C Tilli with a personal reflection on how their experience of EA is similar to their experience of religious faith in that it provides a sense of purpose and belonging, but that they miss the assurance of their own intrinsic value and how that can make it difficult to maintain a stable sense of self-worth
EA Updates for November
Upcoming Virtual Events
8th November—Giving What We Can Meetup
8th November—Sam Berscht on the Future of Animal Advocacy Research
9th November—Chloe Cockburn: Effective Giving and BLM
12th November—One For The World donates it’s millionth dollar with Peter Singer
16th November—Career Profile—Amy Huang from The Good Food Institute
19th November—Giving What We Can Open Forum
21st − 22nd November—EAGxAsia-Pacific 2020
30th November—Working as an AI Strategist with Miles Brundage from OpenAI and The Future of Humanity Institute
2nd December—Career Profile—Daniela Amodei from OpenAI
Latest Research and Updates
Meta
Jess Whittlestone on ‘actually solving problems’ and why she has distanced herself from the EA community
Fin Moorhouse with a review and summary of Moral Uncertainty by Will MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord
Giving Tuesday will be on December the 1st, find out how to get your donation doubled here
Rob Wiblin with a post on when people shouldn’t use EA jargon
5 new charities from the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program
Match for More has launched an initiative to connect professionals who leverage employer donor-matching opportunities
EA New York City now has two full time organisers and a new website
Giving What We Can now has a companies pledge with four companies having already taken it including the Sam Harris, founder of Waking Up
The EA Debate Championship 2020 happened last month with over 100 participants
The EA Consulting Network with a giving guide for people to give to their workplaces
Q&A with Marcus Davis, co-founder at Rethink Priorities, Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health
Julian Hazell on why people should take the Giving What We Can pledge
Clearer Thinking has launched a podcast, including episodes with Arden Koehler, Kat Woods and Anna Salamon
Lincoln Quirk and Ben Kuhn from SendWave with an ask me anything
Akash with a post on what they learnt at the EA Student Summit
Giving What We Can with an effective giving advocacy challenge for 2020
Lucius Caviola and Joshua Greene with a new strategy for broadening the appeal of effective giving
Caleb Parikh has joined EA for Christians full time to support the EA Christian community
EA organisation updates for September
Jamie Gittens with a list of EA related organisations
Jamie Harris with a brief overview of recruitment and retention research
Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola with a paper on misconceptions about charitable giving
Grants
Open Phil have made 15 grants recently with a total value of $4,553,000
$2,680,000 - Scientific research
$550,000 - Macroeconomic stabilisation policy
$500,000 - Immigration policy
$477,000 - Criminal justice reform
$267,000 - Farm animal welfare
$79,000 - Other areas
The EA Global Health and Development Fund has made two grants recently
$550,000 - IDinsight
$198,000 - Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention
Global Development
Founders Pledge have a global development fund looking at riskier opportunities for impact
The 2019 Global Burden of Disease study has been released, analysing 286 causes of death, 369 diseases and injuries, and 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories
Stephen Clare and Aidan Goth looking at whether EA should focus on economic growth vs direct interventions
GiveWell on why ongoing assessment of top charities leads to more impact
The World Health Organization with a report that estimates 1,800,000 people could die from tuberculosis in 2020 - numbers last seen in 2012
The World Bank with lessons from Peru: how to save children from stunting and other exemplars in global health
The Life You Can Save audiobook is now available on multiple major podcast services
Exemplars in Global Health looking at countries that have restored vaccine confidence
Michael Cremer with Tyler Cowen discussing economists as founders
Animal Welfare
Kelsey Piper interviewing Peter Singer about his new book ‘Why Vegan?’
Animal Charity Evaluator with thoughts on building alliances with the environmental movement
George Bridgwater and Amy Odene have founded Animal Ask to assist animal advocacy organisations with research
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
Simon Beard on Parfit, climate change, and existential risk
Leopold Aschenbrenner on whether faster economic growth increases or decreases existential risks
Kelly Wanser on climate change as a possible existential threat
The BBC covering the National Risk Register
Lara Mani on the challenges of communicating about existential risks to the public, politicians, and business people
Environment
The Earthshot prize has been launched, awarding 5, one million-pound prizes every year for the next decade for solutions to environmental problems
The Parametric Press looking at carbon removal for trees compared to algae
Daniel Schreiber on methods better than offsets for fighting climate change
Long Term Future
Hilary Greaves from The Global Priorities Institute on the 80,000 Hours podcast
A new long-termism focused newsletter from BBC journalist Richard Fisher
Alexis Carlier with a post looking at longtermist reasons to work for innovative governments
Podcast with Anders Sandberg discussing possible future trajectories for humanity
Florian Ulrich Jehn with a post on ‘the end of the Bronze Age as an example of a sudden collapse of civilisation’
Stefan Schubert with post on optimism about EA long-termism
Emerging Technology
Kelsey Piper on the case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity
An article in Nature looking at the last decade of synthetic biology
Andrew Critch on AI research considerations for human existential safety
Richard Ngo summarising the existential threat of artificial general intelligence
Iason Gabriel on foundational philosophical questions in AI alignment
Improving Institutions
An overview of an event organised by the Center for Open Science for funders of metascience
Kelsey Piper writing about what has been learnt about the replication crisis in science
Ian David Moss on how to get social sector leaders to use evidence
Other Links
Charity Navigator is starting to evaluate the impact of the charities they recommend
Mauricio with historical case studies on what helped the voiceless
Sigal Samuel on the case for funding psychedelics to treat mental health
Clearer Thinking with twelve ways to accelerate learning
An interview with Harvard professor Max Bazerman about their new book ‘Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness’
Spencer Greenberg discussing effective altruism, mental health and habit change
80,000 Hours looking at how much does one person’s vote matters
C Tilli with a personal reflection on how their experience of EA is similar to their experience of religious faith in that it provides a sense of purpose and belonging, but that they miss the assurance of their own intrinsic value and how that can make it difficult to maintain a stable sense of self-worth
Good News
Kazakhstan has signed a global treaty aiming to abolish the death penalty
Myanmar has eliminated trachoma
The proportion of children under five years of age chronically infected with hepatitis B dropped to just under 1% in 2019 down from around 5% in the pre-vaccine era
The number of people without access to electricity dropped from almost 860 million in 2018 to 770 million in 2019
France has announced a ban on using wild animals in circuses, on keeping dolphins and killer whales in captivity in marine parks and on raising mink on fur farms