EA Organization Updates: May-June 2022

By Lizka @ 2022-06-16T09:15 (+32)

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 are at the top of this post. Some of the jobs have extremely 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.

We’ve decided to cycle through the alphabet in order to avoid showing the same organizations at the top of the updates every month (starting last month). So the organizations here are listed from K-Z, and then from 0-J. 

Job listings

See also: Who's hiring? May-September 2022. These jobs will also appear in the EA Newsletter. 

Applications due soon

Cooperative AI Foundation is hiring for a Chief Operating Officer (Oxford / London / Remote, apply by 23 June)

GiveWell:

Longview Philanthropy:

Other positions

Charity Entrepreneurship:

IDinsight is hiring for a range of jobs including client-facing, economists, data scientists, communications, finance, and operations (Various / Remote)

GiveDirectly:

Organizational updates

Legal Priorities Project

LPP announced their first Legal Priorities Summer Institute (LPSI) – an intensive, week-long program with the goal of introducing altruistically-minded law and policy students to projects, theories, and tools relevant to tackling critical issues affecting the long-term future. Applications are open until June 17. Learn more and apply here.

Additionally, LPP announced a writing competition on “Improving Cost-Benefit Analysis to Account for Existential and Catastrophic Risks.” This competition is a response to the Biden Administration’s task for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to “produce a set of recommendations for improving and modernizing regulatory review,” including how cost-benefit analysis can account for “the interests of future generations” and “fully account for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify.” Prizes ranging from $2,500 to $30,000 will be awarded to the winners. The application deadline is July 31. Learn more and apply here.

Cullen O’Keefe released a sequence on “Law-Following AI”. The posts argue that working to ensure that AI systems follow laws is a worthwhile way to improve the long-term future of AI.

Two student groups at ITAM hosted one-semester-long reading groups on “Legal Priorities Research” funded by LPP.

Longview Philanthropy

Longview Philanthropy are hiring for:

And they are delighted to welcome:

80,000 Hours

Howie Lempel is now the CEO of 80,000 Hours, with Benjamin Todd moving into a President role — more details here.

This month, 80,000 Hours has released:

Over the last couple of months on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Rob Wiblin has interviewed:

The 80k After Hours podcast also released another episode: Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine.

ALLFED - Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters

ALLFED has published two peer-reviewed cost-effectiveness analyses on its two main topics of work: resilient food solutions against global catastrophic food shocks and interventions for a loss of critical infrastructure. Results suggest work in this area has competitive cost-effectiveness compared to other interventions for the long-term as well as for the current generation.

Open access versions can be found here.

Anima International

The Fur Free Europe campaign was launched by a group of organisations and is a hugely important and unique opportunity to ban fur farming across the entire European Union. For more information and to sign the petition just head to the blog.

Just a few weeks before this campaign launch, Anima International released new undercover footage of a mink farm in Bulgaria in collaboration with Nevidimi Zhivotni, a newly formed animal-welfare group from Bulgaria.

Anima International is excited to announce that this year’s Conference on Animal Rights in Europe (CARE) will take place on August 26-28 in Warsaw, Poland. As a hybrid event, attendees will be able to take part in person or online. The conference will focus on reconnecting with friends and colleagues as well as networking with fellow activists to learn from each other. Speaker applications are now open - just complete this short form to be considered and please feel free to share with anyone you think may be interested in contributing. Tickets to attend the event will be on sale soon but in the meantime, you can join Anima International’s Facebook event to stay in the loop. Announcements regarding participant safety measures will also be made soon.

Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and after months of research and analysis, Anima International reluctantly made the decision to end its operations in Russia. More details about this decision can be found on its website. 

Animal Charity Evaluators

Animal charities are doing important work in Asia, but the animal protection movement there is still relatively young. Despite this, there have been many positive developments for animal protection in the region. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) think now is an excellent time for charities to gain a better understanding of the opportunities to effectively help animals in Asia, as well as the barriers. They asked four leaders in the Asian animal protection movement to share their insights on how charities can effectively help animals in Asia and support the growing movement. Read more on their blog!

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is excited to announce its new three-year strategic plan. This plan provides their vision for the future and plans to optimize their work in order to continue helping the most animals. ACE strives to be honest, critical, and transparent about its work, which is why this plan is founded upon self-reflection and a desire to continuously improve. They have broken their goals into three focus areas: Optimize Core Programs, Drive Capital, and Empower Our Team to Do the Most Good.

Each year, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) publishes a list of goals to explore new opportunities, refine its practices, and continue its mission to find and promote the most effective ways to reduce animal suffering. In this blog post, they share the top-level objectives that will guide their work throughout the fiscal year spanning from January 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023. These objectives support ACE’s broader goals and vision over the next three years, as outlined in its 2022–2024 strategic plan.

ACE is looking for board members to join their team and oversee legal and financial processes, monitor key policies and procedures, and ensure that ACE is working to achieve their strategic goals. If either of these roles excites you, they invite you to apply!

Animal Ethics

Animal Ethics has published a new report on the obstacles to a brucellosis vaccination program for the wild bison population of Yellowstone National Park.

The report explains the past and current situations concerning the spread of brucellosis in the Yellowstone area. It details the problems impeding the success of a bison vaccination program and argues that vaccination programs targeting elk instead could be successful in preventing the spread of brucellosis in the area. 

In addition, the report examines the historical, jurisdictional, and regulatory complexities involved in this issue, and whether other alternatives like contraception and spreading awareness and concern for animals in the wild could improve the situation.

Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative

BERI is now accepting applications from university-affiliated groups and individuals interested in receiving our support. Applications are due on June 26th.

Winning applicants would be eligible for free services from BERI, like purchasing equipment, food, and software, maintaining an Uber account for easy travel, and hiring experts for research support; see How does BERI help our collaborators? for more info. If you’re a member of a research group – or an individual researcher – working on longtermist projects then you’re encouraged to apply. If you know anyone who might be interested, please share this with them!

Centre for Effective Altruism

Community Health

Chana Messinger joined the Community Health team and will initially be focused on epistemics and supporting high school outreach projects. 

Groups

Applications are now open for CEA’s University Group Accelerator Program (UGAP) next semester. UGAP aims to turn a new university group consisting of a couple of interested organizers into a mid-sized university group. It offers stipends for main organizers, regular meetings with an experienced mentor, training, and useful resources for a group to run their first intro seminar (or fellowship) program. 

CEA is also looking for additional experienced uni group organizers to serve as mentors. You can find out more about and express interest in becoming a UGAP mentor here.

The groups team is also excited to be hosting seven summer interns who participated in UGAP programming this school year. They will primarily be working on projects designed to support community building at their universities.

Events

Applications are currently open (all via the same form) for: 

You can find more information on applications here and the full list of upcoming events here. Application deadlines are roughly two weeks before each event.

Online

The online team has recently hired some new team members and will soon be hiring for a product manager. 

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)

Matthijs Maas, Kayla Matteucci, and Di Cooke published a new pre-print exploring the potential global catastrophic risks posed in the short to medium term by military applications of AI. It focuses on two risk scenarios: the use of swarms of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (which it argues are unlikely to be a GCR in the near-term) and the intersection of military AI and nuclear weapons (which have a significantly higher GCR potential). The paper concludes with suggestions for a research agenda that can gain a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary understanding of the potential risks from military AI.

A team of researchers from CSER and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence have been shortlisted for the Future of Life Institute's World Building Competition for an imaginative, yet realistic, vision of a future in which AGI is used for safe and beneficial purposes via a careful balancing of centralised and distributed functions.

In an article for The Progressive Magazine, Paul Ingram discusses the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the most significant threats it poses (such as a nuclear winter) as well considering the opportunities for people to work towards mitigating these.

CSER was featured as a part of the highly successful joint submission to the REF 2021 for philosophy at Cambridge, providing a key impact case study. This was the first time their work was featured in the UK's national research assessment exercise. Cambridge's submission brought together research and impact from philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, CSER, and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Videos for the keynotes and panels at CSER’s conference are now available on YouTube:

Charity Entrepreneurship

Charity Entrepreneurship has successfully finalized the application process for the 2022 Incubation Program with the goal to launch charities in the areas of Tobacco Taxation, Aid Quality Advocacy, Road Traffic Safety, Postpartum Family Planning, and Exploratory Altruism. The organization has also accepted some candidates for the February-March 2023 program with the intention to launch new charities focused on animal welfare and advocacy. The next round of applications for this program will be in September/October 2022. In a recent blog post, you can also read what cause areas will CE be focusing on in the future (e.g. health risk/biorisk).

Charity Entrepreneurship is also back with regular EA and entrepreneurship-focused articles, so you can read about seeking more risks while earning to give or about what motivates entrepreneurs and how this affects the help and level of control they need from their mentors, advisors, and other partners.

Faunalytics 

Faunalytics will host a free, remote research symposium for animal advocates on September 8, 2022. They invite academics and scientists from the social and behavioral sciences, or related disciplines, to submit a presentation abstract of original research that discusses the real-life implications and recommendations of such data for animal advocates. Abstracts are due July 10, 2022.

Faunalytics released their newest report comparing the effectiveness of 15 different animal advocacy tactics on people’s behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes towards farmed animals. The goal of the project, which included a retrospective survey of U.S. adults and an experiment, was to estimate how successful each advocacy type is at decreasing animal product consumption among the general public across both the short- and long-term.

 The organization's latest Fundamental covers how animal protection and social justice intertwine, and the latest Faunalytics Explains video covers the ecological implications of wool. They’ve also added several summaries to their Research Library on topics including consumer views of fishes and cephalopod welfare. 

Fish Welfare Initiative

In conjunction with their farmer engagement project in the Philippines (more details on this to be released shortly), FWI recently spoke at four in-person events in Cebu:

Several other updates from FWI:

GiveDirectly

So far this year, GiveDirectly has committed $30M in cash transfers across 9 countries, including a climate adaptation program in Malawi. This summer, we’re launching a program in Yemen to reach internally displaced families with direct cash aid. We’re also launching one of the largest UBI projects ever in Liberia’s Maryland county. We plan to lift the entire region (78k adults) out of extreme poverty with regular cash payments. In the coming months, we’ll release new research findings on our work in refugee settings in Uganda and our U.S. COVID-19 project. To receive updates on these studies, sign up for our newsletter.

GiveWell

Research update

GiveWell published a page on a $66,400 grant it recommended to WAW Statistical Consulting Ltd. This grant will support Rachael Meager and Witold Więcek over two years to continue development of baggr, a Bayesian statistical package for R. GiveWell recommended this grant from its small discretionary grantmaking budget because baggr has been used to support important research in global health and development, some of which has informed GiveWell's own funding decisions, and because GiveWell has a generally positive view of the usefulness of Bayesian approaches to statistical analysis.

Giving Green

Giving Green is thrilled to welcome three new members to its team:

Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

GCRI has officially opened their 2022 Advising and Collaboration Program. They welcome people at all career points, from all geographic locations, and with any interest across the many aspects of global catastrophic risk. There is no deadline for submission and urge anyone interested to participate.

The GCRI Executive Director wrote a review of Toby Ord’s new book The Precipice. He found the book to be an excellent contribution to the literature on global catastrophic risk, but found it erred in its emphasis on only the most extreme global catastrophe scenarios, its strong belief in the resilience of civilization, and its use of quantitative risk analysis.

GCRI Executive Director Seth D. Baum and University of Tasmania Professor Vanessa Adams recently studied two jurisdictions with especially low spread of COVID-19, namely China and Western Australia, as part of the paper Pandemic Refuges: Lessons from Two Years of COVID-19. 

Happier Lives Institute

Michael gave two presentations at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University. The first talk discussed whether faster economic growth makes us happier and the relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to Progress Studies. The second talk presented a critique of longtermism based on the person-affecting view of population ethics.

On June 16 at 4 pm BST / 11am EDT, Michael will be speaking at a webinar alongside the Founder and CEO of StrongMinds, Sean Mayberry. They will discuss HLI’s recent finding that StrongMinds is 9 times more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. Register here.

The Humane League

The Open Wing Alliance published its Cage-Free Fulfillment Report, showing that 88% of the 982 companies with 2021 deadlines have met their cage-free transition targets. The report was featured by several industry media outlets with article titles like “Report: Cage-free eggs becoming the norm”. 

In January 2022, thanks to the efforts of the Animal Welfare Institute and Farm Sanctuary, the USDA proactively released official records of shocking violations at poultry slaughterhouses across the US. THL’s newly published report on these violations –The State of Slaughter – shows just how broken our food system really is. THL needs help urging companies to abandon live-shackle slaughter in their supply chains, visit stateofslaughter.com. 

Following public pressure campaigns, and thousands of grassroots actions, Quiznos, Red Robin and Black Bear Diner all published their commitments to source 100% cage-free eggs by 2024 or 2025, and agreed to publicly report their progress and share a roadmap for achieving their goals. Hawaiian Airlines also recently committed to source cage-free eggs following negotiations with THL.

THL published their 2021 Q1 progress report, which details their full impact from January to April here.
 

abrahamrowe @ 2022-06-20T12:30 (+2)

Thanks for sharing these! It looks like this list ends at H (with some Ls at the beginning). I was wondering if it got cut off, or if that's coincidental?

Lizka @ 2022-06-20T12:40 (+2)

Thanks for asking! Unless I got things wrong when I was transferring the Google Doc to the Forum post, there wasn't anything from M-Z or from I-M. (Some organizations on the list didn't have an update this month, apparently, and also the list of organizations is pretty early-alphabet-heavy.)

abrahamrowe @ 2022-06-20T12:52 (+2)

Thanks!