Latest Research and Updates for November

I’d like to start this month by highlighting amazing acts of altruism that happened on Giving Tuesday earlier this week. Over 200 people, with coordination help from Avi Norowitz and William Kiely, were able to donate over $500,000 within 30 seconds via a Facebook matching campaign to a variety of causes and charities, eventually getting to over $700,000 donated.

• A post looking into whether global inequality has gone up, down or stayed roughly the same over the last 25 years

• Reflections from a GiveDirectly donor on their experience of meeting recipients in person

• First analysis of ‘pre-registered’ studies shows a sharp rise in null findings

• GiveWell with their latest charity recommendations and on why they no longer recommend No Lean Season

• EAF have launched the EAF Fund, mainly focused on supporting research and policy efforts to prevent the worst technological risks

• Charity Entrepreneurship have a post evaluating & comparing the suffering of various animals

• CEA is fundraising for 2019

• Sentience Institute with an end of year summary

• A new donation swap system to match donors together so they can donate to each other’s favourite charity, and both receive tax benefits

• ACE with their 2018 animal charity recommendations

• A post looking at burnout and potential ways to treat it

• Which disease is likely to be eradicated next?

• An update from Global Priorities Institute on what they’ve been up to and how to get involved

• Analysis of the 2018 EA survey on how people originally get involved in effective altruism

• 2018 progress report from ALLFED

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Brian Christian on using computer science algorithms to solve real life problems

• 9 common misconceptions people have about ‘talent gaps’ in priority areas

• A podcast on fast paths into machine learning careers

• How child mortality went from common place to a rarer tragedy, with the highest rates today being comparable to Europe in the 1950′s

• There is a new forum for technical AI Alignment research and discussion

• Future Perfect has been producing almost too much content to consume, with articles looking at funding to prevent pandemics, 10 ways the world is most likely to end, carbon removal research, how to help people in the long term future, cooling the planet with volcanic eruptions and a new journal of controversial ideas, why people seem to care less about mass suffering as well as much more

• Julia and Jeff talking to Vox on how they tried to choose careers that maximised the good they can do

• A tweet from someone who completed their first round of medical tests for kidney donation after listening to the future perfect podcast

• J-PAL have a new resource to help people turn evidence into policy

• The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute has listed the key areas it is researching

• Moorfields Eye Hospital and DeepMind have started working together to help doctors recommend the correct course of treatments for over 50 eye diseases

• The Life You Can Save with research on how to promote good giving

• Over 1 million former Florida prisoners win the right to vote after campaigning by an Open Phil grantee

• A paper on the evidence for what might work in preventing partner violence

• IPA with results from a mass media experiment to reduce violence against women in rural Uganda

• A post looking at how to measure governmental aid effectiveness and which countries rank highest

• A new podcast series interviewing people involved in averting potential end of the world risks

• BERI is looking for testimonials on why they should or shouldn’t give grants to Leverage, Paradigm and IPR

• A new study showing regional preferences on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. They defined “western,” “eastern,” and “southern” clusters of countries and found respondents in southern countries had a relatively stronger tendency to favour sparing young people rather than the elderly

• An info-graphic looking at which groups gave over $400 billion in America in 2017 and which areas they donated to

• Caroline Fiennes writing in the financial times on ensuring an investment has impact

• Sanjay Joshi has a post looking at how Cool Earth may have been over-rated as an effective climate change charity

• James Aung has created a ‘stumble upon’ for effective altruism related content called the EA procrastinator

• An overview of a new paper from DeepMind that outlines a research direction for solving the agent alignment problem

• Adam Gleave has written up their decision process on where to donate after winning the $100,000 donor lottery

• Faunalytics looking at who donates to animal causes and how

• Emergent Ventures with a list of recent grant recipients as well as the philosophy behind handing out $4 million in small grants with minimal evaluation

• A paper looking at how forecasting tournaments can reduce political polarisation and increase epistemic humility

• A post looking at the intersection of effective altruism and minimalism

• The Centre for Global Development with a post on how well the world is prepared for pandemics

• A post looking at how nature conservationism can learn from effective altruism

• A post from Our World in Data summarising the view “The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better” All three statements are true.

• Effective altruism in media & blogs—an overview of EA in Devex with snippets from multiple organisations, Marc Du Bois (former executive director of MSF-UK) recounting an EA meetup in Cambridge, Neerav looking back at the last 5 years of their giving, Rob Mather of AMF being interviewed by Neolib podcast and an overview of EA from VP of advice and investing at Betterment

• In a good news roundup, proposition 12 passed in California, establishing minimum space requirements for egg-laying chickens, calves raised for veal, and pregnant pigs, US congress has doubled the budget for overseas international investments to $60 billion, the FDA announced how they would regulate clean meat, making the path to market clearer and Fargo became the first city to adopt approval voting, called the best voting system by the Center for Election Science, an Open Phil grantee