EA Updates for July 2020

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Giving What We Can have hired Luke Freeman as their new director

EA Asia have a new newsletter with updates from groups in Singapore, India, Philippines, Middle East, Japan, Israel, Malaysia and Indonesia

EA Giving Tuesday donation matching initiative 2019 retrospective. Within 14 seconds, 330 donors had donated $1,100,000, of which 52% was successfully matched

EA Global London will now take place 30th April − 2nd of May 2021

• Angela Aristizábal looking at whether region-level cause prioritisation research is valuable to spot promising long-term priority causes worldwide

• There is a new EA group on FocusMate, a platform that provides one-to-one video calls for accountability regarding focused work

• EA Survey Series 2019: How many people interested in EA live in the main EA hubs?

• Eve McCormick, Sanjay Joshi, Neel Nanda and Jaime Sevilla Molina on a new EA related podcast created by Fin Moorhouse and Luca Righetti

• Founders Pledge have set up their own donor funds, one for global development and another for climate change

• Aaron Gertler with EA organisation updates for June

• Vaidehi Agarwalla with a step-by-step guide to running independent projects

• An annotated list of effective altruism related career advice resources

• An anonymous retrospective on career choice after thinking about it for 300+ hours

• A post with objections to value alignment between people interested in effective altruism

• EA Global transcript of a talk by Marcus Davies: Rethink Priorities — empirical research on neglected causes

• Jessica Watson Miller with a post looking at three possible future for the effective altruism movement

• EA Global transcript of Charity Entrepreneurship graduate lightning talks

• Gregory Lewis on why they think people should use resilience, instead of imprecision, to communicate uncertainty

• Saulius Simcikas with a collection of good 2012-2017 EA forum posts

• Sjir Hoeijmakers on the case for investing to give later

• A transcript of a talk by Karolina Sarek at EA Global: How to do research that matters

Grants

• Open Phil have made 31 grants recently with a total value of $10,393,000

$3,299,000 - Global Priorities Institute

$2,498,000 - Farmed animal welfare

$1,686,000 - Scientific research

$1,440,000 - Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness

$1,000,000 - Immigration policy

$335,000 - Criminal justice reform

$135,000 - Other areas

Global Development

• The 2020 State of Food Security and Nutrition report, with the number of people affected by hunger globally has been on the rise since 2014

• The Gates Foundation with a Q&A looking at the scope of the locust crisis in East Africa, potentially affecting a tenth of the world’s population

• The UN’s Philip Alston on failed global poverty eradication efforts

• A post from someone considering a career plan rethink in global poverty eradication and systemic change

• Melissa Dell and Tyler Cowen discussing what factors effect economic development

• EA Global transcript of a Q&A with Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder of GiveWell

• Amit Varma with a podcast looking at problems with decision makers in India copying public policy from abroad without considering whether it would work in local conditions

• Malaria Consortium with a report on dengue, the world’s fastest growing vector borne disease

• The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation looking at interventions that could have a big impact on food security

• David Miliband on the Founders Pledge podcast discussing the imminent threat of COVID-19 to the world’s most vulnerable populations

• Think Global Health with an article on the difficulties of making the global health field more representative

• EA Global transcript of a talk by Sam Carter: Are cash transfers the best policy option?

• Innovations for Poverty Action on the lack of evidence on interventions relating to forced displacement

Exemplars in Global Health, a new organisation looking at positive outliers in public health to help inform decision makers

• EA Global transcript of a talk by Ruth Levine and Caitlin Tulloch: The good, the bad, and the ugly of evidence-informed decision making in global development

• Founders Pledge with a report on the impact of COVID-19 in poorer countries

Animal Welfare

• Sentience Institute with a literature review on health behaviour interventions and a report on social movement lessons from the US prisoners’ rights movement looking at how they could apply to the farmed animal movement

• Jennifer Kirsch with a report for Fish Welfare Initiative highlighting the most significant knowledge gaps hampering effective fish welfare work

• EA Global transcript of a Q&A with Leah Edgerton, executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators

• Faunalytics with a post looking at institutional attitudes towards wild animal welfare

• The Good Food Institute have created PISCES, a new data navigation tool to inform alternative seafood development

• EA Global Transcript of a talk by Richard Parr on the international expansion of the Good Food Institute

• Jason Schukraft on the welfare implications for animals of the subjective experience of time

• EA Global transcript of a talk by Alexandria Beck: How the Open Wing Alliance is driving progress worldwide

• Jamie Harris with a post on interventions animal advocates can use to build communities in other countries

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• The Global Challenges Foundation has a 2020 survey on global catastrophic risks

• EA Global Transcript of a fireside chat with Bonnie Jenkins, looking at current risks and improvements in nuclear security and biosecurity

• Live Science interviewing Luke Kemp, Cassidy Nelson and Sabin Roman on existential risks

• Think Global Health on how three standard measures didn’t predict how countries fared with COVID-19, and what could be done to be better prepared for the next pandemic

• Michael Aird with a post visualising the differences between existential, global, and suffering catastrophes

Environment

• SoGive with their climate change donation recommendations

• Vox with a deep dive into why getting to net-zero carbon emissions will require rapid, radical innovation

• A long post looking at how 2020 is affecting fossil fuels

• The U.K. government’s development finance institution will no longer put aid money into coal or oil investments

• UK Research and Innovation announced the first projects to receive funding as part of its £149,000,000 transforming foundation industries challenge. The foundation industry sector combined produce 75% of all the materials in the UK economy and account for around 10% of the UK total CO2 emissions

• Maritime engineers have trained an energy shipping app to save over a 250,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions by applying machine learning to its predictive system

Improving Institutions

• Government Outcomes Lab on whether citizens or scientists should set the terms for social projects

• The Social Science Prediction Platform with a new forecasting challenge for academics

• A paper looking at the impact of ‘Nudge Unit’ interventions as they are scaled up

A project to see to what extent a “Red Team”—people hired to criticise a scientific study with the goal to improve it—would improve the quality of the resulting work

• The Skoll Centre for Social Enterprise on strategies for implementing systems change

• John Halstead with a post on mainstream political philosophy and billionaire philanthropy

Emerging Technologies

• Markus Anderljung and Ben Garfinkel discuss their paths into the field of AI governance, and how the field has developed in recent years

• Jaime Sevilla Molina with a paper assessing the impact of quantum cryptanalysis

Ask Me Anything with Ben Garfinkel, a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute

• DeepMind have released their 2020 lecture series with UCL

• The Centre for Security and Emerging Technology with a brief mapping out the AI-related company landscape

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

Long Term Future

• EA Global transcript of a talk by David Rhys Bernard: Estimating long-term effects without long-term data

• Michael Aird with a list of history topics it might be valuable to investigate

• EA Global transcript a Q&A with Toby Ord

• The Global Priorities Institute with recordings of their recent seminars

‘The Precipice’ book review

• 80,000 Hours podcast on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system

• Innovations for Poverty Action on how to reduce police violence by building effective police organisations

• Clement Kao with a product managers guide to effective altruism

• Clearer Thinking with a new program to help create new daily habits

• A new paper looking at how donors vastly underestimate differences in charities’ effectiveness

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