EA Updates for July 2020

Meta

• 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