EA Updates for April 2021
By DavidNash @ 2021-03-26T14:26 (+39)
Meta
- Jonas Volmer with concerns on 'Effective Altruism' as the main branding and identity for the community
- Probably Good have launched a preliminary website for their work as a new career advising organisation and are looking for feedback
- EA Colabs has been created to help people interested in EA collaborate on potentially impactful projects
- Meg Tong has set up a website for EA Finance
- Sanjay Joshi with a post arguing that environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing should be a top priority as an imapctful career option
- 80,000 Hours with a post on how to identify your personal strengths
- EA Funds has appointed new fund managers
- CEA on their plans for hosting an EA wiki on the forum
- Nuño Sempere attempting to estimate the value of the first 10 EA Forum prize winners
- Cullen O'Keefe looking into why EA outreach is hard towards people on the American political left
- An overview of the work SoGive has been up to over the last few years
- An Ask Me Anything with JP Addison and Sam Deere on software engineering at CEA
- A post looking into whether EA has grown over the last 5 years
- Tyler Maule estimating the total yearly dollars that are aligned with EA by cause area
- Jonas Vollmer writing that the 'EA Funds is more flexible than you might think'
- EA Organisation updates for January 2021
Grants
Open Phil have made 12 grants recently with a total value of $32,320,000
- $19,355,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
- $11,355,000 - Center for Human-Compatible AI
- $8,000,000 - Center for Security and Emerging Technology
- $6,651,000 - Global Health & Development
- $3,800,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
- $1,628,000 - Scientific Research
- $508,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
- $202,000 - Macroeconomic Stabilisation Policy
- $176,000 - Global Catastrophic Risks
Global Development
- The Gates Foundation on why they are giving $250,000,000 to fight the pandemic
- A post by Max Roser looking at how much economic growth is necessary to reduce global poverty substantially
- The European Union is looking to consolidate most of its foreign spending via one instrument rather than 10 member states
- Wellcome Leap has launched, describing themselves as DARPA for global health
- A post from JPAL arguing that 'Growth is not enough'
- Our World in Data looking at global poverty lines and what it means for our understanding of poverty
- The Centre for Global Development with a post on 'Allocating Global Aid to Maximize Utility'
- Julian Hazell & David Holmes with a post for Giving What We Can looking at measuring global inequality
- Timothy Liptrot with a post asking whether economic growth causes democratisation
Animal Welfare
- Lewis Bollard on the potential for consumer adoption of alternative proteins
- The Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation has launched its new fish welfare report
Existential & Catastrophic Risks
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete and ending the new nuclear arms race
- Toby Ord in the Guardian asking governments to improve their resilience to prevent catastrophes
- CSER with a paper looking at 'What is Climate Change’s Contribution to Global Catastrophic Risk?'
- The UK government is investing £20 million into the Space Weather Instrumentation Measurement, Modelling and Risk programme to improve the UK’s ability to monitor and predict space weather events
- A podcast with Thomas Moynihan on the history of existential risk
- A post collating analogies & reasons to worry about advanced AI
- Tessa Alexanian with a biosecurity and biorisk reading list
Improving Institutions
- José Luis Ricón looking at potential new models for funding and organising science
- Jason Crawford with a post looking at ways of ending technological stagnation
- Ben Garfinkel with the post 'Is Democracy a Fad?'
- A post introducing Metaforecast, a forecast aggregator and search tool
- An Ask Me Anything with Ian David Moss, strategy consultant to foundations and other institutions
Environment
- The Good Food Institute on the potential environmental benefits of cultivated meat
- China’s coal-fired power plants drop below 50% power generation for first time
- UK Research and Innovation has awarded £171,000,000 in funding across nine significant decarbonisation projects
- Hannah Ritchie looking at what proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food
Longtermism
- Joel Carlsmith with a post 'On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism'
- Nora with a post looking into patient longtermism
- Haydn Belfield with a response to 'The Case Against Longtermism'
- Joshua Teperowski Monrad has created a syllabus of readings relating to longtermism philosophy
- A post looking at the trade off between the high stakes of the future and declining predictability of actions affecting the future
- Jack Malde on possible misconceptions about (strong) longtermism
Emerging Technology
- 80,000 Hours podcast with Brian Christian discussing the alignment problem
- Future of Life podcast with Stuart Russell and Zachary Kallenborn discussing drone swarms and lethal autonomous weapons
- Charlotte Stix with a paper on actionable principles for AI policy
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on planning for potential future technological unemployment
- Roman Yampolskiy joins FLI to discuss whether AI systems can be controlled, comprehended and explained
- Kat Woods introducing the Nonlinear Fund, who aim to do AI safety research, incubation and funding
- Stefan Torges on 'Coordination challenges for preventing AI conflict'
- Jamie Harris on 'The Importance of Artificial Sentience'
Other Links
- 80,000 Hours podcast with with Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics and what matters most
- Project for Awesome have raised nearly $190,000 for seven EA related charities, with members of the EA community contributing 65 videos to this effort
- An interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, a recent blockchain billionaire, on how effective altruism has influenced his donations
- Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet has been sold for the equivalent of $2,900,000 and is planning to donate all of it to GiveDirectly
- Clearer Thinking with '7 reasons why you could be defining a concept ineffectively'
- A look at how Charity Entrepreneurship was founded
- Max Daniel and Benjamin Todd with the post 'How much does performance differ between people?'
- An analysis of the books read by EA Goodreads members
- A post arguing against neutrality about creating happy lives
- Edo Arad summarising chapters 5 and 6 on cause prioritisation from Michael Plant's thesis
- An interview with Igor Kurganov, a former professional poker player who founded Raising for Effective Giving
- An Ask Me Anything on the EA Forum with Tom Chivers, science writer and science editor at UnHerd