Latest EA Updates for June 2019

Organisation Updates

• Rethink Charity Forward 2018 year in review

• ACE with a review of 2018

• A review of fundraising activities of the Effective Altruism Foundation in 2018

• MIRI 2018 year in review

• The Life You Can Save are launching the Giving Games Platform and new facilitator tools

Grants

• Open Phil have made 10+ grants recently, including $18,451,000 on global health, $7,660,000 on farm animal welfare, $5,168,000 on scientific research, $4,796,000 to 80,000 Hours, $2,756,000 to the Centre for Effective Altruism, $1,015,000 on global catastrophic risks, $255,000 on criminal justice reform and $150,000 on land use reform

• The Gates Foundation with a $180,000,000 grant in support of the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network. CHAMPS collects and analyses data that is used to help identify the causes of death among children under the age of 5 in seven countries where child mortality rates are the highest

• A $150,000,000 gift to the University of Oxford to serve as a dynamic hub dedicated to the humanities and also to house the Institute for Ethics in AI

• Open Phil explaining their $17,500,000 bet on Sherlock Biosciences’ innovations in viral diagnostics

• ACE are funding grants for animal advocacy projects, especially for newer organisations focused on farmed animals. Closing on July 14th

• GiveWell explaining their decision to allocate $4,700,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation

• The EA Fund for Global Development has granted $60,000 to Instiglio, an organisation which assists in the technical design of results-based financing mechanisms

Research

• Zach Groff with an update on a foundational result on how much wild animals suffer, suggesting that suffering doesn’t necessarily dominate enjoyment in nature

• Luisa Rodriguez with the first in a series of posts on nuclear risks, looking at which plausible nuclear exchange scenarios should worry us the most

• Karolina Sarek with research looking into whether corporate campaigns in the US have any counterfactual impact

• An overview of the rising threat of dengue, the world’s fastest-growing mosquito-borne virus

• 3ie with a post warning about the dangers of relying on single studies to inform policy making

• Kim Cuddington with research into various ways of understanding life history classification of animals

• Research into the health impact of snakebites, with over 120,000 people being killed each year and 400,000 people with life changing disabilities

• Daniela R. Waldhorn with research into whether invertebrates have the capacity to experience pain and pleasure in a morally significant way

• Peter Hurford looking at

• A report from What Works Wellbeing on what an individual would be willing to pay for an additional year of healthy life (average = £25,000)

Miscellaneous

• A new organisation, the Happier Lives Institute, has been created to look into “the best ways to help others live happier lives”

• An interview with Ben Delo and Natalie Cargill on why they are prioritising the long-term future at Effective Giving

• Vishal Maini with an artificial intelligence reading list for newcomers

• Victoria Krakovna with an overview of the International Conference on Learning Representations Safe Machine Learning workshop

• Jamie Harris looking into whether effective animal advocacy movement building is a neglected opportunity

• Hauke Hillebrandt with a post looking into whether corporations could be global catastrophic risks

• Claire Zabel and Luke Muehlhauser with a post summarising the potential areas and personal fit for information security careers for global catastrophic risk reduction and why it may be an impactful career path

• BBC Future with an article looking into the risks of anthrax and nuclear waste being released by melting Arctic ice

• Helen Toner from Center for Security and Emerging Technology and Jeffrey Ding from the Center for the Governance of AI testifying at the US Senate before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on “U.S.-China Competition in Artificial Intelligence”

• Simon Beard from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk writing for the BBC Deep Civilisation series on the long term quest to decide right from wrong

• Hilary Greaves with a collective study on effective altruism, released later this year with contributors including William MacAskill and Toby Ord

• GFI report on the state of China’s plant-based meat industry

• CSER researcher Luke Kemp with a chapter on conflict resolution in climate diplomacy

• A post on how two centuries of rapid population growth is about to come to an end

• An overview of the Bangladesh Priorities project looking at how to do the most good per taka spent

• A new online game for people to test their knowledge of historical data trends

• Jeremiah Johnson on why they’ve decided to donate a kidney to a stranger

• Clearer Thinking with a set of ‘Life-Changing questions’ that they claim are practical, yet rarely-asked and 83% of people reported were valuable for them to answer

• Our World in Data with visualisations on which countries achieved economic growth and why this matters

Vox

• A look into whether climate change is an existential or catastrophic risk and why this could matter

• What are lethal autonomous weapons and should they be banned?

• What is the case for adding more and more people to earth?

• How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls

Podcasts

• Philip Tetlock on why accurately predicting the future is “central to absolutely everything”

• Future Perfect podcast with Jaan Tallinn and Kelsey Piper looking at risks from AI

• Cass Sunstein on how social change happens

• Pushmeet Kohli on 80,000 Hours talking about DeepMind’s plan to make AI systems robust & reliable

• Dylan Matthews on Rationally Speaking talking about various EA related areas

• Future Perfect looking at how foundations like Ford and Rockefeller pushed hard to control India’s population with sterilisation and how India’s government expanded that practice into a massive atrocity

• Rob Wiblin on the Neoliberal podcast discussing 80,000 Hours

• Dr Diana Fleischman discussing how the EA movement is redefining animal suffering

Effective altruism in media & blogs

• CSER researchers with an article in the Metro on artificial diseases

• A new book by Tom Chivers about AI Safety and the community around this area

• Devex with an article on how GiveWell is exploring giving opportunities that are more difficult to measure

• A Christian book review of The Most Good You Can Do

• Inside Philanthropy looking at whether new donors transforming the global aid industry is a good thing

• Recording of the 2019 Liffman Lecture on ethical philanthropy featuring Peter Singer

• Paul Niehaus from GiveDirectly and Ellie Hassenfeld from GiveWell with recordings of their talks at the Data, Decisions and Public Policy lectures

Good news roundup

• Kenya and Ghana are rolling out a malaria vaccine to 360,000 children

• Ecuador has approved same-sex marriage