EA Newsletter: September 02, 2016

EA Newsletter header Hi all,

We hope you had a nice summer so far! There were certainly quite a few out-of-office replies over the last couple of weeks. Well, it’s back to business now!

Happy reading! The Team

PS: New to EA? Have a look at this introduction.

PPS: Want to help us? Add this email address to your list of contacts, which will tell email providers that we’re not spammers. (How dare they..!)

Articles and Community Posts

Be sure to check out this new course on EA at the University of St Andrews – the course outline is a treasure trove of material. LSE also recently introduced a course on effective altruism for this coming academic year.

In this podcast Sam Harris talks with Will MacAskill about EA, moral illusions, existential risks and more. The other podcast of this kind that Will did, a two-hour conversation with Tim Ferriss, proved very popular.

In this exciting announcement, Charity Science announces a new initiative: Charity Science Health. Read all about how this charity was designed from the ground-up to be evidence-based, cost-effective and flexible.

Ever wondered what it would be like to work at an EA-aligned organisation? Milan Griffes takes to the 80,000 Hours blog to discuss his experiences of working at GiveWell.

What makes animal welfare an important focus area for EA? This article, written by those in the effective animal advocacy field, explains why helping animals could be the best use of your time and money.

Have a look at this updated chapter of the 80,000 Hours career guide on how exactly to build career capital early on in your career.

September 1

The New “Spotlight” Section

In this section we’ll be shining a spotlight on different topics, concepts and considerations that are central to EA. Submit ideas for this section through our feedback form.

After introducing this section in the last edition, this time we’ll be focusing on EA Global 2016. A total of 1,052 people attended the conference a month ago in Berkeley, making it the largest-ever gathering of effective altruists in history.

25 video recordings of talks and panels are now online – have a look at the list!

For example, there’s a panel on sharing and aggregating knowledge, a talk on whether effective altruists should do policy and of course the opening keynote that sketches a grand overview of the history and possible future of effective altruism. More videos will be added there in the coming weeks.

Interested in the next EA conference? Here’s a list of upcoming EAGx events around the world. The next one will be EAGx Berlin on October 8, for which you can sign up now.

September 2

Updates from EA Organizations

Animal Charity Evaluators

ACE released several blog posts, including a “Charities We’d Like to See” post that several people in their audience had requested. They also published an Online Ads Intervention Report, concluding that, while online ads likely spare large numbers of animals from suffering on farms, in most cases marginal resources are probably better spent on activities like corporate outreach and cndercover investigations.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

CSER has made its first hire in catastrophic environmental risk, Tatsuya Amano. CSER’s team is now up to 8 interdisciplinary researchers working on classification frameworks on global catastrophic risk, horizon-scanning, population ethics, biosecurity, disaster law and technology and more.

GiveWell

GiveWell published write-ups on grants Good Ventures made to New Incentives, Results for Development, and IDinsight as part of GiveWell's work to support the creation of future top charities. GiveWell also discussed whether other organizations would have funded the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)'s bed net distributions if AMF hadn't.

Local Effective Altruism Network

The Local Effective Altruism Network launched a new website and is making it easier than ever to start a local group in your area or get support for an existing one.

Open Philanthropy Project

The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a $5,555,550 grant to support the launch of the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI as part of its work on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. The Open Philanthropy Project also described its rationalefor a grant to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH); the grant will allow FNIH to form a working group to recommend a consensus path for field testing gene drives to fight malaria.

Sentience Politics

The deadline for the Sentience Politics Essay Prize has been extended. You can submit your ideas for effective strategies to reduce the suffering of all sentient beings until Sept. 30.

September 3

Jobs

You can stay up to date with job offers through these groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Timeless Classics

The perspectives on effective altruism we don't always hear – Jess Whittlestone on how to take on board feedback about the EA movement.

Go forth and do the most good!

Let us know how you liked this edition and how we can improve further. As usual, thank you very much for your feedback!

See you again on Oct. 6!

Georgie, Michał, Pascal and Sören – The Effective Altruism Newsletter Team

The Effective Altruism Newsletter is a joint project between the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Effective Altruism Hub and .impact.