EA Updates for December 2019

UPDATES

• EA Survey 2019 series: Community demographics & characteristics

• Michelle Hutchinson, head of advising at 80,000 Hours, with an ‘Ask Me Anything’

• The EA Funds are running $100,000 and $500,000 donor lotteries with both closing on the 17th of January

• Rethink Priorities with an ‘Ask Us Anything’

• A new EA Facebook group for people interested in information security and global catastrophic risks

• More anonymous answers from 80,000 Hours, this time looking at what are the most common mistakes when deciding what to do and what bad habits are there amongst people trying to change the world

• Videos from EA Global London are up

• Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentorship have an open call for mentors, particularly people specialising in cultivated meat, international development and machine learning

• 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison

• An overview of the Governance of Emerging Technologies research programme at the Oxford Internet Institute, investigating legal, ethical, and social aspects of AI, machine learning, and other emerging information technologies

• Luisa Rodriguez with the post ‘Will the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons affect nuclear deproliferation through legal channels?’

• Sam Hilton with a post on managing risk in the EA policy space

• Lewis Bollard looking at 10 years of progress in animal welfare

• Breakthrough institute on how we reached global peak pasture usage more than two decades ago

• Alex Rattee with a blog post on whether Christians interested in EA should only give to Christian charities

• Rosie Wardle writing about the key developments in 2019 for alternative proteins

• Richard Ngo looking at the various ways we might characterise a utopia

• Sam Hilton with an open thread on where people are donating in 2019

• Economists and policy makers at ID Insight have created Giving Green, a website attempting to make a clear guide for donors who want to reduce greenhouse gases, with both short and long term recommendations

• A new app has been released that ties behavioural psychology to effective donations

• Phil Hewinson has completed the malaria challenge chatbot which combines Facebook Messenger, a mini game, malaria facts and donations to Against Malaria Foundation

• Our World In Data with a post that suggests we are not facing a ‘loneliness epidemic’ and that it may be harmful to describe the problem this way

• BIT with a report on applying behavioural insights to intimate partner violence

• A post looking into how online trolling may not persuade people to change political beliefs

• An article on how less than 10% of EU Aid reaches the poorest countries and with the average percentage of GDP going to aid now being 0.47%, down from 0.51% in 2016

• Wellcome is funding the “Darwin Tree of Life project” to map genomes of all life on the British Isles, hoping to give insight into how life evolved and uncover new genes, proteins and metabolic pathways as well as new drugs for infectious and inherited diseases

• An overview of the conference on pain relief and palliative care held by the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering and the Burkina Faso Ministry of Health

• An article looking at the Tipping Point Fund, a new fund aiming to build the field of impact investing

• An overview of the Moonshot Catalogue, a repository of big-bet philanthropic causes

• Innovations for Poverty Action on how they navigate political transitions during a research project

• Devex looking at what happens when a government aid department is closed down

• An overview of the Mission-Oriented Innovation Network, aiming to bring together leading global policy-making institutions to share the challenges and opportunities they face when trying to create and support public value

• The Skoll Foundation on how they attempt to measure system change

• Clearer Thinking with a quiz to see how well you can detect weak arguments

ORGANISATION UPDATES

• GiveWell on where they are allocating their Quarter 3 2019 discretionary funds as well as where their staff are donating

• Animal Charity Evaluators effective animal advocacy fund has updates from the spring 2019 grantees

• EA Hub with updates on their new features

• Julia Wise and Sam Deere answering questions about the future of Giving What We Can, the EA Funds and the pledge

• The Future of Life Institute looking over their projects in 2019 and plans for next year

• Let’s Fund with an overview of 2019 and plans for 2020

• An update on the Global Priorities Institute’s activities

• Effective Altruism Foundation: Plans for 2020

• The Centre for Effective Altruism with info on EA Global admissions and the application process

• Effective Altruism Funds project updates

• The Center for Election Science year end appeal

• Rethink Priorities 2019 impact and strategy

• Charity Entrepreneurship has opened applications to their 2020 incubation program, closes January 15th

• GPI has opened applications for its 2020 early career conference programme, closing 10th January

GRANTS

• Open Phil have made 22 grants recently with a total value of $23,669,000. With $10,095,000 on criminal justice reform, $9,106,000 for Infant Immunome and Influenza Studies, $3,563,000 on farm animal welfare, $705,000 for Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative and $200,000 for the Center for Human-Compatible AI

• The EA Animal Welfare Fund granted $415,000 to 9 organisations

• The EA Meta Fund granted $330,000 to 4 organisations

RESEARCH

• Sentience Institute with “Social Movement Lessons From the US Anti-Abortion Movement”

• An article on using effective altruism as an ethical lens on research priorities in the study of plants

• A literature review by Jamie Harris on “Is the US Supreme Court a Driver of Social Change or Driven by it?”

• GiveWell with research into the moral weights that donation recipients place on various outcomes

• An article in Nature on how meta-analyses may have biases

• A paper looking at how to measure inequality as experienced difference rather than the Gini coefficient

• A paper looking at the existential threat of antimicrobial resistance

• Christopher Bryant with a paper on attitudes to vegan and vegetarian diets in the UK

VOX

• Where you could give if you want to give to climate change charities

• Where you could give if you want to give to animal welfare

• Randomised Control Trials and its critics

• Why replacing beef with chicken may not have much impact on the environment

• Peter Singer on the lives you can save and animal welfare

• An interview with Toby Ord, one of the Giving What We Can founders

PODCASTS

• Innovations for Poverty Action with a roundup of interesting podcast episodes in 2019

• David Chalmers talking about the nature and ethics of consciousness for over four hours

• Yuval Noah Harari & Max Tegmark on consciousness, morality and effective altruism

• Ben Clifford on a podcast talking about founding Tyve, a software platform that empowers employees to give tax-free through their paycheck to effective causes they care about

• Stefan Schubert on the FLI Podcast talking about the psychology of existential risks and effective altruism

• Matthew Allcock with a list of EA related podcasts which Pablo Stafforini has added to a ListenNotes list which displays the most recent episode from each podcast

• Jan Leike on the AI Alignment Podcast, talking about DeepMind, AI safety and recursive reward modelling

• Jamie Harris with a new podcast talking to advocates, social scientists and entrepreneurs about effective strategies to expand humanity’s moral circle

• Nicole Eagan, CEO of Darktrace, discussing how AI is opening a new battlefield for hackers, governments and private companies

• Vaclav Smil on Exponential View exploring the limits of renewables and the consequences of mega-cities

• Naomi Oreskes on Not Cool laying out the case for why we should listen to experts, how we can identify the best experts in a field, and why we should be open to the idea of more than one type of “scientific method”

• Here Be Monsters interviewing Dylan Matthews on kidney donations

• Rethink Priorities researcher Marcus Davis on nuclear war, invertebrate sentience, and foundational research

• 80,000 Hours with Peter Singer on how both EA and his own moral views have changed

• Jacob Weisberg talks to Michael Faye about cutting out the middle man in charitable donations via GiveDirectly

• Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the AI Now Institute, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how technology workers can influence progress in culture and technology

EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM RELATED MEDIA

• Lucia Coulter with Ali Abdaal, a doctor and youtuber, who has made a video about his decision to take the Giving What We Can Pledge to give away 10% of his income a year to potentially effective charities

• Ariel Conn in the Guardian talking about their FLI podcast about climate change

• Marc Gunther reviewing The Life You Can Save

• Vice interviewing Simon Beard of CSER about existential risks

• Paul Simon and Peter Singer discussing The Life You Can Save in AP News

• The New Scientist looking at effective altruism (Paywall)

• Brian Cox interviewing Martin Rees about Joseph Rotblat, a physicist on the Manhattan Project, who later became a leading advocate of peace and disarmament

• NPR with an overview of GiveWell and the moral questions that donating asks us

• Religion News talking to Peter Singer on why people don’t help the global poor

• Tim Harford writing for the BBC on why we give to charity

• Danielle Thyme looking at how several members of the EA Perth local group discovered effective altruism

GOOD NEWS ROUNDUP

• The 2019 prosperity index suggests that 89% of countries are experiencing higher prosperity than a decade ago, looking at economic strength, peoples lived experiences and tolerance of other communities

• Angus Hervey with 99 good news stories from 2019 looking at conservation, global health, living standards, human rights, peace and climate change

• Following a record-breaking replenishment in October 2019, the Global Fund announced its largest-ever funding allocations for countries to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and build systems for health over the next three years