Link post for 2022 August EA Updates.

Top News

• Olivia Addy - EA for Dumb People?
• Non-Trivial Pursuits has launched a series of interactive lessons to think critically about solving the world's most important problems, aimed at students
• Ahmed Ghoor and Kaleem have launched Effective Altruism for Muslims
• Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, Michael Plant - Deworming and decay: replicating GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis
• Astral Codex Ten with 'Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism'
• A post announcing High Impact Engineers
• GiveWell with an update on their funding projections, having changed since last year they now don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities they expect to find

Events

• 2nd-4th September - EAGxSingapore
• 23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.
• 16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin - Applications now open
• 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual
• 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam

Meta

• Benjamin Todd - Let's stop saying 'funding overhang'
• Owen Cotton-Barratt with a response to Todd - What I mean by "funding overhang" (and why it doesn't mean money isn't helpful)
• Michel Justen - Emphasizing emotional altruism in effective altruism
• Magnify Mentoring are open for applications from mentees - closes 5th August
• Ollie Base - CEA’s Community Events Programme: Update and Call for Applications, they are especially looking for applications for 30-100+ person events focused on specific cause areas, in neglected regions and EA sub-communities
• Michael Plant - A philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework
• Dwarkesh Patel - There will be many more effective altruist billionaires
• Stefan Schubert - Remuneration In Effective Altruism
• Aaron Bergman - Some research questions that you may want to tackle
• Étienne Fortier-Dubois on being for effective altruism but against optimisation
• Gidon Kadosh - How EA is perceived is crucial to its future trajectory
• EA organisation updates for June-July
• Paul Logan looking at longtermism within EA and potential splits in the community
• Sara Azubuike - Crypto markets, EA funding and optics
• 80,000 Hours are running a survey for people who have ever interacted with them
• Why EA needs Operations Research: the science of decision making
• A post on the forum suggesting that 'EA Shouldn't Try to Exercise Direct Political Power'
• Rethink Priorities 2022 Mid-Year Update: Progress, Plans, Funding

New Projects

• A post announcing the Center for Space Governance
• Book a chat with an EA professional
• EA Opportunities: A new collection of internships, contests and events
• High Impact Medicine has it's own podcast series
• A new blog looking at the intersection of EA, longtermism and liberalism
• Michel Justen - A Database of EA Organizations & Initiatives
• Open Philanthropy Technology Policy Fellowship - September 15th deadline. For people in the U.S.

Community building

• Sabrina C
  • How I Recommend University Groups Approach the Funding Situation
  • Tradeoffs in Community Building
• An EAGx Boston 2022 retrospective
• David Manheim - Making Effective Altruism Enormous
• Charlie Dougherty looking at how to increase the methods of introspection that EA uses
• Sophia - Is it possible for EA to remain nuanced and be more welcoming to newcomers? A distinction for discussions on topics like this one
• Rob Gledhill
  • Self investment I think community builders should do
  • Things I’m curious about city or national groups trying

Critiques

• A post critiquing how EA organisations are hiring 'senior' operations roles
• Charlie Dougherty with pushback on the fidelity of communication
• Zvi with more criticism of the EA Criticism Contest
• Helen - Leaning into EA Disillusionment
• Nick Whitaker - Going more meta on EA criticism
• Ann Garth - EA is becoming increasingly inaccessible, at the worst possible time
• Peter Elam - EA's Culture and Thinking are Severely Limiting its Impact

Careers

• Joseph Lemien - What is Operations Management?
• Ruth Grace - It's OK not to go into AI (for students)
• Tee - Replaceability v. 'Contextualized Worthiness'
• Jordan Schneider with an early career guide for people interested in China policy
• Locke - Law School: Why and When? – Considerations for Members of the EA Community (In the U.S.)
• Jake P. Mann on how EA affects his career choices in medicine
• Tim Farkas - Is Medical School High Impact?
• Probably Good have released two new chapters of their career guide
• Vael Gates - Social scientists interested in AI safety should consider doing direct technical AI safety research, governance, support roles or community building instead
• Steven Byrnes on choosing a job that has enough spare time to do become better at doing good

Grants

• The FTX Future Fund has a grants database, having committed over $130 million to date
• Founders Pledge with grants to Suvita, EA Australia and r.i.c.e institute
• EA Infrastructure Fund have made 68 grants with a value of $2,450,000
  • $300,000 - Charity Entrepreneurship
  • $270,500 - Gi Effektivt
  • $233,000 - Effektiv Spenden
  • $200,000 - Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC
  • $174,000 - Global Challenges Project

Global Development

• Open Philanthropy are planning to allocate $350 million to GiveWell’s recommended charities in 2022
• Lant Pritchett - Development work versus charity work
• Tom Davidson with a report on social returns to productivity growth
• Richard Sedlmayr suggesting that Open Philanthropy should do more hits based giving in global development
• Kelsey Piper Q&A with development economist Charles Kenny
• The Gates Foundation is planning to increase annual giving by 50%
• Max Roser - The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
• Saloni Dattani and Fiona Spooner - Guinea worm disease is close to being eradicated - how was this progress achieved?
• The World Bank announced a $92 million investment in mobile money firm Wave to boost access to digital financial services in West Africa
• Kelsey Piper covering the return of 'worm wars'

Animal Welfare

• Stanford held it's first Economics of Animal Welfare conference
• Legal Impact for Chickens files its first lawsuit
• Giving What We Can podcast with Bruce Friedrich - Why plant based meat is a scalable solution to feed the world
• Saulius Simcikas - Wild animal welfare in the far future
• Michael St. Jules - Desire theories of welfare and nonhuman animals
• Saulius Simcikas - Reducing aquatic noise as a wild animal welfare intervention
• Faunalytics has produced an update to their Global Animal Slaughter Statistics and Charts
• Animal Charity Evaluators with their movement grants for 2022 with 35 projects funded

Biosecurity

• There is a multi-year biosecurity forecasting tournament on Metaculus, aiming to map out future biosecurity risk landscape, help direct resource allocation and inform the distribution of efforts
• Jonas Sandbrink - New ideas for mitigating biotechnology misuse
• Tessa - List of Lists of Concrete Biosecurity Project Ideas
• Linch with a summary of the Apollo report on biodefense

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Lalitha Sundaram, Matthijs Maas and S.J. Beard have co-authored a new working paper, exploring critical questions in the existential risk studies field
• There is a new bipartisan bill on catastrophic risk mitigation introduced by two U.S. senators
• Aryeh Englander with a summary of the new book 'On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War'
• A red team post - 'Questioning the Value of Extinction Risk Reduction'
• An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Why policymakers should beware claims of new "arms races"
• Tom Gardiner - Maritime capability and post-catastrophe resilience
• Lauro Langosco with a review of a report on how scientists involved in the Manhattan project failed to influence decision-making
• Isabel - Summary of Major Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Winter
• A post looking at how the James Webb Space Telescope can help against existential risks
• Jaime Sevilla - Results of a Spanish-speaking essay contest about Global Catastrophic Risk
• The Institute for Government with a report on how the UK government can learn from Covid to be better prepared for the next crisis
• Maxwell Tabarrok - Enlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World

Improving Institutions & Metascience

• Matt Clancy - Do Academic Citations Measure the Impact of New Ideas?
• Ben Reinhardt on the interplay between funding organisations, research management, and research motivation
• Saloni Dattani has started a newsletter highlighting new scientific discoveries
• Eleni A - An Epistemological Account of Intuitions in Science
• An article on how Welcome Leap is looking to use networks to produce scientific breakthroughs
• Saloni Dattani - Real peer review has never been tried

Progress Studies

• Progress Studies has a new forum for relevant posts and conversations
• Bastian Herre looking at democracy over the last 200 years for Our World In Data
• Rose Hadshar - How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study

Environment

• Forum post on 'The most important climate change uncertainty'
• Project Drawdown has added 11 new solutions for addressing climate change
• Ben Yeoh - 'Open climate data as a possible cause area'
• The Breakthrough Institute looking at how nuclear reactors might play a major role in a least-cost plan to transition the U.S. power grid entirely to clean energy sources by 2050
• At article looking at issues with the sustainability rating industry
• Good Judgment has launched the 'Climate Change and the Long-term Future' forecasting challenge

Longtermism

• Holden Karnofsky - The Track Record of Futurists Seems...Fine
• Future Matters newsletter on digital sentience, AGI ruin and forecasting track records
• Erich Grunewald - A Kantian View on Extinction
• Matthew Barnett - The Most Important Century: The Animation
• Martin Rees writing in the Spectator - How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead
• Charlie Dougherty thinking about visualising a trillion people
• Simeon C - Future Design: How To Include Future Generations in Today's Decision-Making?
• Jonathan Rystrom - Low-key Longtermism

AI Policy

• Matthijs Maas with an intro to 'Strategic Perspectives on Long-term AI Governance'
• The Centre for Long-Term Resilience, CSER & Centre for the Governance of AI - The UK Defence AI Strategy: ensuring safe and responsible use of AI
• Michael Huang - Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy
• GovAI is running student essay prizes to promising pieces of research with relevance to AI governance, deadline 2nd October

Technical AI

• Ajeya - Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover
• A post introducing the Fund for Alignment Research
• Sam Clarke - A Survey of the Potential Long-term Impacts of AI
• Dan Hendryks announcing the NeurIPS ML Safety workshop. The first at a top ML conference to emphasize and explicitly discuss x-risks
• Eli Lifland - Reasons I’ve been hesitant about high levels of near-ish AI risk
• Stanford University have a $71,000 innovation challenge to design better AI audits
• Nate Soares
  • On how various plans miss the hard bits of the alignment challenge
  • Brainstorm of things that could force an AI team to burn their lead
  • A note about differential technological development
  • AGI ruin scenarios are likely (and disjunctive)

Other AI

• Jacob Steinhardt with updates on an AI forecasting project after one year of predictions
• A post arguing that AI safety is not a longtermist cause area
• Lukas Trötzmüller - Why EAs are skeptical about AI Safety
• AlphaFold are releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, expanding the database from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures
• Matt Clifford podcast with Iason Gabriel on AI and moral philosophy
• Deepmind with the publication 'Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI'
• Peter Singer & Yip Fai Tse with the paper 'AI ethics: the case for including animals'
• Robert Long summarising recent debates about AI sentience
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Max Tegmark on how a ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection

Other Causes

• A post asking 'Does biodiversity loss warrant being it’s own cause area?'
• Drew Housman - Reducing nightmares as a cause area
• Madeleine Chang - Why you should care about space people
• Eli Dourado - Why go to space?
• Anton Rodenhauser on fecal microbiota transplants as a potential cause and an unlikely way to earn a lot of money
• A post with a collection of links looking at what has happened this year in the decentralised science community
• Luke Eure - Pestering embassies to reduce non-policy barriers to movement
• Igor Moric - How commercial satellite imagery could soon make nuclear secrecy very difficult - if not impossible
• Could New Technology Help Solve the Glasses Problem?
• Lauren Gilbert - Telecommunications in LMICs
• Akhil - Potential new cause area: Obesity
• Cognitive Risks of Adolescent Binge Drinking
• Soleine Scotney - Expanding access to infertility services in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
• Reducing Suffering and Long Term Risk in Common Law Nations via Strategic Case Law Funding
• Khartik T - Climate Adaptation in Low-Income Countries
• Time-restricted eating (IF) for individual and community health in LMICs
• Falk Lieder - Doing research on promoting prosocial behaviour might be 100 times as cost-effective at increasing well-being as providing psychotherapy

Productivity

• Anonymous forum post - Digital Networking for Dummies
• Amy Labenz writing about a group activity for receiving critical but beneficial feedback
• Jack Cunningham - What is your theory of victory?
• Joey - The value of content density
• Using the “executive summary” style: writing that respects your reader’s time
• Lynette Bye
  • How do you prioritize?
  • What Does Self-Care Look Like For You?

Philosophy

• Max Görlitz - All moral decisions in life are on a heavy-tailed distribution
• Tobias Leenaert - Confused about "making people happy" vs. "making happy people"
• Rohin Shah - Person-affecting intuitions can often be money pumped
• Applied Divinity Studies looking at utilitarians and thought experiments
• Eleni A - Why did I misunderstand utilitarianism so badly?
• Michael Plant exploring and evaluating an internal bargaining approach to moral uncertainty
• Hamish Huggard - When Utilitarianism is Actually Fun
• Nick Beckstead and Teruji Thomas - Paper summary: A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values
• Richard Ngo
  • Making decisions using multiple worldviews
  • Moral strategies at different capability levels

Other Links

• Dwarkesh Patel podcast with Sam Bankman-Fried
• Zvi Mowshowitz - When Giving People Money Doesn't Help
• Anna Leptikon with a post describing the reasons for, process, and result of creating an information design poster of the essential books on effective altruism
• Scott Alexander - Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
• Lorenzo - Probability distributions of Cost-Effectiveness can be misleading
• Jason Collins - We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model
• Rhodri Davies - Why are we so bad at measuring giving and why does it matter?
• An article looking at Elon Musk's charitable foundation
• Hear This Idea podcast with Doyne Farmer on complexity and predicting technological progress
• Martin Rees on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing black holes, dark matter and space exploration
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us
• Andre Ferretti - 300+ Flashcards to Tackle Pressing World Problems
• Jeff Kaufman - Passing Up Pay
• Ben Yeoh with Larry Temkin discussing concerns/thoughts over international aid, longtermism and philosophical notes
• Akash - A summary of every "Highlights from the Sequences" post
• Semicycyle with their 'EA Failure Story'
• Rahela with 'How I went from working in the fashion industry to animal advocacy'

Tweets

• Frances Lorenz asking people 'If you've interacted with the EA community, I would be very interested to hear: in what ways do you think you've changed as a result?'
• Peter McIntyre on what he wish he knew 7 years ago
• Ben Todd
  • How anyone can practice effective altruism
  • EA can't tell you how much to give

Good News

• 46 countries have eliminated at least one NTD between 2015 and 2019
• India reports 86% fall in malaria cases and 79% reduction in deaths due to malaria since 2015
• A study in the Lancet found that Covid vaccines prevented nearly 20 million deaths in the first year after they were introduced
• An article looking at how child mortality fell from 40% to 4% in 200 years
• Global bank account ownership increased from 51 percent to 76 percent in the last decade