EA Organization Updates: August 2024

By Toby Tremlett🔹, Dane Valerie @ 2024-08-19T12:04 (+10)

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Some of the opportunities and job listings we feature in this update have (very) pressing deadlines (see High Impact Professionals’ Impact Accelerator Program, job opportunities at Open Philanthropy for Grants Associates, and an opening for a Communications Project Manager at the Good Food Institute).

Opportunities and jobs

Opportunities

Consider also checking opportunities listed on the EA Opportunity Board and the Opportunities to Take Action tag.

Job listings

​​Consider also exploring jobs listed on the Job listing (open) tag. For even more roles, check the 80,000 Hours Job Board.

80,000 Hours

Anima International

Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)

GiveDirectly

GiveWell

Giving What We Can

Lead Exposure Elimination Project

Open Philanthropy

Rethink Priorities

The Good Food Institute

Organization updates

The organization updates are in alphabetical order (0-A-Z).

80,000 Hours

80,000 released updates to their problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe and their article on whether you should work at a frontier AI company.

They also released blog posts about their top resources for handling mental health issues in your career and why Orwell would hate AI.

On the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Luisa interviewed:

 And Rob interviewed:

Animal Charity Evaluators

In January 2024, thanks to generous support from Animal Charity Evaluators’ Recommended Charity Fund, ACE awarded $1,394,955 to their 2023 Recommended Charities — their second-largest disbursement ever. Learn how these organizations have used their grants to help animals around the world in ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund: July 2024 Update.

Anima International

Anima International’s Polish team recently published a report looking into how Polish farmers see the future of food production. This is one of the steps Anima International is taking towards including farmers in the discussion about food system transformation. The data suggest that the agricultural sector  will support alternatives to animal production as long as farmers see the potential for profit and stability. A summary of the report in English can be found here.

The Conference on Animal Rights in Europe (CARE) is taking place 12–15 September in Warsaw and online. CARE is an international conference that connects and inspires animal advocates from all across the globe — most notably in neglected regions, where the animal welfare movement has a shorter track record.

GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly has appointed Nick Allardice as their new President and CEO. Allardice previously served as the head of the global activism platform Change.org and advised Open Philanthropy on mobilizing support for lead poisoning eradication.

Also, here are highlights from the AMA with Beast Philanthropy

Faunalytics

On September 19th Faunalytics will host Fauna Connections, a free, remote research symposium for animal advocates. Academics and scientists from the social and behavioral sciences and related disciplines will present original research that discusses the real-life implications and recommendations for animal advocacy. Register here.

The organization has published their mid-year report and released the second edition of their Tactics in Practice series: The Science of Plant-Based Defaults and Nudges. Additionally, Faunalytics updated their Research Library with articles on a variety of animal advocacy topics including bottom trawling’s impact on climate change and AI techniques in toxicology research.

Fish Welfare Initiative

Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) launched a new study to identify the minimum levels of dissolved oxygen and maximum levels of ammonia that Indian major carps can tolerate without demonstrating welfare concerns. FWI believes this study will be useful for informing their current programming, which relies heavily on the assumption that certain levels of water quality parameters are serious sources of suffering for these animals.

Their farm program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture has expanded to a new region. The program’s team currently works with 142 farms on stocking density caps and water quality monitoring, and they expect to expand it to about 200 farms by the year's end.

GiveWell

GiveWell published a new blog post about their excess assets policy describing what happens if they receive more unrestricted donations than they need. See other blog posts here.

GiveWell also published several new grant pages, including:

New Incentives

New Incentives published a new photo blog, A Day in the Life of Hauwa Ibrahim, a Mother from Kwamarawa Village, which provides a glimpse into the life of the caregivers they serve and the challenges caregivers face in getting their children vaccinated.

Open Philanthropy

Research Fellow Matt Clancy, who oversees Open Phil’s Innovation Policy program, was featured on two podcasts: The Entrepreneur’s Ethic and Macroscience.

They  published a blog post on the success of the Open Wing Alliance’s corporate cage-free campaigns. You can subscribe to Open Philanthropy’s blog here.

Rethink Priorities

The Animal Welfare Department released the third installment in their Shrimp Welfare Sequence. This report quantifies pain caused by 18 welfare threats and will be followed by a prioritization analysis.

The Worldview Investigations Team launched the Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools (CRAFT) Sequence, which introduces two tools they developed to help donors work through uncertainties: a giving portfolio builder and a moral parliament simulation.

The Team also announced a new project focused on digital consciousness, which aims to produce a prototype model that translates uncertainty about sources of evidence on AI consciousness into probability ranges for existing and potential AI models.

The Surveys and Data Analysis Team published a post reporting on data about the personality psychology of EAs from the 2018 EA Survey.

Senior Researcher Greer Gosnell published her perspective on approaches to climate change research in EA.

The Humane League

The Humane League (THL) continues to leverage their 2024 Cage-free EggsposĂ© (with results!) to hold major restaurant brands accountable to their promises to phase cruel battery cages out of their supply chains by 2025. To date, 14 companies — including Carl’s Jr, Dine Brands, and Rubio’s Coastal Grill — have reported progress or fulfilled their pledges.

Globally, the Open Wing Alliance (OWA) has escalated their campaign against the iconic mayonnaise producer Kewpie. Over 43,000 advocates have signed the OWA’s petition, calling on Kewpie to make a global commitment that is in line with industry standards.

The OWA also released their first ever report on progress made to improve the lives of chickens raised for meat, who are subject to some of the worst conditions on factory farms, like inhumane slaughter and being bred to grow so large so quickly their bodies fail beneath them.