EA Organization Updates: July-August 2022

By Lizka @ 2022-08-15T15:54 (+25)

These monthly posts originated as the "Updates" section of the EA Newsletter. Organizations submit their own updates, which we edit for clarity.

Job listings that these organizations highlighted are at the top of this post. Some of the jobs have extremely pressing deadlines (including jobs whose applications close today). 

You can see previous updates on the "EA Organization Updates (monthly series)" topic page, or in our repository of past newsletters. Notice that there’s also an “org update” tag, where you can find more news and updates that are not part of this consolidated series. The organizations are in alphabetical order, starting with F this week.[1]

Job Listings

See also: Who's hiring? May-September 2022. The jobs below will also appear in the upcoming EA Newsletter.

Applications due soon

80,000 Hours

Family Empowerment Media

Open Philanthropy

Operations Team at the Centre for Effective Altruism

Rethink Priorities:

Other Positions

Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative:

Charity Entrepreneurship

Founders Pledge

GiveWell

Momentum

Open Philanthropy

Organizational updates

Alphabetical order, F-Z, 0-E

Family Empowerment Media

Family Empowerment Media (FEM) received promising results from their pilot in Kano State, Nigeria: an external survey conducted by PMAdata found that the contraceptive uptake in Kano has increased by 75% over 11 months in 2021 (corresponding to over 400,000 new contraceptive users.)

FEM is pioneering a new evaluation technology: they have developed a transmitter that can automatically replace campaign content in randomly selected areas, making it possible to conduct randomized control trials and efficiently assess the impact of radio interventions.

The team is growing as FEM is preparing to scale, so FEM is hiring for three exciting roles:

Faunalytics 

Faunalytics is hosting a free, remote research symposium, Fauna Connections, for animal advocates on September 8, 2022. Academics and scientists from the social and behavioral sciences and related disciplines will present on original research that discuss the real-life implications and recommendations for animal advocates in four key areas: farmed animals, companion animals, wild animals, and animals used in science.

They have produced an update to their Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts, which documents how many animals are slaughtered for food every year based on newly released United Nations FAO data.

Faunalytics also presented their 2022 Community Survey results with both quantitative and qualitative feedback about the use and value of their research, along with details on how advocates’ ideas are being incorporated into their work. 

Fish Welfare Initiative

Fish Welfare Initiative recently concluded their farmer engagement project in the Philippines, in which they estimate to have improved the lives of 10,000 fish as well as set farmer and political precedent for later fish welfare work. You can learn more in their new Philippines webpage.

They are also still hiring for the following two roles:

For more information, see their Second Quarter Update.

Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge’s recent publications include its report on oral health, which is part of its broader strain of research on interventions that improve subjective well-being, as well as a blog post explaining the rationale for a small initial grant from the Patient Philanthropy Fund.

FP also completed a number of charity evaluations and consequently made several new recommendations to its members. These include LEEP, Suvita, Effective Altruism Australia (EAA), Effektiv Spenden (ES), and the Berkeley Risk and Security Laboratory, a new research institute focused on existential threats from frontier military technologies. FP members committed funding to close the estimated funding gaps for a number of the organization’s recommended charities.

FP’s upcoming research includes a report on air pollution, methodological work on converting between DALYs and WELLBYs, and additional funding recommendations drawing on its “Giving Multipliers” project, which generated the recommendations for EAA and ES.

Johannes Ackva, FP’s climate lead, appeared on David Roberts’ Volts podcast to discuss the EA perspective on climate. FP is still hiring for a climate researcher to work with Johannes. Tell your friends!

GiveWell

Giving Green

Giving Green’s Lucia Simonelli and Dan Stein published a blog post, A Business Case for Beyond Net Zero, outlining 3 actionable, high-impact approaches that businesses can take to go beyond carbon neutrality goals and maximize real climate impact. Giving Green is looking to get in touch with businesses small and large that are interested in learning more about or providing feedback on this approach - please get in touch with the team at givinggreen@idinsight.org.

Giving What We Can

Giving What We Can announced their new pledge pin this month. This pin will be given to all Giving What We Can Pledge members who have been pledgers for over a year and are on track with their donations. The pin is a small way for Giving What We Can to thank our members for displaying an ongoing commitment to their pledge. You can read the full announcement and FAQs.

New content from Giving What We Can:

Blog

YouTube

Podcast

Happier Lives Institute

Recent publications

Recent events

Legal Priorities Project

A series of blog posts submitted to the 2022 Multidisciplinary Forum on Longtermism and the Law are being published as an online symposium on Verfassungsblog throughout August. The series includes submissions by researchers at LPP and elsewhere, including Is Legal Longtermism Common Sense? and Paths Untaken: The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and lessons for AI. Verfassungsblog is considered to be one of the most influential forums for constitutional law and policy in the world.

Dr Matthijs Maas joined LPP full time as Senior Research Fellow - Law & AI. He recently published an in-progress sequence titled Strategic Perspectives on Long-term AI Governance mapping out 15 perspectives on AI governance. The sequence aims to lend greater strategic clarity, consensus, and coherence about what near-term actions to pursue in order to ensure the beneficial development and impact of TAI in the long-term.

Prof John Bliss, now Senior Research Fellow in Residence at LPP, received a grant to carry out legal longtermist research until July 2023, as well as reading group seminars for students at Harvard Law School co-hosted with Prof Christoph Winter.

Cullen O’Keefe (LPP Founding Advisor & Research Affiliate), Dr Jade Leung (LPP Advisor and Board Director), and Markus Anderljung published a piece on How technical safety standards could promote TAI safety.

Prof Christoph Winter taught an undergraduate summer course on “Law & Artificial Intelligence” at ITAM focused on transformative AI.

One for the World 

One for the World has hired a new Director of Chapter Management, Emma Cameron, to guide the team in movement organizing and community building for their university chapter program. Emma will officially join the team in mid-August, but you can email her at Emma@1fortheworld.org. 

One for the World will host their first in-person Chapter Leaders Meeting in over two years in Philadelphia, PA at the end of the month. Nearly 60 Chapter Leaders from around the world will come together to receive training, learn more about One for the World, and build relationships with each other. 

One for the World underwent a rebrand and website revitalization this summer - positioning them right in front of their core audience and ushering in a new era of effective giving movement building. You can check it out here! 

Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy hired a new program officer, James Snowden, to help launch a new focus area for EA community building with an emphasis on global health and well-being. 

Tom Davidson published a report on the social benefits of funding research and development, and Lauren Gilbert published shallow investigations on civil conflict reduction and telecommunications infrastructure.

Ought

Ought hosted an AMA on EA Forum, addressing questions about team culture, alignment approaches, Elicit’s impact, and vision for Elicit. 

Rethink Priorities

Rethink Priorities published a mid-year update on its work. The growing organization plans to reach ~50 full-time equivalent staff and 28 contractors by the end of the year. While RP does much of its research on a consultancy basis, their recent public research includes:

RP is also setting up a Special Projects department to help launch promising initiatives. They are currently fiscally sponsoring and operationally supporting projects like:

The Life You Can Save 

The Life You Can Save has published its new charity evaluation framework. The charity evaluation framework will help identify a broader range of high-impact charities that are working to reduce the burden of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The new framework was designed to compliment existing charity evaluator’s work and will help expand The Life You Can Save’s current list of giving opportunities for donors with strong preferences for particular causes, geographies or theories of change. 

​​“Our framework does three main things,” said Bilal Siddiqi, strategic advisor for research and growth at The Life You Can Save. “First, it helps us focus on the right problems—urgent problems with concrete solutions that don’t get enough funding, like access to basic healthcare or runaway carbon emissions. Second, it lays out how we identify the solutions we want to support—specifically, how we use scientific evidence to pick and choose among the hundreds of possible ways to tackle these problems. And, third, it spells out the criteria we use to find outstanding organizations to recommend to our supporters—those that are among the most cost-effective, transparent, innovative and well-run out there, whose work is backed by evidence.”

80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours wants to hear from you to improve its programmes! If you’ve had any interaction with 80,000 Hours (such as through the website, podcast, job board, or one-on-one team), please take a few minutes to fill out the annual 80,000 Hours user survey — it closes August 14!

This month on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Rob Wiblin spoke with: 

Benjamin Hilton also published a new problem profile: Risks from atomically precise manufacturing.

Anima International

Good news for caged hens in Europe. 

Poland exports around 40% of eggs produced in the country to other countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, meaning that in order to change Polish egg production on a large scale, work also needs to happen further afield. Otwarte Klatki, Anima International’s organisation in Poland, thinks one way to work towards this is to put more pressure on companies which import Polish eggs into countries like Germany. So they were pleased to take part in an Austrian TV report which will help Austrian viewers know that the issue of caged hens is still found in the country.

Anima International also saw some progress for broiler chickens in Norway. After a long and positive dialogue with the country’s largest online retailer, Oda, a European Chicken Commitment agreement has been reached. This means that all chicken products will be ECC compliant by the end of 2023. This will impact roughly 1 million chickens per year. Also, the chicken producer "Norsk Kylling" (which holds a 20% market share) is now fully ECC compliant.

Animal Charity Evaluators

For a limited time, your gift to ACE’s Movement Grants program will be matched dollar-for-dollar! Your donation will be doubled to support groups working on various approaches to animal advocacy — especially those that are underfunded, target large numbers of animals, or are located in regions with a relatively small animal advocacy movement. Learn more about this special opportunity to help build and strengthen the global animal advocacy movement here (you can donate at that link too).

Each year, ACE conducts a thorough search and evaluation of new and promising projects to fund, and they are excited to showcase their sixth round of Movement Grants recipients. ACE particularly focuses on funding animal advocacy groups that are underfunded, target large numbers of animals, and are in regions with a relatively small animal advocacy movement. After reviewing 164 applications, they have selected 35 promising projects across six continents to receive a total of $910,000. View the recipients here.

In 2021, ACE influenced an estimated $10.8 million within the animal advocacy movement, distributed $2.4 million in grants from their Recommended Charity Fund, and awarded over $1 million in Movement Grants to 35 promising charities working to improve the lives of animals. Read their 2021 Year in Review here.

Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI)

BERI recently launched trial collaborations with eight new university groups, as described in this blog post. They’re looking for a Deputy Director to improve existing programs and enable further expansion.

Center on Long-Term Risk

The paper “Evolutionary Stability of Other-Regarding Preferences under Complexity Costs” by Anthony DiGiovanni, Nicolas Macé, and Jesse Clifton was accepted at the “Learning, Evolution, and Games” conference.

Tristan Cook published “Neartermists should consider AGI timelines in their spending decisions” on the EA Forum.

Centre for Effective Altruism

Events

Applications are open for the following events, all via the same link:

CEA also recently shared an update on the Community Events Programme. The program funds and supports EA-aligned events run by community members, such as EAGx conferences and retreats. The program is primarily for larger and/or more professionally run events (i.e. 3-4 day retreats with 30 or more attendees, or 1-3 day conferences with 100+ attendees) than CEA’s Group Support Funding. If you’re unsure which between this and Group Support Funding to apply for, ask CEA at groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

The events team are particularly excited to see applications for: 

You can apply here, and you can read more about what they offer and why you should apply in this previous post. CEA will also be hiring staff to help run the program later this year, and you can express interest in applying here.

Community Health

The Community Health team has been coordinating with staff at Forethought Foundation, Open Philanthropy and other orgs on communications efforts in the lead up to the launch of What We Owe the Future. You can read more about this work here.

Online

Effectivealtruism.org has launched a new Introduction to effective altruism, which focuses on the tangible impact that individuals and organizations in EA are making today.

The EA Forum team launched a new version of the EA Handbook to introduce newcomers to the key ideas of effective altruism, which will also be the foundation of the curriculum for CEA’s Introductory EA Virtual Program moving forward.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)

Luke Kemp was lead author on a paper published in PNAS Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.

Haydn Belfield and Christian Ruhl wrote a post for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warning of the danger of arms race mentalities in technological development.

Paul Ingram appeared on Good Morning Scotland to talk about the recent NATO Summit, Russia, and the threat of nuclear war. 

Martin Rees appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast to discuss black holes, dark matter, alien life, space exploration, future technology, and his advice to young people.

Clarissa Rios Rojas was part of a panel on Latin-American scientists influencing global policy: Lessons learnt from the Global South at the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress 2022.

Charity Entrepreneurship

A few weeks ago Charity Entrepreneurship invited applications for career coaching. They received >100 applications and coached ~¼ of those that applied. Feedback was very positive (net promoter score >9.3), so CE is launching another round of applications. If you feel you could potentially start an impactful organization but have reservations or see barriers to doing so, please check out the coaching that CE is offering and get in touch here. 

  1. ^

     We’ve decided to cycle through the alphabet in order to avoid showing the same organizations at the top of the updates every month (starting a few months ago). This month, we're at F-z, 0-E.

Modeling Cooperation @ 2022-08-16T17:04 (+8)

In August, we at Modeling Cooperation announced our new web app SPT Model—an interactive tool to explore a model of AI competition built in collaboration with Professor Robert Trager.

The research software tool implements the Safety-Performance Tradeoff (SPT) model created by him, Paolo Bova, Nicholas Emery-Xu, Eoghan Stafford, and Allan Dafoe [1]. The tool allows other researchers and decision-makers to explore how safety insights could affect the safety choices of competing AI developers.

We would be very pleased to receive feedback on the web app. We also welcome opportunities to collaborate on future projects and are looking for people to help us implement and/or analyze AI competition models. Leave a comment below or send us a message at modeling.cooperation@gmail.com.

You can also read more about the web app on the EA Forum here.

[1] Robert Trager, Paolo Bova, Nicholas Emery-Xu, Eoghan Stafford, and Allan Dafoe, "Welfare Implications of Safety-Performance Tradeoffs in AI Safety Research", Working paper, August 2022.