EA Updates for November

By DavidNash @ 2020-11-02T12:38 (+36)

Upcoming Virtual Events

• 8th November - Giving What We Can Meetup
• 8th November - Sam Berscht on the Future of Animal Advocacy Research
• 9th November - Chloe Cockburn: Effective Giving and BLM
• 12th November - One For The World donates it's millionth dollar with Peter Singer
• 16th November - Career Profile - Amy Huang from The Good Food Institute
• 19th November - Giving What We Can Open Forum
• 21st - 22nd November - EAGxAsia-Pacific 2020
• 30th November - Working as an AI Strategist with Miles Brundage from OpenAI and The Future of Humanity Institute
• 2nd December - Career Profile - Daniela Amodei from OpenAI

Latest Research and Updates

Meta

• Jess Whittlestone on 'actually solving problems' and why she has distanced herself from the EA community
• Fin Moorhouse with a review and summary of Moral Uncertainty by Will MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord
• Giving Tuesday will be on December the 1st, find out how to get your donation doubled here
• Rob Wiblin with a post on when people shouldn't use EA jargon
• 5 new charities from the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program
• Match for More has launched an initiative to connect professionals who leverage employer donor-matching opportunities
• EA New York City now has two full time organisers and a new website
• Giving What We Can now has a companies pledge with four companies having already taken it including the Sam Harris, founder of Waking Up
• The EA Debate Championship 2020 happened last month with over 100 participants
• The EA Consulting Network with a giving guide for people to give to their workplaces
• Q&A with Marcus Davis, co-founder at Rethink Priorities, Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health
• Julian Hazell on why people should take the Giving What We Can pledge
• Clearer Thinking has launched a podcast, including episodes with Arden Koehler, Kat Woods and Anna Salamon
• Lincoln Quirk and Ben Kuhn from SendWave with an ask me anything
• Akash with a post on what they learnt at the EA Student Summit
• Giving What We Can with an effective giving advocacy challenge for 2020
• Lucius Caviola and Joshua Greene with a new strategy for broadening the appeal of effective giving
• Caleb Parikh has joined EA for Christians full time to support the EA Christian community
• EA organisation updates for September
• Jamie Gittens with a list of EA related organisations
• Jamie Harris with a brief overview of recruitment and retention research
• Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola with a paper on misconceptions about charitable giving

Grants

• Open Phil have made 15 grants recently with a total value of $4,553,000
  • $2,680,000 - Scientific research
  • $550,000 - Macroeconomic stabilisation policy
  • $500,000 - Immigration policy
  • $477,000 - Criminal justice reform
  • $267,000 - Farm animal welfare
  • $79,000 - Other areas
• The EA Global Health and Development Fund has made two grants recently
  • $550,000 - IDinsight
  • $198,000 - Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention

Global Development

• Founders Pledge have a global development fund looking at riskier opportunities for impact
• The 2019 Global Burden of Disease study has been released, analysing 286 causes of death, 369 diseases and injuries, and 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories
• Stephen Clare and Aidan Goth looking at whether EA should focus on economic growth vs direct interventions
• GiveWell on why ongoing assessment of top charities leads to more impact
• The World Health Organization with a report that estimates 1,800,000 people could die from tuberculosis in 2020 - numbers last seen in 2012
• The World Bank with lessons from Peru: how to save children from stunting and other exemplars in global health
• The Life You Can Save audiobook is now available on multiple major podcast services
• Exemplars in Global Health looking at countries that have restored vaccine confidence
• Michael Cremer with Tyler Cowen discussing economists as founders

Animal Welfare

• Kelsey Piper interviewing Peter Singer about his new book 'Why Vegan?'
• Animal Charity Evaluator with thoughts on building alliances with the environmental movement
• George Bridgwater and Amy Odene have founded Animal Ask to assist animal advocacy organisations with research

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Simon Beard on Parfit, climate change, and existential risk
• Leopold Aschenbrenner on whether faster economic growth increases or decreases existential risks
• Kelly Wanser on climate change as a possible existential threat
• The BBC covering the National Risk Register
• Lara Mani on the challenges of communicating about existential risks to the public, politicians, and business people

Environment

• The Earthshot prize has been launched, awarding 5, one million-pound prizes every year for the next decade for solutions to environmental problems
• The Parametric Press looking at carbon removal for trees compared to algae
• Daniel Schreiber on methods better than offsets for fighting climate change

Long Term Future

• Hilary Greaves from The Global Priorities Institute on the 80,000 Hours podcast
• A new long-termism focused newsletter from BBC journalist Richard Fisher
• Alexis Carlier with a post looking at longtermist reasons to work for innovative governments
• Podcast with Anders Sandberg discussing possible future trajectories for humanity
• Florian Ulrich Jehn with a post on 'the end of the Bronze Age as an example of a sudden collapse of civilisation'
• Stefan Schubert with post on optimism about EA long-termism

Emerging Technology

• Kelsey Piper on the case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity
• An article in Nature looking at the last decade of synthetic biology
• Andrew Critch on AI research considerations for human existential safety
• Richard Ngo summarising the existential threat of artificial general intelligence
• Iason Gabriel on foundational philosophical questions in AI alignment

Improving Institutions

• An overview of an event organised by the Center for Open Science for funders of metascience
• Kelsey Piper writing about what has been learnt about the replication crisis in science
• Ian David Moss on how to get social sector leaders to use evidence

Other Links

• Charity Navigator is starting to evaluate the impact of the charities they recommend
• Mauricio with historical case studies on what helped the voiceless
• Sigal Samuel on the case for funding psychedelics to treat mental health
• Clearer Thinking with twelve ways to accelerate learning
• An interview with Harvard professor Max Bazerman about their new book 'Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness'
• Spencer Greenberg discussing effective altruism, mental health and habit change
• 80,000 Hours looking at how much does one person's vote matters
• C Tilli with a personal reflection on how their experience of EA is similar to their experience of religious faith in that it provides a sense of purpose and belonging, but that they miss the assurance of their own intrinsic value and how that can make it difficult to maintain a stable sense of self-worth

Good News

• Kazakhstan has signed a global treaty aiming to abolish the death penalty
• Myanmar has eliminated trachoma
• The proportion of children under five years of age chronically infected with hepatitis B dropped to just under 1% in 2019 down from around 5% in the pre-vaccine era
• The number of people without access to electricity dropped from almost 860 million in 2018 to 770 million in 2019
• France has announced a ban on using wild animals in circuses, on keeping dolphins and killer whales in captivity in marine parks and on raising mink on fur farms