Monthly Overload of EA—July 2022

[DavidNash]

Link post for 2022 July EA Updates

Top News

• Lizka Vaintrob, Fin Moorhouse and Joshua Teperowski Monrad have launched an EA Criticism and Red Teaming contest with $100,000 in prizes. There has already been criticism of how this competition has been announced

• The Future Fund with an update on their recent grants

• Julia Wise—Power dynamics between people in EA

• Abraham Rowe—Critiques of EA that I want to read

• Ben Garfinkel—On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates

• Holden Karnofsky—AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined

• James Ozden & Neil Dullaghan with a list of megaproject ideas for animals

• Nuño Sempere—A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform

• Kurzgesagt’s recent video invites viewers to consider the potential for a vast number of future people, it already has over 2 million views

Events

• 8th-10th July—EAGxAustralia

• 29th-31st July—EA Global: San Francisco

• 2nd-4th September—EAGxSingapore (Applications now open)

• 23rd-25th September—EA Global: Washington, D.C.

• 16th-18th September—EAGxBerlin

• 21st-23rd October—EAGx Virtual

Meta Updates

• Open Philanthropy with a post looking at how accurate their own predictions are

• Luke Muehlhauser—Effective altruism as I see it

• Owen Cotton-Barratt—Global health is important for the epistemic foundations of EA, even for longtermists

• A post looking for ‘Examples of someone admitting an error or changing a key conclusion’

• Ozy Brennan on the benefits of categorising people who are more or less dedicated in EA

• 80,000 Hours would be happy to see more projects in the careers space

• Rémi T with the idea of taking an ‘EA Break’

• Jan Kulveit—Ways money can make things worse

• Ofer & Owen Cotton-Barratt—Impact markets may incentivize predictably net-negative projects

• Mathias KB asking what the overhead costs of grantmaking are

• A post from me on how we should see effective altruism as more about coordination & field incubation

• Thomas Woodside—You Don’t Need To Justify Everything

• Richard Y Chappell asking what an alternative EA movement might look like

• Joey Savoie - ‘Why EAs should normalize using Glassdoor’

• Chris Freiman—You Don’t Have to be a Moral Saint to be an Effective Altruist

• A post with ‘unflattering’ reasons the author is attracted to EA

• Effektiv Spenden: A meta opportunity in Germany & Switzerland

• Derek Shiller—Fanatical EAs should support very weird projects

• A post titled ‘How To Prevent EA From Ever Turning Into a Cult’

New Projects

• Clearer Thinking have a new regranting program for projects that could have a big positive impact on the future of the world, applications close 22nd July

• Brian Jabarian has launched a community for economists

• An intro post to User-Friendly, an EA-aligned marketing agency

• Giving What We Can have a dashboard with their growth metrics

• Historea Club is a ‘A peer-led exploration club for history enthusiasts in the EA community’

• Condor Camp is a 10 day program for talented students in Brazil to learn about the worlds most pressing problems

• Giveffektivt—a Danish regranting site for effective charities

Community building

• Emma Williamson—Community Builders Spend Too Much Time Community Building

• Owen Cotton Barratt—There is no separate “community building” track

• Habryka—On funding, trust relationships, and scaling our community

• S.E. Montgomery—Community builders should focus more on supporting friendships within their group

• Patrick Gruban & Lukas Trötzmüller—Mastermind Groups: A new Peer Support Format to help EAs aim higher

Critiques

• Michael Nielsen—Notes on effective altruism

• Joey Savoie on deference culture in EA

• Archana Ahlawat with replies to the post ‘Towards Ineffective Altruism’

• José Luis Ricón responding to ‘Ineffective Altruism’

• Trevor Klee with an EA critique of the Carrick Flynn campaign

• Ed Talks—The totalitarian implications of Effective Altruism

• James Ozden—The dangers of high salaries within EA organisations

Careers

• High Impact Professionals have a new directory of the various workplace and professional EA groups, including tech, policy, engineering, communications, finance, consulting, healthcare, sports, law, entrepreneurship

• Federico Speziali—Paths to Impact for EA Working Professionals

• Michael Aird with resources for people interested in research careers

• Ben Williamson with three lessons from starting a small EA org

• Tereza Flidrova - ‘EA Architect’: Updates on Civilisational Shelters & Career Options

• Yonatan Cale—Software Developers: How to have Impact?

• High Impact Medicine, 6 months later—Update & Key Lessons

• Jeff Kaufman on why he decided to leave Google and join the Nucleic Acid Observatory

• Two forum posts on hiring

  • Who’s hiring?

  • Who wants to be hired?

Grants

• Open Phil have made 15 grants recently with a total value of $33,600,000

  • $15,000,000 - Global Health & Development

    • $14,000,000 - Evidence Action—Accelerator Program

    • $700,000 - Effective Altruism Foundation—European Policy Research and Advocacy

  • $12,000,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness

    • $10,000,000 - Good Forever—Regranting for Biosecurity Projects

    • $2,000,000 − 1Day Sooner

  • $3,500,000 - Alternatives to Animal Products

  • $1,800,000 - Farm Animal Welfare

  • $1,150,000 - Criminal Justice Reform

  • $170,000 - Transformative Basic Science

Global Development

• Stuart Buck—Why Effective Altruism Should Put a Higher Priority on Funding Academic Research

• Ryan C. Briggs—Results of a survey of international development professors on EA

• The World Health Organization has given it’s highest crisis ranking to the drought in the Horn of Africa for the first time since rankings started in 2011

• Pfizer to sell all its patented drugs at nonprofit price in low-income countries

• Saloni Dattani & Fiona Spooner—We need more testing to eradicate polio worldwide

• Max Roser—Millions of children learn only very little. How can the world provide a better education to the next generation?

• Thomas Pogge—New Global Pools: Impact Funds

• Sebastian Schwiecker—Will there be an EA answer to the predictable famines later this year?

• 7 learnings from the Lead Exposure Elimination Project

• GiveDirectly will run Chicago’s guaranteed basic income pilot

• Quantifying uncertainty in GiveWell’s GiveDirectly cost

• The UN has a new 5 year plan to have every person protected by early warning systems for extreme weather events

• An article looking into drowning, responsible for 43% of all deaths among children ages 1-4 in Bangladesh

• Podcast with Ben Kuhn, the CTO of Wave who aim to build ways for unbanked people to send and save money

• The Adani Foundation plans to deploy $7.7B for social programs in India

• Sigal Samuel looking at the latest evidence on what may be best for helping extremely poor people

• Siobhan McDonough on why giving cash may be better than sending food for fighting global hunger

• A review of evidence on whether cash transfers and therapy can reduce violent crime

• A book review of James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine from an EA point of view

• A research summary of what works to promote charitable donations

• Akhil Bansal with a cause exploration prize submission on violence against women and girls

Animal Welfare

• Lewis Bollard—Farm Animals at the Supreme Court

• Andrew Critch—Steering AI to care for animals, and soon

• Ozy Brennan—Emphasize Vegetarian Retention

• Gabriel Weil—The Role of Individual Consumption Decisions in Animal Welfare and Climate are Analogous

• Sofia Balderson introducing the Impactful Animal Advocacy Community newsletter

• Sam Glover exploring the research on effective protest and how it can be used to make change for animals

• Brian Lui with a cause exploration prizes submission on bivalve aquaculture

• Michael Huang in discussion with Kyle Johannsen, author of Wild Animal Ethics

Biosecurity

• The World Bank has a new pandemic preparedness fund, with over $1 billion in pledges so far

• 80,000 Hours with a list of biosecurity projects to get involved with

• Jonas Sandbrink arguing that there should be more discussion on self-spreading vaccine technology

• Fønix are recruiting a team to join a project building biological weapons shelters

• Hear This Idea podcast with Ajay Karpur from Open Philanthropy on metagenomic sequencing

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• ‘A Critique of The Precipice: Chapter 6 - The Risk Landscape’

• Christian Ruhl—How Policymakers Can Build a Better Doomsday Clock

• Matthijs Maas, Kayla Lucero-Matteucci and Di Cooke on ‘Military Artificial Intelligence as Contributor to Global Catastrophic Risk’

• Stephen Bush writing in the Financial Times on EA and avoiding disasters

• Ben Garfinkel—We should expect to worry more about speculative risks

• The Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience has been launched in Israel

• Tom Green—Case study: Reducing catastrophic risk from inside the US bureaucracy

• Peter Wildeford—The chance of accidental nuclear war has been going down

• Jacy with a post looking at how the prioritisation of existential risk work depends on assuming a positive future

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

• A post announcing the ‘Legal Priorities Project Writing Competition: Improving Cost-Benefit Analysis to Account for Existential and Catastrophic Risks’

Improving Institutions & Metascience

• Michael Nielsen—Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science

• David Reinstein—Unjournal: Call for participants and research

• The Research on Research Institute with an overview of their randomisation project

• A look at how the world’s largest COVID-19 trial transformed treatment—and what it could do for other diseases

• Matt Clancy

  • Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average

  • How common is independent discovery?

Progress Studies

• Michael Plant asking ‘Will faster economic growth make us happier? The relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to Progress Studies’

• Garrison Lovely writing for the BBC asking ‘Do we need a better understanding of ‘progress’?′

• Dylan Matthews interviewing Jared Rubin and Mark Koyama on what made the Industrial Revolution possible

• Nick Whitaker on the intersection of the progress community and the idea from Holden Karnofsky of ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’

Environment

• Podcast with Johannes Ackva on effective climate altruism

• The Shared Future Fund provides funding and resources to early-stage entrepreneurs working on climate change

• The Centre for Global Development with the blog post ‘Where Emissions Are High, Reduce Emissions. Where Poverty Is High, Reduce Poverty’

• Hear This Idea podcast with Spencer Weart on the discovery of global warming

• Saloni Shah - ‘Are Alternative Proteins a Climate Solution?’

• The U.S. Department of Energy released a Notice of Intent to fund the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $3.5 billion program to capture and store carbon dioxide pollution directly from the air

• Daniel Jassby with a critical essay on ‘The Quest for Fusion Energy’

• Kelsey Piper - ‘Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world’

• Kenny Torrella - ‘The environmental limits of eating local’

• Lauren Holt writing in the BBC on how humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature

Longtermism

• The Future Forum is a conference in San Francisco from the 4th-7th of August for people interested in improving the future of humanity, applications close 10th July

• 80,000 Hours have a quick census for anyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermism related work

• A post asking whether too many people in longtermism are focused on movement building

• Pat Andriola—Four Concerns Regarding Longtermism

• Future Matters newsletter for May

• The Future of Life Institute is supporting the Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest, ‘offering fellowship grants for television scripts whose storylines focus on a world set between 2045 to 2100 when we achieve lives that reflect our better selves’

• The winners of the FLI world building contest have been announced

Artificial Intelligence

• Eliezer Yudkowsky—AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities

• Paul Christiano on agreement/​disagreement with Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’

• Gary Marcus arguing that AGI is not imminent

• Charlie RS—How to pursue a career in technical AI alignment

• Victoria Krakovna with a high-level view of the technical AI alignment research landscape

• Robin Hanson with ‘Why Not Wait on AI Risk?’

• A post ‘Announcing Epoch: A research organization investigating the road to Transformative AI’

• Rob Bensinger on ‘The inordinately slow spread of good AGI conversations in ML’

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Nova Das Sarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

• Michaël Trazzi interviewed Blake Richards on why he is skeptical of existential risk from AI

• Kris Shrishak and Risto Uuk with the article ‘The EU AI law will not be future-proof unless it regulates general purpose AI systems’

• Kat Woods—Four reasons I find AI safety emotionally compelling

• Vasco Grilo and Simon Holm ‘Red-teaming Holden Karnofsky’s AI timelines’

Space & Space Governance

• Bryan Walsh looking at why receiving signals from extra-terrestrial civilisations could pose an existential risk

• An article on the borders of ethics in astrobiology

• A blog post on ‘Outer Space and the Veil of Ignorance: An Alternative Way to Think About Space Regulation’

• Paul Taylor arguing for Europe to be more involved in space security

• An article looking at why U.S. defense and intelligence communities are taking unidentified aerial phenomena seriously

• Researchers at the B612 Foundation’s Asteroid Institute have developed a new tool for tracking space-rock trajectories

• Our World in Data have launched a new collection of charts on space exploration & satellites

Mental Health

• The Mental Health Funding Circle has been launched

• David Hartsough—History of the theory of well-being

• The inaugural wellbeing research and policy conference is happening in Oxford on the 6th-8th of July

• The World Health Organisation published one of the most in-depth reports on global mental health for over 20 years

Digital Consciousness

• Derek Shiller—The importance of getting digital consciousness right

• Dylan Matthews writing about the debate on AI sentience

• G McGowan—Digital people could make AI safer

Other Causes

• Matthew Barnett—Preventing a US-China war as a policy priority

• The Global Terrorism Index for 2022 has seen an increase in the number of attacks but a 1.2% decrease in the number of deaths since the previous year

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus asking whether social media may be less harmful than people think

• Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging

Productivity

• Peter Wildeford with notes on ‘A World Without Email’

• Ben Williamson with a database of effective productivity recommendations

• Lynette Bye interviewing eleven people on what is most important for their productivity

• Lizka with notes on impostor syndrome

• Amy Labenz—Hiking: an analogy for sustainable work

• Akash has made a summary of the Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares

• Evie Cottrell—Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic

• Alex Lawsen with ‘Know what you’re optimising for’

Other Links

• Schmidt Futures have created the Act 2 Network to ‘amplify the impact of exceptional executives, technologists, and entrepreneurs working to solve humanity’s greatest challenges’

• An article looking at generational churn and the Chinese Communist Party

• Feather Grants has been launched, aiming to give out $500 micro grants

• Giving What We Can with a series of interviews with members at EA Global London earlier this year

• Holden Karnofsky—Non-profit Boards are Weird

• A post on the history of the effective philanthropy movement

• Calvin Baker comparing effective altruism and Engaged Buddhism

• Owen Cotton-Barratt—Perils of optimising in social contexts

• Gregory Lewis—Terminate deliberation based on resilience, not certainty

• Sam Atis with a blog looking at extreme honesty in EA

• Ada-Maaria Hyvärinen—Less often discussed EA emotional patterns

Fellowships & Programs

• US Policy Careers Speaker Series—Organised by Stanford Existential Risks Initiative

• ILINA Fellowship for intellectually curious students in Nairobi to spend 2-4 months learning new ways of thinking and find pressing problems to work on. Applications close July 8th

• The Future Academy is a program aimed to equip students and early-career professionals with the thinking and resources to pursue impactful careers. The first program starts in September, applications close July 10th

• The University Group Accelerator Program is running in August, applications close July 25th

• Center for the Governance of AI Winter Fellowship—Applications close 1st August

• French X-Risk and Safe Technologies Summit—Happening in September. Applications close 7th August

• The Open Philanthropy Undergraduate Scholarship aims to provide support for students who are hoping to start an undergraduate degree at one of the top universities in the USA or UK. Applications close August 15th

EA On Twitter

• Alexander Berger responding to Michael Nielsen on EA

• Benjamin Todd also responding to that piece by comparing ‘totalising’ EA to actual EA

• Former UK MP Rory Stewart with his EA Book Recommendations

EA Around The World

• Photos of the Lagos EA Meetup

• Intro to EA event at Kathmandu

• Video highlights from EA Global London 2022

• Rutuja Chhajed with a photo of the first EA Delhi meetup

First EA Delhi meet-up! Feels good to have this community here:) @EAheadlines @Effect_Altruism #Delhi #community #EAIndia

Good News

• Benin, Uganda and Rwanda eliminate sleeping sickness as a public health problem

• The Central African Republic has abolished the death penalty

• Togo eliminates trachoma as a public health problem

• China reduced air pollution by 40% in 7 years, which could add two years to average life expectancy

• Malaysia abolishes mandatory use of the death penalty

• From 2000 to 2015, Peru’s under-five mortality decreased by 56%