Monthly Overload of EA - October 2022

By DavidNash @ 2022-10-01T12:32 (+13)

Link post for 2022 October EA Updates.

Top Posts

• Holden Karnofsky - EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous
• Eli Lifland - My take on What We Owe the Future
• A post announcing the Future Fund's AI Worldview Prize, with prizes ranging from $15k to $1.5M for work that informs the Future Fund's fundamental assumptions about the future of AI
• A highly upvoted post on the forum red teaming CEA’s community building work
• Sawyer - EA is too reliant on personal connections
• Announcing EA Pulse, large monthly US surveys on EA
• Vadim Albinsky - Does Economic Growth Meaningfully Improve Well-being? An Optimistic Re-Analysis of Easterlin’s Research
• Eleos Arete Citrini - Switzerland fails to ban factory farming - lessons for the pursuit of EA-inspired policies?

Upcoming Events

Global

• September to December - Prague Fall Season
• 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual - Apply by October 19th
• November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
• 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam - Admissions close 23rd October
• 24th-26th November - Eastern Europe Community Building Retreat
• 2nd-4th December - EAGxBerkeley
• 7th-8th January - EAGxLatinAmerica

Virtual

• 6th October - What’s the most effective way to help as many animals as possible?, Talk by Charity Entrepreneurship
• 9th October - Giving What We Can Meetup
• October/November - High Impact Medicine Fellowship, Apply by 9th October
• EA Virtual Programmes
  • The Precipice Reading Group
  • Intro to EA
  • In-Depth EA Program
• 29th October - Intro Course to EA for Christians

Meta

• David Manheim - "Doing Good Best" isn't the EA ideal
• Luke Freeman - We’re still (extremely) funding constrained (but don’t let fear of getting funding stop you trying).
• Nathan Young - Summaries are underrated
• Giving What We Can - Marketing Messages Trial for GWWC Giving Guide Campaign
• Sam Freedman - The Politics of Effective Altruism
• Jehan - Chesterton Fences and EA’s X-risks
• Ronja - EA for people with non-technical skillsets
• Rudolf - Much EA value comes from being a Schelling point
• Akash - 13 background claims about EA
• Sabrina C - Young EAs should choose projects more carefully
• Richard Ren - What is neglectedness, actually?
• Jordan Arel - Why Wasting EA Money is Bad
• Vaidehi Agarwalla - Sprinting & Marathoning: Two Strategies for Volunteering your Time
• Thomas Kwa - EA forum content might be declining in quality. Here are some possible mechanisms
• Jeremiah Johnson asking why EA isn't spending more effort on influencing individual donations
• Chana Messinger
  • Scattered Takes and Unsolicited Advice
  • Advice I Give to People Who Don't Currently Have an EA Job and are thinking of transitioning
• Evie Cottrell - "Agency" needs nuance
• High Impact Professionals
  • Fundraising Campaigns at Your Organization: A Reliable Path to Counterfactual Impact
  • Key Factors for Success in Organizing a Fundraising Campaign at Your Company
  • If you're interested in seeing what a campaign could look like at your organisation, you can contact federico@highimpactprofessionals.org

New Projects

• Research in Effective Altruism and Political Science aims to create a community of researchers interested in governance, politics and EA
• Asterix are sending out their first quarterly EA inspired magazine soon, sign up here
• Rachel Norman - Announcing the Rethink Priorities Special Projects Program
• High-Impact Psychology are piloting a global network for psychologists
• Effective Developers aims to help software developers and people running software projects in the EA community
• The Tarbell Fellowship - A one year programme for early-career journalists intent on improving the world - 9th October
• Pineapple Operations has expanded to include anyone interested in operations work in EA
• Céline Galletti and Camille Fayet have launched Better Matters, a student magazine based on effective altruism
• There are new sub forums on the EA forum for bioethics and software engineering
• Carson Ezell, Madeleine Chang and Olaf Willner - Announcing the Space Futures Initiative
• Luca Parodi introducing School of Thinking, an English and Italian media startup
• There is an effective jobs board that you can vote on, set up by Nathan Young
• CEA Ops is now Effective Ventures - a federation of organisations and projects working to have a large positive impact in the world
• Sofia Fogel - Announcing the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program
• Quantified Intuitions: An epistemics training website including a new EA-themed calibration app

Movement building

• A post by me on the mistakes of focusing too much on student community building
• Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from an EA India retreat
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups
• Cold Button Issues - Smart Movements Start Academic Disciplines
• Amy Labenz - CEA's Events Team is Hiring!
• Chana Messinger - Transparency for undermining the weird feelings around systematizing community building

EA Ideas Explained

• Luke Muehlhauser - Reasoning Transparency
• Alana Horowitz Friedman
  • What is counterfactual thinking and why should you care about it?
  • Should charity begin at home?

Critiques

• Peter Wildeford - 21 criticisms of EA I'm thinking about
• Ruth Grace - Evaluating large-scale movement building: A better way to critique Open Philanthropy's criminal justice reform
• Rohit - Effective Altruism is a constant fight against Knightian uncertainty
• Yonatan Cale - Criticism of the 80k job board listing strategy
• Thomas Aitken - The Role of "Economism" in the Belief-Formation Systems of Effective Altruism
• Connor Tabarrok - EA Worries and Criticism
• Akash - Criticism of EA Criticisms: Is the real disagreement about cause prio?
• Francis - Prediction Markets are Somewhat Overrated Within EA

EA Global

• Scott Alexander with a suggestion to make EA global open access
• Dion with her closing speech at EAGx Singapore
• Constance Li - Case Study of EA Global Rejection + Criticisms/Solutions
• Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from EAGx Singapore

Careers

• Madhav Malhotra - Internship Lessons at the Happier Lives Institute
• Hear This Idea podcast with Michael Aird on how to do impact-driven research
• 80,000 Hours - Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career?
• Gabriel Mukobi - Levelling Up in AI Safety Research Engineering
• Dan Pandori - Offering FAANG-style mock interviews

Prizes

• GiveWell have announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of their cost-effectiveness analyses
• The Truman Prize: Rewarding Anonymous EA Work ($100,000 in prizes)
• $13,000 of prizes for changing our minds about who to fund (Clearer Thinking Regrants Forecasting Tournament)
• $5,000 challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career paths

Grants

• Open Philanthropy have made 24 grants recently, with a value of $25 million
  • $8,000,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
    • $3,600,000 - Compassion in World Farming - Broiler Chicken Welfare and Efforts to End Cages and Crates
    • $2,500,000 - Sinergia Animal - Farm Animal Welfare in Southeast Asia and Latin America
    • $1,500,000 - World Animal Protection - Farm Animal Welfare in Asia
  • $6,800,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
    • $4,800,000 - Center for a New American Security - Work on AI Governance
    • $2,000,000 - Epoch
  • $4,600,000 - Global Health & Development
    • $3,400,000 - Bridges to Prosperity - Trailbridge Building RCT in Rwanda
    • $1,000,000 - Center for Global Development
  • $4,000,000 - Transformative Basic Science
    • Oregon Health and Science University - Research on Oocyte Production
  • $550,000 - Effective Altruism Community Growth
    • Apollo Fellowship - Effective Altruism Debate Camp
    • University of Edinburgh - Effective Altruism Psychology Course
    • Universidad de Sevilla - Course on Effective Altruism
    • Peter McIntyre - Effective Altruism Community Building Projects
  • $400,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
  • $400,000 - Longtermism
    • Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative - SERI Summer Fellowships
• The Future Fund has made 14 grants in August, with a value of $6.4 million
  • $2,900,000 - Longview Philanthropy
  • $1,000,000 - Fund for Alignment Research
  • $800,000 - VIVID
  • $350,000 - University of California, Santa Cruz, Cihang Xie
  • $300,000 - ALLFED
  • $290,000 - University of Pennsylvania, Professor Geoff Goodwin
  • $200,000 - HR Luna Park

Global Development

• The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria didn't hit its $18 billion replenishment target, although the final tally of $14.25 billion exceeded the amount raised in the last pledging cycle
• Open Philanthropy have announced the winners of their cause exploration prizes
  • Top prize - Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants by Ben Stewart.
  • Second prizes
    • Violence against women and girls by Akhil Bansal
    • Sickle Cell Disease
    • Shareholder activism by S Behmer
• Bastian Herre - The world has recently become less democratic
• Charles Kenny with a post suggesting that people interested in EA should work at the Centre for Global Development
• GiveWell - The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund
• Leo - Assessing Cost Effectiveness: malnutrition, famine, and cause prioritization
• Rosie Bettle - How Founders Pledge use (and sometimes don't use) DALYs
• The Gates Foundation with an update on the Sustainable Development Goals
• India develops its first cervical cancer vaccine
• Yonatan Cale - Zzapp Malaria: More effective than bed nets? (Wanted: CTO, COO & Funding)
• Joel Tan - Value of Statistical Life Estimates vs Community Perspective Evaluations

Animal Welfare

• Kenny Torrella looking at the history and future of animal product consumption
• An Evaluation of Animal Charity Evaluators
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project
• Sofia Balderson with the September edition of Impactful Animal Advocacy Newsletter
• Max Carpendale - Pathways to victory: How can we end animal agriculture?
• Animal Ask and Ren Springlea - CCTV cameras in slaughterhouses: Modest benefits for animal welfare
• GWWC podcast with Neil Dullaghan on using research & strategic thinking to help animals effectively
• Animal Advocacy Careers - The impact we achieved to date

Alternative Proteins

• Fai - Could it be a (bad) lock-in to replace factory farming with alternative protein?
• Seren L. Kell - How researchers can join the race to develop new ways of making meat
• The UK's Ivy Farm has opened the largest cultivated meat pilot plant in Europe

Biosecurity

• The World Bank has set up a new financial intermediary fund for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response to strengthen capabilities in low- and middle-income countries with over $1.4 billion in financial commitments already announced
• Byron Cohen - Biosecurity challenges posed by Dual-Use Research of Concern
• Hear This Idea podcast with Tessa Alexanian and Janvi Ahuja on synthetic biology and GCBRs
• Andy Graham and Tsmilton - Developing Next Gen PPE to Reduce Biorisks
• Open Philanthropy Biosecurity Scholarships - Apply by 11th October

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Kelsey Piper - How to stop rolling the dice on the destruction of human civilization
• Ethan Siegel - The biggest challenges of redirecting a killer asteroid
• Rani Martin - The Pugwash Conferences and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a case study of Track II diplomacy
• James R looking at what potential fellowship schemes/secondments could look like for tackling existential threats
• NASA’s DART mission hits asteroid in first planetary defense test
• WHO has released a global guidance framework for the responsible use of the life sciences: mitigating biorisks and governing dual-use research
• The Neoliberal podcast with Christine Parthemore discussing the risks from nuclear and biological weapons
• Lingnan University has set up the Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre
• The Future of Life Institute has a request for proposals targeting research on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons use and nuclear war, initial deadline 15th November. They are planning on granting at least $3,000,000

Improving Institutions & Metascience

• Sophia Brown - Improving "Improving Institutional Decision-Making": A brief history of IIDM
• Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg - Tearing down the academic research paywall could come with a price
• The Foresight Institute podcast with Tom Kalil, Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures
• The Center for Open Science looking at the new policy update from the White House Office of Science Technology & Policy ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research

Progress Studies

• Big Think has an issue focused on progress, including contributions from Tyler Cowen, Hannah Ritchie, Jason Crawford, Saloni Dattani and Rutger Bregman
• Jason Crawford - Towards a philosophy of safety

Environment

• Hannah Ritchie - Why being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one
• Turchin - A Pin and a Balloon: Anthropic Fragility Increases Chances of Runaway Global Warming
• A new report analysing the environmental benefits of agricultural research and development
• Vasco Grilo - Longterm cost-effectiveness of Founders Pledge's Climate Change Fund
• Cullen O'Keefe - Contra Appiah Defending Defending "Climate Villains"

Longtermism

• Future Matters newsletter on Supervolcanoes, AI takeover and What We Owe the Future
• Cold Button Issues - The Base Rate of Longtermism Is Bad
• Julian Hazell - A more convincing case for longtermism
• Thomaaas - The discount rate is not zero
• Brian Kateman - Optimistic “Longtermism” Is Terrible For Animals
• Dan Luu - Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
• Benjamin Todd on four types of Longtermism
• Garrison Lovely - The Socialist Case for Longtermism
• Michael Dickens - Should Patient Philanthropists Invest Differently?
• Dwarkesh Patel - Evaluation of Longtermist Institutional Reform
• William Macaskill writing in the Big Think - What NASA’s Spaceguard can teach us about our uncertain future
• Sigal Samuel writing for Vox about longtermism
• Richard Ren - Systemic Cascading Risks: Relevance in Longtermism & Value Lock-In

AI Policy

• Mauricio - AI Governance Needs Technical Work
• Matthijs Maas - Artificial Intelligence Governance under Change
• Haydn Belfield - The Rival AI Deployment Problem: a Pre-deployment Agreement as the least-bad response
• Michaël Trazzi interviewing Shahar Avin on how to strategically regulate advanced AI systems

Technical AI

• Thomas Larsen and Eli Lifland - What Everyone in Technical Alignment is Doing and Why
• Janus with a post on what it would look like if self-supervised learning created AGI or its foundation
• Akash - 7 traps that (we think) new alignment researchers often fall into

AI & Forecasting

• David Roodman with a review of Ajeya Cotra's Forecasting TAI with biological anchors
• Eli Lifland - Samotsvety's AI risk forecasts
• Michaël Trazzi interviewing Alex Lawsen on forecasting AI progress

Other AI

• Nuno Sempere - An experiment eliciting relative estimates for Open Philanthropy’s 2018 AI safety grants
• Eleni A - Alignment is hard. Communicating that, might be harder
• Fergus Q - Reasons for my negative feelings towards the AI risk discussion
• Henry J - A California Effect for Artificial Intelligence
• Mathieu Putz and Rudolf - Why we're not founding a human-data-for-alignment org
• Kat Woods & Amber Dawn - Two reasons we might be closer to solving alignment than it seems
• Michaël Trazzi interviewing Katja Grace on Slowing Down AI, AI Expert Surveys And Estimating AI Risk

Philosophy

• 80,000 Hours podcast with Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
• Calvin Baker - A dilemma for Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness
• Larks - The Long Reflection as the Great Stagnation
• Richard Y Chappell - Puzzles for Everyone
• William D'Alessandro - Deontology, the Paralysis Argument and altruistic longtermism

Will MacAskill Interviews

• The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
• The Atlantic
• Max Roser interviewing Will MacAskill for Intelligence Squared

Stories

• Eleni A - Talking EA to my philosophy friends
• Carmen Csilla Medina on her experience teaching at Condor Camp, an introductory retreat to EA for Brazilian students
• GWWC Podcast with Michael Noetel discussing the mistakes he made when trying to improve the world
• Sam Brown - My emotional reaction to the current funding situation
• Giving What We Can member profiles
• Fernando Martin-Gullans - Professional ballet dancer
• Rupal Ismin - Director of a research commercialisation centre at the University of Sydney
• Peter Jensen - Retired U.S. Army officer

Other Links

• A post reconciling the EA and Financial Independence movements
• Econ Talk podcast with Erik Hoel on EA, utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion
• Charlotte - Exploring (EA) Donation Parliaments
• Interview with author Rutger Bregman on effective altruism and philanthropy
• Vipul Naik - Levels of donation
• Julia Wise looking at moral aesthetics of EA compared to Quakers
• An obituary for Peter Eckersley
• Elizabeth - Impact Shares For Speculative Projects
• Sam Stowers - Altruist Dreams - a collaborative art piece from EAG SF
• Habiba Islam - A peek into the EA Forum if Hamilton characters wrote the posts

Good News

• Measles cases declined by 92% between 2002 and 2020 in southeast Asia and the death rate decreased by 97% - saving an estimated 9.3 million lives during this period
• Maternal mortality rates in Zimbabwe declined from 657 deaths per 100,000 births in 2007, to 217 per 100,000 births in 2019
• Togo has become the first country to eliminate four neglected tropical diseases
• Wind and solar top 10% of global power generation for the first time
• Italy bans slaughter of male chicks, sparing up to 40 million birds a year
• Deaths due to malaria in Tanzania have decreased by 71% from 2015 to 2021
• The murder rate in El Salvador has dropped from 18.2 per day in 2015 to 3.1 per day in 2021
• Equatorial Guinea abolishes death penalty