EA Organization Updates: December 2022

By Lizka @ 2022-12-19T18:20 (+19)

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, starting with F-Z, 0-E.

Job listings

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

Fish Welfare Initiative

GiveWell

Global Priorities Institute

Open Philanthropy is hiring for (lots of) operations roles (Remote / San Francisco / Washington, D.C., $84,000 - $159,399)

Rethink Priorities: 

Organizational updates

These are in alphabetical order, starting with F-Z, 0-E.

Faunalytics 

Faunalytics released their newest report, Local Action for Animals as a Stepping Stone to State Protections. The goal was to look at whether local animal welfare laws in the United States have laid the groundwork for laws at the state level of government as a potential avenue for change. 

The organization has also updated their Animal Product Impact Scales (originally published in 2020) to include updated statistics and more detailed figures. The purpose of this resource is to help a wide range of nonprofit organizations, new alt protein start-ups, and individuals prioritize animal product substitutes. 

Finally, Faunalytics is honored to announce they have been named a Top Charity by Animal Charity Evaluators again for 2022. 

Fish Welfare Initiative

Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) was honored to recently be named a Standout Charity by Animal Charity Evaluators for 2022! They are very grateful to all those who made this day possible – particularly their advisors and donors. 

Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge recently published its report on Mass Media Interventions, as well as a number of blog posts about ongoing research. On the methodological front, FP published its Forecasting Guide and Approach to Moral Weights, while FP’s climate team published three pieces covering recent developments in climate and the work of the FP Climate Fund. On the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, FP researcher Christian Ruhl also published a piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

FP is writing up new charity recommendations in air pollution, giving multipliers, and maternal mortality, and is in the middle of new research on education, vaccine research, and quality of life for the elderly, as well as preliminary scoping investigations on topics related to biosecurity, AI safety, and space-based strategic threats.

In the new year, FP will also be launching a new approach to its longtermist ratings system based on a recent methodological review. This will help to guide work by FP’s two longtermist-relevant funds, the Patient Philanthropy Fund and the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund, which complement each other as researchers Christian Ruhl and Tom Barnes describe in a recent post.

GiveWell

GiveWell's 2022 giving recommendations blog post is out! 

GiveWell has set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but its research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps, meaning $300 million of those funding gaps will remain unfilled without additional support. By donating between now and the end of the year, you can help GiveWell not only meet but exceed its goal – and say yes to more excellent opportunities to save and improve lives.  

GiveWell's top recommendation for donors this year is its All Grants Fund, which is allocated to any funding need that meets its cost-effectiveness bar. This is the best option for donors who want to support the most promising opportunities GiveWell has found to help people, regardless of program or location. See here for examples of grants that could be funded by donations to the All Grants Fund.

Giving What We Can

Giving Season has officially kicked off and Giving What We Can has been very busy!

There is a Giving Season landing page which shows a live count of all the donations made on the platform as well as a new animated video.

They hosted Effective Giving Day on the 28th of November and you can catch up on the YouTube Livestream to hear from community members and special guests like Rutger Bregman, Liv Boeree, Dylan Matthews, Peter Singer and Marcus Daniell! 

Giving What We Can launched fundraising pages – you check out and donate to the active ones or request to have your own. Please take advantage of this new functionality!

They also published their top-rated charities and funds for 2022 as well as a new post on Giving What We Can’s new research direction.

Happier Lives Institute

HLI announced that StrongMinds is their top charity recommendation for 2022. StrongMinds provides group interpersonal therapy for women in Uganda and Zambia who are struggling with depression. The news was covered in a live TV interview.

The recommendation was preceded by the publication of a major new report – The elephant in the bednet: the importance of philosophy when choosing between extending and improving lives. 

The report shows how the relative value of extending or improving life depends very heavily on philosophical views about the badness of death and the point at which a person’s wellbeing changes from positive to negative. At one end of (reasonable) opinion, StrongMinds is 12x better than the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). At the other, AMF is 1.3x better than StrongMinds. AMF is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions, the report would suggest. 

Donations to StrongMinds are eligible for counterfactual matching through the Double Up Drive and the UBS Optimus Foundation. (Note: UBS has indicated they intend to donate to StrongMinds after the match is over but there is no commitment that the donation will exceed what is matched.)

You can make a tax-deductible donation to StrongMinds in the following countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States or donate directly at strongminds.org/donate. 

Rethink Priorities (RP)

Jojo Lee completed her research fellowship, which culminated in a shallow literature review on the extent to which farmers of shrimps and fishes in China and Thailand register with voluntary certification schemes and why. Her work may be helpful in informing the future uses of such schemes that set and audit production standards as an animal welfare advocacy strategy. 

Academic collaborator Meghan Barrett’s new post summarizes and provides additional context related to her and her colleagues’ academic article on “Welfare considerations for farming black soldier flies, Hermetia illucens (Diptera: Stratiomyidae): a model for the insects as food and feed industry.” 

Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer, academic collaborator Adam Shriver, and Associate Researcher Michael St. Jules published additional installments in the Moral Weight Project sequence. The team’s most recent posts recommend not acting on the idea that brains contain many conscious subsystems at the moment and explain why they think neuron counts should not be used as proxies for moral weight.  

Chief Strategy Analyst Kieran Grieg compiled a thorough review of RP’s impact, strategy, and funding needs. In 2022, the organization expanded its research teams and agendas, completed ~60 research projects, incubated initiatives, ran message testing, and coordinated forums. The post describes RP's ambitious plans for 2023 and lists funding gaps by area and growth scenario and reasons why this funding is likely to be high impact.

Sentience Institute

Sentience Institute (SI) published their 2022 end-of-year summary blog post, summarizing their research and other activities focused on building the new field of digital minds research (e.g., How will humans react to AI that seems agentic and intentional? How will we know when an AI is sentient?). SI pivoted to this area because it is an extremely neglected topic on which short- and long-term AI futures seem to hinge.

Their 2022 accomplishments include the first-of-its-kind Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey, a psychology paper in Computers in Human Behavior on “Predicting the Moral Consideration of Artificial Intelligences,” and a historical case study on “The History of AI Rights Research,” as well as a regular intergroup call between organizations working on digital minds, co-hosting The Summit on AI in Society at the University of Chicago with participants such as Stuart Russell and Erik Brynjolfsson, and the SI podcast. They have substantial room for more funding for this uniquely neglected and tractable longtermist approach if you are able to make a financial contribution.

80,000 Hours

This month, 80,000 Hours’ usual content releases were put on hold whilst the FTX crisis unfolded. In response to the crisis, they released:

In other news, 80,000 Hours now has a marketing team and an expanded advising team, thanks to new hires. On the 80,000 Hours job board, salary data is now shown for most roles. 

Anima International

The Danish word that Anima International created to describe fast-growing chicken breeds in its campaigns, “turbokylling” (turbo chicken), has become so recognised that it has been added to the official Danish dictionary. This comes as a result of hundreds of media hits generated by its campaigns and hopefully it will help legitimise the campaign even further.

The team released an investigation on white striping disease in chicken in the most popular supermarkets in Poland. Over 99% showed presence of the disease. The report resulted in 108 media publications, reaching over 2 million people. Anima International was a guest on one of the biggest television stations in the country to talk about chicken welfare, fast-growing breeds and the European Chicken Commitment. 

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)

SJ Beard is conducting a research study into Diversity and Inclusion in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. Anyone interested in supporting this project is invited to participate in a short survey on the topic.

Luke Kemp appeared on the Challenging Climate podcast to explore catastrophic and extinction risks, why they are understudied, and how we can weigh the catastrophic risks of climate change and solar geoengineering.

CSER Research Affiliate Tom Cernev has published a paper in Progress in Disaster Science about the effects from crossing Planetary Boundaries and Global Catastrophies on Disaster Risk Reduction efforts, international development targets, and any future international development target iterations.

As part of her communications evaluation project for volcanic risk, Lara Mani co-created a video with the UWI Seismic Research Centre, showcasing the experiences of children living near a volcano.

SJ Beard and Clarissa Rios Rojas have been working with Lorena Escuadero (Cambridge Department for Radiology) and Xiaolei Zhang (European Bioinformatics Institute) to develop new narratives around Global Catastrophic Risk, including poems, plays, and comics.

Open Philanthropy

Senior advisor David Roodman wrote a post analyzing Esther Duflo’s 2001 paper on whether a wave of school construction in Indonesia raised students’ wages in adulthood. Roodman concludes that the results are less robust than Duflo originally claimed, due to both technical adjustments and a potential source of bias.

Open Philanthropy is seeking applications from former FTX Foundation grantees who have been impacted by recent events.