In this reading group, you will read and engage in structured discussions of Toby Ord’s The Precipice, a book about existential risks and safeguarding the future of humanity
• 29-31st October - EA Global: London 2021

Latest Research and Updates

Meta

• The EA Forum has a wiki page with lists of relevant forum posts
• An overview of EA Giving Tuesday last year, with $1.6 million donated and 25% getting matched
• WANBAM mentee applications are open until the 30th of July
• A post on the EA Forum suggesting that EA needs consultancies
• EA Organisation updates for June 2021
• 80,000 Hours have an Airtable for their job board if you prefer to sort through opportunities on a spreadsheet
• A post suggesting that digital marketing is under-utilised in EA
• You can now apply to the Long Term Future and EA Infrastructure funds anytime
• An update with what's new on the EA Hub in 2021
• An ask me anything with the EA Infrastructure fund
• A post by Lotte de Lint arguing that EA needs outsiders with a greater diversity of skills
• Vaidehi Agarwalla on 'What is Meta EA?'
• Jamie Harris from Sentience Institute and Tobias Baumann from the Center for Reducing Suffering discussing moral circle expansion and cause prioritisation

Grants

• Open Phil have made 19 grants recently with a total value of $9,290,000
  • $4,910,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
    • $3,500,000 - Wild Animal Initiative
  • $1,900,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
  • $1,670,000 - Scientific Research
  • $430,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
  • $250,000 - Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness
  • $120,000 - Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy
  • $6,000 - Effective Altruism Debate Championship
• EA Infrastructure Fund has made 26 grants worth $1,220,000
• Mackenzie Scott has made two EA related grants recently
  • $50,000,000 to GiveDirectly
  • $12,000,000 to IDinsight

Global Development

• The Norwegian Refugee Council with a list of the ten most neglected displacement crises in the world
• The Global Peace Index for 2021 has been released
• There is an Evidence for Development: What Works Global Summit in October
• Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel writing about the neglect of neglected tropical diseases, including a planned 90% cut by the British government
• Rethink Priorities with an intervention report on charter cities
• Dengue fever cases have been cut by 77% in a trial that took place in Indonesia
• A look at how vaccines and new health-care improvements might make large Ebola outbreaks a thing of the past
• An article looking into mRNA vaccines and the potential for a healthcare revolution
• Max Roser on 'why do we need to know about progress if we are concerned about the world’s large problems?'
• Rethink Priorities with a report on global lead exposure
• A six month update from Family Empowerment Media

Animal Welfare

• Animal Advocacy Careers have a new tool to help match people to skilled volunteering opportunities
• Paul Shapiro interviewing Nicole Rawling of Material Innovation Initiative about their plan to have an animal-free material revolution
• Animal Advocacy Africa report their findings of the animal advocacy landscape in Africa
• An overview of the Welfare Footprint Project - a blueprint for quantifying animal pain

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Sophie Dannreuther and Angus Mercer with their new report Future Proof on 'The opportunity to transform the UK's resilience to extreme risks'. Co-authored by Toby Ord
• The Future of Life Institute has announced a new $25,000,000 grants program for existential risk reduction
• A new £40,000,000 Animal Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre will be established in the UK. They are planning to develop vaccines to prevent zoonotic diseases that spread from animals to humans
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction
• Podcast with Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
• GCRs mitigation: the missing Sustainable Development Goal
• Rethink Priorities and Metaculus have announced a nuclear risk forecasting tournament

Improving Institutions

• Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Hsu on what they learned with the Fast Grants program
• A post on 'Why scientific research is less effective in producing value than it could be: a mapping'
• A report by the School of International Futures providing a framework for governments to build and sustain foresight in policy-making
• A summary of the results from a survey by the Effective Institutions Project (formally the improving institutional decision-making working group) looking at what the scope of their work should be

Environment

• Our World in Data with an argument for carbon pricing
• Hear This Idea with Armond Cohen on climate change and the Clean Air Task Force
• A study into environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG) suggesting that there is little evidence of a link between ESG metrics and reduced emissions
• Hear This Idea with Isabelle Boemeke on nuclear power and science communication
• Updates on the Founders Pledge Climate Fund
• Podcast with Matthew Ives on solar power and experience curves

Longtermism

• Holden Karnofsky with his current impressions on career choice for longtermists
• Nuno Sempere with a shallow overview of longtermist organisations
• Lizka with humanities research ideas for longtermists
• Richard Fisher looking at which living thing may be the best 'mascot' for long term thinking
• Max Daniel writing 'Progress studies vs. longtermist EA: some differences'
• Jack Malde with a summary of a recent update to a paper on the case for strong longtermism
• Nuno Sempere looking at how the 2018-19 Long Term Future Fund grantees did
• A list of the readings from Shelly Kagan's seminar, “Ethics and the Future,” taught at Yale

Emerging Technology

• Anthropic is a new AI safety and research company which has recently raised $124,000,000 in funding
• Tom Davidson with a report on whether AI could drive explosive economic growth
• There is a new £210,000,000 centre to advance AI and quantum computing in the UK
• Summary of results from a survey on AI existential risk scenarios

Other Links

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Max Roser from Our World in Data
• The Jewish Effective Giving Initiative has been set up
• Jason Brennan has received a $2.1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to research 'Markets, Social Entrepreneurship, and Effective Altruism'
• The EA China & Global Cooperation group have an interest form for anyone who is interested in their discussion groups
• Jason Crawford asking what is the crux of the differences between Progress Studies and EA/Existential Risk
• A progress studies 101 guide
• Michael Plant and Julian Hazell with an update on 'whether money can buy happiness'
• David Zhang on 'Becoming a Member of Parliament: potential routes & impact'
• Mark Lutter with a list of examples of past successes and failures of social change
• A post asking what are some key numbers that (almost) everyone interested in EA should know
• From the EA Forum, deluks917 on why they focus on effective altruism.

Good News

• Guinea has become the 61st state to prohibit corporal punishment of children
• In the U.S. the number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails has declined from 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million in late 2020
• Israel has become the first country in the world to ban the sale of fur
• The Ebola outbreak in Guinea has been declared over, with 12 lives lost compared to the last time there was an Ebola outbreak in this region which resulted in 11,000 deaths