EA Updates for March 2022

By DavidNash @ 2022-02-25T15:42 (+27)

This is a streamlined version of the EA London Newsletter.

Upcoming Virtual Events

• 25th February - The Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations - Organised by the Legal Priorities Project
• 27th February - Designing the Terawatt Transition: Repowering Coal - Organised by Effective Environmentalism
• 27th February - How Asia Works Reading Group - Organised by EA Anywhere
• 27th February - EA for Jews Volunteers meeting - Organised by EA for Jews
• 2nd March - Impactful Forecasting Prize meetup
• 6th March - Giving What We Can Meetup
• 7th March - 1st May - EA Virtual Programs - Applications close 27th February
  • Introductory EA Program
  • In-Depth EA Program
  • The Precipice Reading Group
• 10th March - Power-Seeking AI and X-risk Mitigation - A talk by Joseph Carlsmith from Open Philanthropy
• 13th March - Electricity Production & Use in Decarbonisation Scenarios - Organised by Effective Environmentalism
• 15th March - Panel Q&A: Regulating AI - Why, How, and When? - Organised by Beyond Human Rights
• 16th March - Habiba Islam: How to Have a High Impact Career + Q&A - Organised by EA Denmark
• 17th March - Scaling Laws in Neural Networks - A talk by Jared Kaplan from Johns Hopkins/Anthropics

Latest Research and Updates

Meta

• Open Philanthropy have a new grantmaking program aimed at supporting the effective altruism community around global health and wellbeing
• Julia Wise on why it's okay to leave EA
• Joey Savoie on why 'we need more nuance regarding funding gaps'
• There is a new forum for people who have a basic understanding of the core ideas of global priorities research/longtermism/EA (~20 hours+ engagement), and are interested in identifying/pursuing high-impact China-related opportunities
• Benjamin Todd on how founding a new organisation to tackle a pressing global problem can be extremely high impact
• Elizabeth Cox introducing Should We Studio, who aim to create high-quality, EA-aligned video content
• EA Angels has been launched to help EA founders get startup funding
• Rose Hadshar with reflections on testing fit for research
• Open Philanthropy is running a $150 million Regranting Challenge, aiming to add funding to the grantmaking budgets of outstanding programs at other foundations
• Lucius Caviola & Joshua Greene with an update on Giving Multiplier after 14 months
• 80,000 Hours are running a book giveaway for anyone that signs up to their newsletter
• Martyna with a post arguing for more career advice for mid and late career people
• Charity Entrepreneurship have a released a new book 'How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit'
• Jack Lewars on why EA should promote effective giving more
• Neel Nanda suggesting that EA pitches should be focused more on existential risks
• A summary of the Global Priorities Institute’s activities from 2021 and plans for 2022
• Training for Good are offering 1-to-1 coaching for EA professionals
• A post looking at which EA organisations give feedback when hiring
• Benjamin Hilton with an update to the 80,000 Hours career profile on software engineering
• Pablo with a bibliography of EA writings about fields and movements of interest to EA

Grants

Open Phil have made 24 grants recently with a total value of $46,700,000

• $15,800,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
  • $10,000,000 - Good Food Institute
  • $3,000,000 - Animal Equality
  • $1,000,000 - Dao Foods - Plant-Based Startup Incubator
• $11,100,000 - Scientific Research
  • $10,200,000 - UC Davis - Malaria Gene Drive Feasibility Analysis
  • $800,000 - University of Washington - Syphilis Vaccine Development
• $10,600,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
  • $9,400,000 - Redwood Research
• $3,900,000 - Other Areas
  • $2,300,000 - Should We Studio LLC - Video Production
  • $1,600,000 - Institute For Progress
• $2,000,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
• $1,100,000 - Global Health & Development
• $1,000,000 - Land Use Reform
• $900,000 - Biosecurity
• $200,000 - Global Catastrophic Risks

Global Development

• Devex covering Open Philanthropy as they launch programs for South Asia development
• There is new research suggesting that further intervention methods may be required to reduce the transmission of malaria to combat the daytime-biting species of mosquitos
• Siobhan McDonough on how to clear the air in the most polluted cities
• Wellcome Leap announces over $300M in additional funding for catalysing breakthroughs in human health
• Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have said that the African continent is on course to vaccinate at least 70% of its population against COVID-19 by the end of 2022
• Think Global Health with an article on how we are near to eliminating blindness from trachoma
• The Centre for Global Development with the paper 'COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Rollout in Historical Perspective'
• The Happier Lives Institute with a report on 'The challenge of predicting future feelings and the implications for global priorities research'
• An article looking at how there are 11 million severe burn cases every year globally, with 95% in low- and middle-income countries
• Akhil Bansal with a post suggesting that equity should be a part of effectiveness evaluations
• Saloni Dattani on 'Why randomized controlled trials matter and the procedures that strengthen them'

Animal Welfare

• James Ozden looking at possible Theories of Change for the animal advocacy movement
• China’s five-year agricultural plan includes cultivated meat for the first time
• Richard Ngo with thoughts on individual vegetarianism and veganism
• George Stiffman with the case for rare Chinese tofus as a way to reduce meat consumption

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Rumtin Sepasspour, Richard Kresina and Avital Balwit have created an existential risk policy database
• An article on how progress in biotechnology will advance pandemic defences in coming decades
• Stephen Clare modelling great power conflict as an existential risk factor
• Mike Cassidy and Lara Mani with 'What can we learn from a short preview of a super-eruption and what are some tractable ways of mitigating it'
• Fin Moorhouse writing about the risks from asteroids
• A post announcing Alvea - an EA COVID vaccine project
• Rose Hadshar looking at 'How big are risks from non-state actors?'

Improving Institutions

• The Effective Institutions Project has launched with a new website
• The Institute for Progress with 'A Roadmap to Improving Research Funding Efficiencies and Proposal Diversity'
• Tom Kalil interviewing Martin Borch Jensen on launching a $26 million competition called Longevity Impetus Grants and novel ways to fund science
• Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu with a post on 'The trouble in comparing different approaches to science funding'
• José Luis Ricón looking at how meta science is used in practice
• Matt Clifford interviews complexity scientist Sam Arbesman, discussing science, institutional innovation and long term thinking
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy

Environment

• The FTX Foundation have launched FTX Climate, aiming to spend at least one million dollars a year on impactful solutions
• A study finding that eradicating extreme poverty would raise global emissions by less than 1%
• The Centre for Science and Policy looking at the risks and benefits of geoengineering

Longtermism

• Holden Karnofsky with a post on future-proof ethics
• On the 9-11th June there is a Longtermism and the Law conference in Germany, organised by the University of Hamburg and the Legal Priorities Project
• The Eon Essay Contest has launched with a $15,000 first prize for students, with the contest closing on June 15th
• SJ Beard appeared on the 21st Talks podcast to talk about the far future of humanity, ethical growth through generations, and the psychology behind striving to do the most good

Emerging Technology

• Stuart Armstrong on why he is co-founding Aligned AI
• DeepMind with a post on accelerating fusion science through learned plasma control
• Ryan Lowe and Jan Leike with a post for OpenAI on how they are aligning language models to follow instructions
• Future of Life podcast with David Chalmers on reality+, virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy
• Risto Uuk has started the EU AI Act Newsletter for the Future of Life Institute
• A post asking if the European Union is relevant for AGI governance

Other Causes

• Dylan Matthews on great power conflicts
• Fin Moorhouse writing a cause profile for 80,000 Hours on space governance
• Matthew Yglesias looking into whether misinformation is a significant issue
• Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg on antibiotic resistance
• Stephen Clare with a post on 'How likely is World War III?'
• Madhav Malhotra on antifungal resistance
• Marius Hobbhahn asking if GMOs should be a cause area

Other Links

• Rose Hadshar on 'Trading time in an EA relationship'
• Kelsey Piper with an overview of the Progress Studies movement
• Britney Budiman writing about her early explorations of effective altruism
• Elon Musk has hired Igor Kurganov, co-founder of Raising for Effective Giving, to help give away $5.7 billion
• Julia Wise with an overview of donations and budget for a household that donates half their income
• Nuño Sempere with the latest forecasting newsletter, looking back at 2021
• Scott Alexander on the issues with running a microgrants program
• Holden Karnofsky on 'Learning By Writing'
• Joe Carlsmith on infinite ethics
• Vitalik Buterin has created a $100m organisation to fund Covid science and relief projects worldwide
• A post asking if deontological ethics are incompatible with progress
• Spencer Greenberg and Tom Chivers in discussion on rationalism and effective altruism
• Joey Savoie has set up the website Good Enough, a place for content aimed at getting optimised
• Michelle Hutchinson with a post on managing people with 'imposter syndrome'
• Nuño Sempere with 'Five steps for quantifying speculative interventions'
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit’s fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
• Australian entrepreneur Sarah Wilson on selling her business and donating 100% of profits using EA as a guide

Good News

• There were just 14 guinea worm cases last year, a massive drop from 3.5 million cases in 1986
• Germany has banned the culling of male chicks
• South Korea will ban bear farming by 2026
• The BBC on how HIV elimination is within Australia's reach