EA Organization Updates: July 2023

By Lizka, JP Addison🔸 @ 2023-07-17T02:11 (+32)

We’re featuring some opportunities and job listings at the top of this post. Some have (very) pressing deadlines. 

Opportunities and jobs

Opportunities

Consider also checking opportunities listed on the EA Opportunities Board. 

Applications are open for a number of conferences

Fellowships and incubation programs

Other opportunities

Job listings

​​Consider also exploring jobs listed on “Job listing (open).”

Against Malaria Foundation

Centre for Effective Altruism

Cooperative AI Foundation

GiveWell

New Incentives

OpenAI Superalignment team

Open Philanthropy

Organization Updates

The organization updates are in alphabetical order.

80,000 Hours

This month on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Rob interviewed: 

80,000 Hours also released a problem profile on great power conflict and a popular blog post on how to cope with rejection in your career from team member Luisa Rodriguez. They also released the following career reviews: 

Anima International

Anima International UK published a major undercover investigation in support of the Open Wing Alliance campaign asking Lidl to sign the European Chicken Commitment.

The Danish government together with opposition parties have agreed to phase out fast-growing chickens from state purchases. Also, the Danish government’s policy will be to push for EU legislation in the upcoming revision of animal welfare laws to phase out the production of fast-growing chickens.

Anima International together with Compassion in World Farming Poland continue to push the Ministry of Agriculture in Poland to support the EU ban on cage farming. The efforts have now led to over 220k signatures for a petition calling the minister to support the ban.

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)

ACE shared "Updates to ACE’s Charity Evaluation Criteria in 2023" as it is entering its 2023 charity evaluation season. This is the time of year when ACE works to identify charities that can do the most good for animals with two years of additional funding. To provide more transparency and insight into its evaluation process, ACE is sharing some changes it made to its four charity evaluation criteria this year. 

Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)

CEA’s Ollie Base published a Community Events Retrospective sequence, which concludes with an invitation to submit applications to run an EAGx event in 2024.

CEA also published the results of the 2022 Groups Census and an update about how the Communications team is thinking about EA comms.

Charity Entrepreneurship

Charity Entrepreneurship is now accepting applications to their 2024 Incubation Programs. Apply by 30 September to join one of the two cohorts:

  1. The February - March 2024 cohort will focus on farmed animals and global health and development of mass media interventions. Top ideas include childhood vaccination reminders and entertainment-led mass media to prevent violence against women. More interventions will be announced on the EA Forum and on CE’s newsletter by the end of the month. 
  2. The August - September 2024 cohort will focus on the top most cost-effective Sustainable Development Goals (as identified by Copenhagen Consensus) as well as organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants (as identified by a CE Incubation Program graduate). 

You can apply here or find more information on the CE Incubation Program page

If you are interested in high-risk, high-reward opportunities and supporting launching new impact-focused nonprofits, you can now express interest in joining the CE Seed Network - a group of donors that have already provided past CE-incubated charities with $2.47M in seed grants to get them up and running. To join the network, the donor needs to have the ability to donate $10,000 or more to early-stage projects per year. More information and the expression of interest form can be found here.

Faunalytics

Faunalytics presented their 2023 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. Highlights include: 97% of respondents agreed that Faunalytics’ work is high-quality, 94% said they would probably or definitely recommend Faunalytics to others, and 79% said that Faunalytics’ work has improved their own or their organization’s advocacy efforts.

In April, Faunalytics published a report looking at how likely different groups are to take pro-animal actions. Additional analyses of the data, published as a blog on the Faunalytics website, reveals further leverage points for animal advocates working with specific demographic groups in the United States.

The organization has also updated their Research Library with articles on topics including mitigating climate change through plant-based diets and publishing bias with animal experiments. 

Fish Welfare Initiative

FWI recently published two updates about their work in India:

For more information, see FWI’s recent newsletter (subscribe here).

GiveDirectly 

GiveDirectly’s Zakat fundraiser effort – in collaboration with Muslim Impact Lab – raised ~$250k for cash transfers to Yemeni families living in poverty, an exciting first-year success in their outreach to Muslim donors. 

Did you know simply giving mobile phones (and access to mobile money) helps reduce poverty? 90% of GiveDirectly recipients elect to receive a new phone as part of their cash transfers, which research shows has benefits distinct from the cash they receive. They lay this out in a recent EA Forum post.   

Giving Green

Giving Green has updated its research process and published a new report describing the steps we take to evaluate potential recommendations. The research team hopes that this transparency helps donors make more informed decisions and opens the process up to additional scrutiny that could improve the work.

Giving Green has also written a blog post describing the disbursements it has recommended from the Giving Green Fund and the reasoning behind those decisions.

The team summarized these updates along with its annual impact report on the EA Forum here. 

GiveWell

Giving What We Can (GWWC)

Happier Lives Institute (HLI)

HLI’s work and the subjective wellbeing approach featured prominently on the latest 80k podcast with Elie Hassenfeld, the CEO of GiveWell.  Quite a few people asked what they thought, so they've written up some major and some minor comments, which you can find in full on their website. 

HLI’s Director, Dr Michael Plant debated whether we should take happiness seriously with Professor Mark Fabian from Warwick University at EA Global London in May 2023. The talk and transcript can be found here

The Research Agenda has been published on their website. It covers their research plans for the next 18 months, including Foundational research and Applied research to maximize global well-being.

HLI is currently funding-constrained and needs to raise a minimum of 205,000 USD to cover operating costs for the next 12 months. They think they could usefully absorb as much as 1,020,000 USD, allowing them to expand the team, substantially increase their output, and provide a runway of 18 months. More details can be found in this EA Forum article.

Legal Priorities Project

LPP is running a Summer Research Fellowship in Law & AI. For 8–12 weeks, participants will work with researchers at LPP on how the law can help to mitigate existential risks from artificial intelligence. Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000. Applications are now closed.

LPP submitted a public comment on the proposed Circular A-4 of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, discussing how US cost-benefit analysis by federal agencies could more fully account for the interests of future generations and catastrophic and existential risks.

Matthijs Maas was interviewed for the Philosophical Disquisitions podcast by John Danaher, where he discussed pausing AI development. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Additionally, Matthijs’s paper “The technology triad: disruptive AI, regulatory gaps and value change”, co-authored with Jeroen Hopster, was published on AI and Ethics.

Recently, LPP has been focusing on delivering legal insights related to the development of transformative AI with an emphasis on US law. The team has advised multiple organizations working on TAI in the US.

New Incentives

New Incentives has released its first vaccination coverage survey results since initiating the scale-up of its program. These surveys enable the organization to keep a constant pulse on the program's impact and cost-effectiveness as it scales. You can view the results here.

New Incentives’ Founder and CEO, Svetha Janumpalli, recently spoke at EA Global in London. She shared some of the highs and lows of nearly a decade of piloting, testing, and pivoting to find a proven intervention that cost-effectively saves lives. She also peeled back layers to give a glimpse of the organization’s monitoring systems and data collection processes. Watch her talk or read the highlights here.

One for the World 

One for the World has launched a corporate chapter program this summer. With eight years of experience organizing volunteers to raise money for highly cost-effective nonprofits, they are now offering corporate organizers the opportunity to work alongside our team. Further details can be found here. 

They are looking for teams of at least two people to be corporate chapter organizers. They anticipate the time commitment will be 5-8 hours per quarter. 

Interested in connecting with their team? Email jack@1fortheworld.org and emma.c@1fortheworld.org if you want to be part of their corporate organizing cohort July 2023-June 2024.

Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is looking for information about the potential for Far-Ultraviolet-C light to reduce pathogen transmission and prevent future pandemics. They welcome responses from all sources — including academics, students, government personnel, and private individuals. Ideal responses will touch on what might be possible in 20+ years of advancement, as well as short-term challenges; see this page for a full list of relevant topics.

Senior research analyst Tom Davidson wrote a report where he uses a compute-centric model to predict AI takeoff speeds — for example, how long it might take to go from AI being able to automate 20% of cognitive tasks to being able to automate 100% of them.

Rethink Priorities (RP)

Co-CEOs Marcus A. Davis and Peter Wildeford wrote a post reflecting on what they’ve learned in the five years since they founded RP. Later in July, the organization will share additional information about its impact, plans, and funding needs. Peter will also hold an Ask Me Anything discussion on the Forum.

In the meantime, RP researchers have published several recent posts, including:

The Humane League

The Humane League (THL) has reached 53% of their goal to spare 6.7 million hens from battery cages. That’s over 3.5 million hens impacted by THL’s corporate work in 2023. For a deeper dive into the organization’s 6.7 million goal and their progress, visit THL’s website. 

THL’s Animal Policy Alliance (APA) has a new major priority: defeating the EATS (“Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression”) Act, which was introduced by Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) just hours after the Supreme Court’s monumental upholding of Proposition 12. If it passes, this piece of legislation could unravel decades of past and future progress for animals. Learn more about the EATS Act and join The Humane League in defeating it here.