The Effective Altruism Newsletter & Open Thread – August 2016

[ChrisCundy]

Here is the latest newsletter, brought to you by the Effective Altruism Newsletter Team:

This is an open thread, so feel free to comment about anything, whether it’s what you’ve got up to in the last month, or awesome plans for new EA things.

The Monthly EA Newsletter – August 2016 Edition View This Email in Your Browser Welcome to this special edition of the EA Newsletter! What’s so special, you ask? Well, we recently hit 10,000 subscribers – a very warm welcome to all new readers! Tomorrow EA Global kicks off in Berkeley with more than 1,000 people expected to attend. (Here’s the livestream if you can’t make it in person.) There’s a brand-new EA landing page (more info below). And it’s August, generally considered the best month of the year. Now, read on! The team The New “Spotlight” Section In this new section we’ll be shining a spotlight on different topics, concepts and considerations that lie at the heart of EA. The first topic is a special one at that: the all-new effectivealtruism.org landing page – it literally went live half an hour ago! There’s a new Introduction to Effective Altruism section (highly recommended!) as well as a new resources page that collects some of the best introductory writing on EA. Over time, the site content will be expanded to cover more topics in greater detail. There’s also an interactive Cause Prioritization Tool that helps you explore the many considerations that might inform which cause you should work on. The site design is more stripped-back and puts more emphasis on content, navigation and readability. This project is a collaboration between the Centre for Effective Altruism and members of the EA community. If you have feedback or would like to contribute to the project, feel free to email [e-mail]. Articles and Community Posts 2904 people took part in 2015 Effective Altruism Survey and the results are available right here. Happy reading! There’s also been a separate survey conducted among local group organizers. You can look up the results following this link. In fact, have a look at these great threads if you’re interested to learn more about local EA meetups. It sounds like bad news but it’s actually a brilliant example of expected value thinking: GiveWell on how deworming might have huge impact, but might have close to zero impact. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time in a cave recently, you must’ve heard about the Universal Basic Income experiment by GiveDirectly. There’s good news about it everywhere, including in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. There’s more good news coming from Evidence Action and the Government of India, which has just recently held the largest public health event ever conducted in one day: the country dewormed 179 million children in almost all states and Union territories. Very impressive! Learn more about how to identify plausible paths to impact and then have a look at five potential ways of handling flow-through effects. Updates from EA Organizations 80,000 Hours 80,000 Hours grew 30% last month, reaching over 85 plan changes per month. This was aided by higher web traffic and workshops, of which they gave 8 in the past 5 weeks (London, Norway, Germany, Australia). Animal Charity Evaluators ACE published several blog posts in July, including some initial thoughts on the use of legal and social activism to effect legal change for animals and an accessible explanation of why ACE focused on farmed animals. Centre for Effective Altruism (Special Update) The Centre for Effective Altruism is becoming a more unified organization than it has been in the past. The teams that compose Giving What We Can, Effective Altruism Outreach, the Global Priorities Project and CEA Central will now merge and operate as a single unit. 80,000 Hours will continue as an autonomous organisation, based in the Bay Area. Rest assured that all the teams will continue with their work and that, for example, the Giving What We Can pledge will remain a cornerstone of the EA community. The new CEA consists of a Community & Outreach Division and a Special Projects Division. And there are plans to set up an Oxford Institute for Effective Altruism. Sounds good to us! Effective Altruism Foundation The Effective Altruism Foundation, an EA think tank and project incubator that is active in the German-speaking area, now has a basic English website. Foundational Research Institute FRI has identified a promising class of interventions for reducing risks of astronomical future suffering: Their paper “Suffering-focused AI safety: Why “fail-safe” measures might be our top intervention” presents an overview of the options they plan to investigate further. Future of Humanity Institute FHI made its first biotech hire Piers Millet. This month, Piers organized a closed roundtable with key stakeholders on gene editing and national security. FHI Researchers participated in the White House’s AI governance workshop, IJCAI, and hosted a workshop with EUROSPARC staff and students. GiveWell GiveWell published a blog post on the challenges of weighing organizational strength against estimated cost-effectiveness, and how that tradeoff impacts its recommendations of GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. Open Philanthropy Project The Open Philanthropy Project welcomed new team members to focus on scientific research and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. The organization also discussed grants to Compassion in World Farming USA for its work to reduce farm animal suffering and Harvard University’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management to support its work on reforms that impact young adults. Raising for Effective Giving Raising for Effective Giving published its 2015 transparency report: In 2015, they fundraised $597,820 for effective charities, with expenses of just $75,242, putting REG’s donation multiplier or “fund ratio” at 1:8. Sentience Politics Sentience Politics is raising €80,000 for their ballot initiative for fundamental rights for primates in Basel, Switzerland. If successful, this would be the world’s first ballot initiative to legally secure the fundamental rights of a non-human species. Until August 16 all donations will be matched. The Life You Can Save The Life You Can Save is raising funds for the Giving Game Project. You can promote effective giving and support the EA community (not to mention leverage your giving!) by sponsoring Giving Games. Jobs Research Director at GiveDirectly Behavioural Insight and Trials Advisor at HM Revenue and Customs (UK) Research Associate/​Manager at Humane League Labs Jr. Database Developer at Mercy for Animals Business Operations at Segovia You can stay up to date with job offers through these groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Timeless Classics The ability and willingness to change your mind in the face of new evidence is a core trait we effective altruists like to cultivate. But it can be difficult to change your mind and re-prioritize between cause areas. Claire Zabel has some suggestions on making the re-prioritization process easier. Go forth and do the most good! Let us know how you liked this edition and how we can improve further. See you again on Sept. 1! Georgie, Michał, Pascal and Sören – The Effective Altruism Newsletter Team The Effective Altruism Newsletter is a joint project between the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Effective Altruism Hub and .impact Like this newsletter? Click here to forward it to a friend A community project of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1149828) – Centre for Effective Altruism, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, United Kingdom unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences

[Gavin]

Project seeking analysis and developers:

An app for routing recurring meat offset payments to effective animal orgs. I’ve made a hackpad for it here.

Big questions for debate here:

• Is this even an effective way of promoting animal welfare?
  a) would its absolute effect be positive? b) if not, is building it less bad than the counterfactual of an ineffective animal org doing it?

• Anyone have any inkling of how to estimate the moral licencing cost, to animal welfare?

• Is anyone doing this already?

[Evan_Gaensbauer]

The EA newsletter goes out to thousands of people. We should add a sentence with a link to the EA newsletter’s email or whatnot, inviting subscribers to email the newsletter team if they’d like to advertise a job at their EA organization. It could also work for the EA founders of startups or somesuch. Might be the best way to spread the word about EA jobs since the EA jobs board .impact made.