Latest EA Updates for July 2019

Latest Updates

• For people who are interested in long-termism and China, and have at least conversational Mandarin, there is a new fellowship to help people accelerate their careers in this area. Closes July 30th

• Anders Sandberg writing for the BBC on the biggest challenges humanity will face if we survive into the far future

• Larry Temkin writing in the Journal of Practical Ethics on the possible negatives of global aid, with responses from William MacAskill and Theron Pummer & Matthew Clark

• The EU is deciding how to invest 100,000,000,000 Euros of research and development money over the next few years, through the new Horizon Europe programme. If you have ideas on how this could be spent, they are surveying people here

• Meet the 13 charity entrepreneurs planning to start new effective charities

• Rosie Campbell with a post on their favourite AI alignment and policy newsletters

• An article on why our current thoughts on recycling and landfill may be incorrect

• The Atlantic reporting on how Chinese scientists and philanthropists are trying to eradicate malaria in Kenya by giving antimalarial tablets to everyone there

• A look at 24 tech startups from around Asia attempting to solve a range of problems, including health, climate and education, as part of Entrepreneur First

• Marc Gunther looking at how a badly run charity can still get a 4 star rating from traditional charity raters

• World Economic Forum whitepaper outlining 8 actions to enable technology to ethically address mental ill-health at scale

• A look at Target Malaria, with a small-scale release of genetically modified sterile male mosquitoes in Burkina Faso

• National geographic looking at how AI can combat climate change

• 80,000 Hours with a calibration training tool to help improve your predictions

• More than half of the people who live below the absolute poverty line are children despite only making up a third of the population

• William MacAskill with definitions of effective altruism and longtermism

• A new group for Buddhists interested in EA

• The Indian government is creating a new ‘Nudge’ unit to reform policy using behavioural economics

• Jamie Harris with reflections on the effectiveness of grassroots protests

• A post on 5 actions governments and international funders should take to meet sustainable development goals, including keeping an up to date directory of interventions that need to be scaled

• Open Philanthropy with a post on how “GiveWell’s Top Charities Are (Increasingly) Hard to Beat”

• Uplift with 5 tips on how to compare apps that help with depression and the evidence behind these tools (Uplift themselves create their own app but are open about that)

Organisation Updates

• Wild Animal Initiative with a 6 month update and fundraiser post

• The EA Funds have had some changes to three of the fund management teams

• Richard Parr has set up The Good Food Institute Europe and is happy for people to reach out to them to find out more and/or join this mission

•The Center for Innovative Governance Research on why charter cities may be an impactful intervention

• CSER with an overview and notes of the APPG for Future Generations event on drones and the future of warfare and on negative emissions technology

Grants

• Open Phil have made 10 grants recently, including $2,000,000 on land use reform (California YIMBY), $933,000 on farm animal welfare, $680,000 on scientific research (Off-grid refrigeration challenge), $437,000 on global catastrophic risks, $440,000 on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and $115,000 on criminal justice reform

• The Purple Orange Ventures fellowship is providing 120,000 EUR grant funding and mentorship for scientists and engineers to explore startup ideas to create or support the creation of products that mimic animal-based food products

• The Effective Altruism Foundation has opened applications for people interested in working on reducing risks of astronomical suffering. Closes 12th August

Research

• The UN released their multidimensional poverty index, demonstrating that labelling countries—or even households—as rich and poor is an oversimplification. Two-thirds of the multidimensionally poor live in middle-income countries. In India there were 271 million fewer people in poverty in 2016 than in 2006

• Lewis Bollard looking at whether companies will make good on their cage-free pledges

• A paper looking at how ethics classes with Peter Singer can affect animal consumption amongst students

• The Urban Institute with a literature review of the role of philanthropic funding in nuclear disarmament

• OpenAI with papers on why responsible AI development needs cooperation on safety

• Rethink Grants with a write up of their evaluation process for a corporate ambassador program

• A psychology paper on how helping socially distant others can result in negative perceptions by those closer

• The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute with a report on “Risk Trade-off Analysis of Nuclear Explosives for Asteroid Deflection”

• Saulius Šimčikas with a report on how corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent

• The Welcome Foundation with a global survey of 140,000 people on how they think about science and major health challenges, key figures including 79% agree that vaccines are safe and 72% trust scientists

• A cause profile on invertebrate welfare by Jason Schukraft

Vox

• Microsoft has a new billion dollar partnership with OpenAI to help build beneficial AI

• Looking at the first decade of the Giving Pledge, the campaign to change billionaire philanthropy

• How cryptocurrency is being used to help people in Venezuela, which is now the fourth largest bitcoin trading country in the world

• Vox covering Let’s Fund research into public clean energy research and development as a potentially high impact donation opportunity

• An overview of the work by David Denkenberger at ALLFED, figuring out how to reduce the risk of starvation in the aftermath of global disasters

Podcasts

• Helen Toner from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology talking to 80,000 Hours about common misconceptions when thinking about emerging tech and China

• Future Perfect looking at the value of moon exploration

• The Future of Life Institute with a podcast on whether nuclear weapons testing is coming back

• A podcast looking at why people generally find A/B testing uncomfortable

• Haydn Belfield from CSER on a podcast answering questions about existential risks

• A podcast from the Charities Aid Foundation looking at the history of EA and rational giving, including Scientific Philanthropy and how EA is different to these past movements

Effective Altruism In Media & Blogs

• Inside Philanthropy looking at how Open Philanthropy has granted over $70,000,000 to criminal justice reform from an effective altruism perspective

• Quartz looking at effective altruism and how it has changed over the last decade

• An article looking at why only 9% of donations in New Zealand go to international charities