EA Organization Updates: February 2023

By Lizka @ 2023-02-14T21:39 (+43)

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 (as well as a couple of other impactful jobs) are at the top of this post. Some of the jobs have pressing deadlines. 

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.

Job listings

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

Against Malaria Foundation

Effective Institutions Project

Charity Entrepreneurship

GiveWell

Open Philanthropy

Rethink Priorities: 

Expression of Interest - Project lead/co-lead for a Longtermist Incubator (Remote, flexible, $67,000 - 115,000, apply by 28 February)

Organizational updates

80,000 Hours

EVF’s recent update - announcing interim CEOs of EVF - highlights changes to 80,000 Hours’ organisation structure. 80,000 Hours’ CEO, Howie Lempel, moved to Interim CEO of Effective Ventures Foundation in the UK in November, and Brenton Mayer has been acting as Interim CEO of 80k in his absence.  

This month on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Rob Wiblin interviewed Athena Aktipis on cancer, cooperation, and the apocalypse. 

80,000 Hours also shared several blog posts, including Michelle Hutchinson’s writing on My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career. 

Anima International

Anima International’s Bulgarian team, Nevidimi Zhivotni, recently released a whistleblower video interviewing a former fur farmworker. As a result, part of the video was shown on Bulgaria’s national evening news programme and a member of the team was interviewed live on air. This represents the first time that fur has been covered in depth as a topic on prime-time television in the country.

Further north in Poland, Anima International’s Polish team Otwarte Klatki launched one of its biggest projects as part of the Fur Free Europe campaign. In the video, we see celebrities reacting to being shown footage from fur farms. It’s worth remembering that Poland is one of the world’s top fur producers.

Finally, the team in Norway is gearing up for the Anima Advocacy Conference (Dyrevernkonferansen) 2023. The conference is dedicated to effective animal advocacy and was the first with such a focus when it launched a few years ago. For more information and to get tickets, you can go here.

Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI)

Elizabeth Cooper joins BERI as Deputy Director starting March 1. She’ll help run BERI’s university collaborations program, as well as launching new BERI programs in the future.

Centre for Effective Altruism

Forum team

You can see an update from the Forum team here: “Community” posts have their own section, subforums are closing, and more (Forum update February 2023)

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)

Charity Entrepreneurship

Announcing: Top Ideas you can start through Charity Entrepreneurship’s Incubation Program.

CE has announced their top interventions in Large-Scale Global Health and Biosecurity, that you can launch through their July-August 2023 Incubation Program. The application deadline is March 12, 2023. Apply here. 

Biosecurity:

Large-Scale Global Health in Low-and Middle-income Regions:

Learn more about them in this post. You can also apply for CE’s 2024 February-March program that will focus on farmed animals and global health and development mass media interventions. CE also invites you to an online event on February 20, 6PM UK Time, where Sam Hilton, Director of Research, will introduce the ideas and answer your questions. Team members and incubatees will also be present at EAG Bay Area.

CE provides participants with 2-month, full-time training, stipends to cover living costs, and seed funding of up to $200,000 per project. Learn more

Effective Institutions Project

The Effective Institutions Project is wrapping up research on global catastrophic risk management at the US National Security Council and AI Safety at Google (and its parent company, Alphabet). They did this with the goal of investigating actionable strategies for improving decision-making at these institutions. They are grateful to Philip Reiner / Loren DeJonge Schulman (NSC) and Tim Hwang / Shahar Avin (Google) for leading these projects.

One of EIP’s goals is to build a field of philanthropists interested in working together to help shape the actions of important institutions in ways that benefit humanity and the planet. With this in mind, the Building Better Institutions convening on January 18 covered topics such as global catastrophic risks, improving institutional epistemics, improving talent in key institutions, and global health and development. At the event, EIP shared their first slate of grant recommendations with potential funders and other key stakeholders. In total, they have raised or granted nearly $600,000 to date for these opportunities.

Finally, EIP welcomes three new research fellows for the spring: [redacted], Kartik Sharma, and Gabrielle Tran. These fellows will assist full-time staff in executing pilot implementations of new initiatives, brokering collaborations with funders, and conducting the next edition of the landscape analysis of important institutions.

Faunalytics 

Faunalytics released their newest original report, Reforming Animal Agriculture Subsidies: A Guide for Advocates. This report dives into animal agriculture subsidies and how advocates can reduce their harmful impact. 

Additionally, Faunalytics released a companion report, The Animal Agriculture Industry's Perspective On Advocates & Cage-Free Reforms. Here they review a small sample of industry publications and outline findings. 

The organization celebrated the milestone of 5,000 entries in their free online Research Library, and also updated the collection with articles on topics including insect farmers’ attitudes toward slaughter and biases in AI hurting farmed animals.

Fish Welfare Initiative

Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) recently published their 2022 in Review, where they discuss some of their key successes of the year (e.g. improving the lives of an additional ~720,000 fish) as well as key challenges (e.g. running on-the-ground experiments with farmers in India). FWI also gave a talk at EAGx India, and was represented at EAGx Latin America.

FWI would like to invite anyone who’s interested in following their work more closely to sign up to their monthly newsletter.

Founders Pledge

FP’s Global Health and Development Fund made grants to LEEP, New Incentives, and, as a result of FP’s Giving Multipliers work, to The Life You Can Save and Effektiv Spenden. FP’s Global Catastrophic Risk Fund supported reporting by Vox on the Biological Weapons Convention and other imperiled international treaties.

This quarter, FP researchers are working on methodological improvements focused on external and internal validity adjustments, time-bounding charity evaluations using value-of-information concerns, and finalizing a new longtermist ratings system. Ongoing research includes a landscape of the nuclear philanthropy space, new prioritization work in climate, continued investigation of funding opportunities involving mass media interventions, a re-evaluation of the evidence base on education interventions, and investigations on far UV light and vaccine research.

FP has also started recommending a number of new high-impact funding opportunities to its members: Family Empowerment Media, Clean Air Asia’s Clean Construction Toolkit program in India, and a new biotech FRO being spun up by Convergent Research.

Recently, FP Senior Researcher Christian Ruhl was awarded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Leonard M. Rieser Award jointly with CSER’s Haydn Belfield. FP also recently published Christian’s recent research on hotlines and global catastrophic risk, as well as philanthropy to the right of boom.

Finally, Applied Researcher Megan Phelan recently started on FP’s climate team. Megan previously earned a Ph.D in materials science at Caltech, where her doctoral work focused on solar photovoltaics.

GiveWell

Giving Green

Giving Green published a white paper on corporate climate action, “How To Think Beyond Net-Zero”. It outlines 4 high-impact strategies that businesses can take to maximize their climate impact: engaging in policy, donating to high-impact nonprofits, contributing to catalytic technologies, and purchasing high-quality carbon credits if necessary for existing commitments. Giving Green’s team is offering free 1-1 consultations with businesses who are seeking advice about their climate strategies and invites anyone interested to get in touch here.

Giving What We Can

The Giving What We Can community raised over $50 million USD in 2022, including donations from pledgers and through the donation platform. 

The team launched the new pledge management dashboard on the main GWWC site. This means users can manage their account, payments and pledges in their now centralized dashboard.

Sjir Hoeijmakers published an overview of current effective giving organisations and projects on the EA Forum. 

Giving What We Can also added to their top-rated charities list, including:

Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

GCRI has begun some work on solution-oriented public outreach, publishing opinion articles on climate change solutions related to housing and transportation in the New York City metropolitan area. GCRI previously announced a shift toward such outreach work in GCRI's 2022 Annual Report.

GCRI also published two official statements on issues of social justice and inclusivity. One addresses the Demographic Diversity of the GCRI Team following recent changes to the team. The other addresses Race and Intelligence in response to problematic remarks by senior scholar Nick Bostrom.

The Humane League

Happier Lives Institute

HLI published a shallow cause exploration of pain relief. The report was commissioned by Founders Pledge and expands on HLI’s previous work in Sharma et al. (2020). The report includes tentative back-of-the-envelope calculations for the cost-effectiveness of several interventions and estimates that providing opioids for terminal pain might be 100x more cost-effective than cash transfers. 

A recent post on the Effective Altruism Forum argued that StrongMinds should not be a top recommended charity (yet) and sparked much debate. HLI published a response to clarify the strength of the evidence and to acknowledge what we’ve learned from the discussion. A debate about the technicalities of HLI's methodology is still ongoing in the comments section. Transparent exchanges like this are an important part of research and HLI highly values this deep engagement with HLI's work.

Devex, a leading media platform for the global development community, published an in-depth interview with HLI’s Director, Michael Plant: Could happiness be a new measure for nonprofit effectiveness? The article provides an accessible introduction to HLI’s approach and the implications it could have for the global development field. 

Legal Priorities Project

Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter published a new working paper titled “The intuitive appeal of legal protection for future generations,” arguing that the principles underlying legal longtermism — namely, that the law can and should protect the long-term future much more than it does currently — are in fact widely endorsed by legal experts and laypeople, independent of demographic factors such as gender, culture, and politics.

John Bliss gave an online talk for McGill EA x Law on his working paper “Existential advocacy.”

Jonas Schuett published a paper on “Three lines of defense against risks from AI,” outlining a framework aimed at helping AI companies assign and coordinate risk management roles and responsibilities. Jonas started this project at LPP and finished it at his new position at GovAI.

Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy announced the results of its regranting challenge, which will regrant $150 million to several excellent grantmakers chosen by a competitive process. The awardees are: 

Open Philanthropy published a shallow cause investigation on Tobacco Control, written by Cause Prioritization intern Helen Kissel.

Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute

This month QURI released The QURI Medley, a new Substack newsletter. It represents a collection of early takes, polished work, and announcements.

Select posts this month include (posted on the EA Forum and the newsletter):

Separately, Slava has started to do a technical revamping of Guesstimate. We’re exploring fully bringing Guesstimate into QURI for continual support. 

Rethink Priorities (RP)

Davidmanheim @ 2023-02-15T15:43 (+5)

Also, ALTER Israel's update