Monthly Overload of EA—June 2022
Link post for 2022 June Effective Altruism Updates
Top Links
Will MacAskill on EA and the current funding situation
Theo Hawking - ‘Bad Omens in Current Community Building’
Nick Beckstead—clarifications on the Future Fund’s approach to grantmaking
Haydn Belfield -‘Cautionary Lessons from the Manhattan Project and the ‘Missile Gap’; Beware Assuming You’re in an AI Race’
Linch - ‘Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker’
Luke Freeman - ‘”Big tent” effective altruism is very important (particularly right now)’
Julia Wise - ‘Messy personal stuff that affected my cause prioritization (or: how I started to care about AI safety)’
New Organisations, Projects & Prizes
Open Philanthropy have prizes for new cause area suggestions, submit suggestions by August 4th
A post introducing Asterisk, a new quarterly journal of ideas from in and around Effective Altruism
An EA Unjournal has been started. They aim to organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects
Nuño Sempere has started the EA Forum Lowdown, a tabloid version of the EA Forum digest
The EA Forum has a new feature allowing you to find other people interested in EA near you
Charity Entrepreneurship have launched career coaching for impact-focused entrepreneurs
EA Engineers has been set up as a discord for people interested in EA and non-software engineering
Non-trivial Pursuits has been set up to help teenagers find fulfilling, impactful careers
The Nucleic Acid Observatory project for early detection of catastrophic biothreats has been launched
Critiques/Suggested Improvements
Ines on how EA can sound less weird
CEA is looking for anonymous feedback
Hal Triedman with a critique of effective altruism
Jeff Kaufman on ‘Increasing Demandingness in EA’
Luke Freeman on being ambitious and celebrating failures
Arjun Panickssery on impressions of ‘Big EA’ from students
Justis with a post on status as a Giving What We Can Pledger
Marius Hobbhahn with ‘EA needs to understand its “failures” better’
Marisa with ‘The EA movement’s values are drifting. You’re allowed to stay put.’
Caroline Ellison on how discussion about increased spending in EA and its potential negative consequences conflates two separate questions
James Lin and Jennifer Zhu with ‘EA culture is special; we should proceed with intentionality’
Luke Chambers with ‘Why EA’s Talent Bottleneck is a Barrier of its own Making’
Ben Kuhn suggesting that ‘The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or motivated cognition, but grift’
Étienne Fortier-Dubois with ‘Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philosophies: Why Aesthetics Matter’
Miscellaneous Meta EA
80,000 Hours podcast with Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure
David Moss and Jamie Elsey ran a survey to find out how many people have heard of effective altruism
Matthew Yglesias on understanding effective altruism’s move into politics
Results from the Decade Review on the EA Forum
Lucius Caviola, Erin Morrissey, Joshua Lewis have run a survey that found most students who would agree with EA ideas haven’t heard of EA yet
Kat Woods and Amber Dawn on how to have passive impact
Owen Cotton-Barratt on deferring
Justis looking at how complicated it is to work out impact
Julia Wise with a post on what to do as EA is likely to get more attention over time
Updates from the CEA community health team
Careers
Vaidehi Agarwalla on the availability bias in job hunting
Joseph Lemien looking at how to do hiring better
Jonathan Michel with an overview of his job as an EA office manager
Tereza Flidrova on becoming an EA architect
A post asking for an EA copyediting service
‘Is it still hard to get a job in EA? Insights from CEA’s recruitment data’
Lynette Bye with ‘Have You Ever Doubted Whether You’re Good Enough To Pursue Your Career?’ and also ‘Do you need to love your work to do it well?’
Ben West on why CEA Online doesn’t outsource more work to non-EA freelancers
A post suggesting ‘You should join an EA organisation with too many employees’
Ben West with ‘Comparative advantage does not mean doing the thing you’re best at’
Joey Savoie asking ‘Does it make sense for EA’s to be more risk-seeking in earning to give?’
Caroline Ellison on organisational alignment
A post arguing that people should spend more time working on projects together to improve networking in EA
Ben West suggesting that people do ‘EA Tours of Service’
Abby Hoskin on how to apply for a PhD
Abi Olvera and Dan Spoko suggesting that Americans should consider applying to join U.S. diplomacy
Grants
Open Phil have made 6 grants recently with a total value of $14,300,000
$12,600,000 - Global Health & Development
$8,200,000 - Fortify Health
$4,400,000 - Sightsavers
$750,000 - Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative
$500,000 - Center for Popular Democracy
$360,000 - Malaria Vaccine Research
Global Development
The Integrated National Financing Framework Facility has been launched aiming to bring together international partners to align and magnify support to more than 80 governments to channel investment towards the Sustainable Development Goals
The WHO reports that excess deaths from COVID-19 pandemic may be 3 times more than reported
80,000 Hours podcast with James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
Shakeel Hashim asking ‘Is the world really getting worse?’
Kelsey Piper looking into whether microfinance is encouraging women to join multilevel marketing schemes
Pablo Villalobos and Jaime Sevilla looking at how much population growth happened because of the introduction of potatoes
Animal Welfare
Andrea Polanco writing in Faunalytics on ‘The Impact Of Diet & Different Animal Advocacy Tactics’
Joy Muthanje Mwaniki with ‘What I’ve learnt from researching animal advocacy interventions across the African continent’
On the 18th-20th July there is a virtual global animal law conference
The world’s largest vats for growing cultivated meat are to be built in the U.S.
Clearer Thinking podcast with Leah Edgerton discussing cognitive biases and animal welfare
Animal Advocacy Careers with posts on whether animal charity jobs can be a good personal fit and an overview of fundraising for nonprofits in effective animal advocacy
Jamie Harris, Ali Ladak and Maya Mathur on whether animal welfare reforms affect wider attitudes towards animals
Jamie Gittins with ‘Why should I care about insects (and other invertebrates)?’
Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie with data on the proportion of people in the UK who say they are vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian
Holly Elmore on the ‘The Rodent Birth Control Landscape’
Biosecurity
Open Philanthropy have a request for proposals to help quantify biological risk—Apply by June 5th
Gates Notes on how to prevent future pandemics
The National Institutes of Health has awarded $577 million to establish nine antiviral drug discovery centres for pathogens of pandemic concern
A post from iGEM on the risks from information hazards
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations with a post asking if monkeypox could give us an R&D blueprint to end pandemics
A paper in Nature on how to prevent pandemics by stopping animal to human pathogen exchange
Bridget Williams in conversation with Carrick Flynn on how to prevent the next pandemic
Kelsey Piper with ‘Can we stop the next pandemic by seeking out deadly viruses in the wild?’
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Anders Sandberg with a paper on ‘Collective Intelligence as Infrastructure for Reducing Broad Global Catastrophic Risks’
Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative are accepting applications from university-affiliated groups and individuals interested in receiving their support. Applications close 26th June
Improving Institutions
The Research on Research Institute is hosting the virtual event ‘Priorities for Research on Research’ on the 20th June
The Hypothesis Fund has been launched to support early stage, innovative research that increases adaptability against systemic risks
A new paper on potential risks from making science open
Nadia Asparouhova with the concept of Idea Machines, looking at the example of effective altruism
Chris Said has started Apollo Academic Surveys, aiming to aggregate the views of academic experts
Progress Studies
Matt Clancy has created New Things Under the Sun, aiming to be a living literature review on social science research about innovation
The Atlantic has a new series focused on progress
Hear This Idea podcast with Jason Crawford on Progress Studies
Ben Yeoh interviewing Alex Stapp on ‘Policy For Progress, Under-Researched Areas, Science Of Science and Biosecurity’
Environment
80,000 Hours with an update to their climate change profile
The UK government has started a £120 million fund to develop nuclear power technology
An article on how to use carbon that has been captured
Stanford has started a new climate school with $1.1 billion
An article on how more attention should be paid to geothermal energy
Project Innerspace is a new organisation focused on advocating for geothermal energy
Ben Yeoh with the post ‘Why Consider Supporting SEC Climate Disclosures’
Longtermism
The Global Priorities Institute is producing summaries of their papers. Here is ‘The case for strong longtermism’ and ‘Moral demands and the far future’
Frances Lorenz asking whether EA is just longtermism
Boaz Barak with ‘Why I am not a longtermist’
Sigal Samuel interviewing Sophie Howe, the future generations commissioner of Wales, where they are trying to shift policy to consider 25 years into the future
John G. Halstead with ‘Should we buy coal mines?’
Richard Ren asking if longtermists focus more on climate resilience
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic have raised $580 million to responsibly explore and develop safe AI systems
Astral Codex Ten with a post aiming to popularise obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment
80,000 Hours with a new article on data collection for AI alignment
Jeffrey Ladish and Lennart Heim on information security considerations for AI and the long term future
Frances Lorenz, Nora Belrose and Jon Menaster with a non-technical explainer on DeepMind’s generalist AI, Gato
An article in Foreign Policy looking at why China and the U.S. need to limit the risks from autonomous weapons
Luke Chambers with ‘The Case for Non-Technical AI Safety/Alignment Growth & Funding’
The AI X-risk Research podcast discussing natural abstractions with John Wentworth
Podcast with Holden Karnofsky on AI, philanthropy and the future
Timothy Liptrot with ‘How to internationally regulate industries in non-democracies’
Joe Carlsmith with a presentation on existential risk from power-seeking AI
Thomas Woodside and Dan Hendrycks with a series of posts on pragmatic AI safety
Vael Gates with ‘Transcripts of interviews with AI researchers’
Buck with ‘The case for becoming a black-box investigator of language models’
A post arguing that ‘we shouldn’t confuse theoretical possibility with likelihood, let alone with theoretical certainty’
Other Causes
80,000 Hours podcast with Chris Blattman on five reasons wars happen
Shakeel Hashim on influencing the culture to improve the world
Leo has made a list of cause candidates that have been posted on the EA forum in the first quarter of 2022
Ben Snodin with thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area
Austin on What We Owe the Past
Dan Elton with ‘Kidney stone pain as a potential cause area’
Saloni Dattani with data on the lifetime risk of depression
Bryan Walsh looking at the potential of quantum computing
Dylan Matthews asking whether economic growth will slow down in the long run and the implications of that
Other Links
Matt Clifford in discussion with Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross exploring how to identify talent around the world
80,000 Hours podcast with Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine
Rutger Bregman giving a talk about effective altruism to 400 people
Richard Y Chappell on levelling-up impartiality rather than levelling down
Gregory Lewis with ‘Rational predictions often update predictably*’
Alex RJL suggesting that sharing google docs with your current thinking is a good way to make tough decisions
Kuhan J on avoiding invisible mistakes
Chana Messinger with a list of lists of EA-related open philosophy research questions
A story of how someone missed their biggest career opportunity so far
Shakeel Hashim with ’13 musings from EA Global’
Milan Patel with 10 learnings from EAGxPrague
EA in the Media
Sam Bankman-Fried says he could spend $1 billion or more in the 2024 U.S. election
The BBC interviewing Peter Singer as he’s awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture
Politico writing about Carrick Flynn running for Congress in Oregon’s 6th Congressional District and the interest from people involved in EA
Seren Kell, Rishub Jain and Arvind Raghavan on why they give via Giving What We Can
Nathan Young with social media rules of thumb
Conferences
8th-10th July—EAGxAustralia—Apply by 24th June
29th-31st July—EA Global: San Francisco
2nd-4th September—EAGxSingapore
23rd-25th September—EA Global: Washington, D.C.
16th-18th September—EAGxBerlin
Apply to join the EAGxIndia 2023, the Future Forum and the EAGxBerkeley 2023 teams
Fellowships & Programs
Leaf are running an eight day residential program in Oxford in August for sixth formers on the theme ‘Building a Better Future’
Legal Priorities Summer Institute is a week-long program in Oxford with the goal of introducing altruistically-minded law and policy students to projects, theories, and tools relevant to tackling issues affecting the long-term future—apply by 17th June
ML Safety Scholars Program − 9 week program to help undergraduates gain skills in machine learning with the eventual aim to work on AI safety research—Apply by May 31st
Center on Long-Term Risk—Summer Research Fellowship
An EA fiction writing retreat will be near Oxford for a week in September—Apply by June 26th
Good News
Over 1 million children have been protected by first malaria vaccine
In Vietnam, over the last decade, absolute poverty has dropped from 16.8 to 5 percent, and over 10 million people were lifted out of poverty
I like the rebranding. 10⁄10.
Thanks David! I always appreciate your curation 💕
Love this newsletter, thanks for making it :)
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