Hello!
In this edition, our favorite links include:
There's been a lot of good news in the last month!
— The EA Newsletter Team
|
|
Articles
News and updates from the world of effective altruism
We finally have a malaria vaccine
For the first time, the World Health Organization has approved a vaccine to protect children from malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
This doesn’t mean the end of malaria — the vaccine only prevents about 30% of the most severe cases. But it’s a big step forward from not having a vaccine, and gives us another tool to use against one of the world’s worst problems (alongside existing options like bednets and seasonal chemoprevention).
Related: GiveWell shares their initial thoughts on the vaccine, and why it doesn’t change the charities they recommend (for now).
Good news on climate change — past and present
The Future of Life Award honors people who helped the world avoid disaster but didn’t get much recognition at the time.
This year’s winners all played a role in helping the world phase out chlorofluorocarbon gases, which reversed the thinning of Earth’s ozone layer. Had the ozone layer collapsed, we’d have seen catastrophic global warming and millions of additional deaths from skin cancer. Instead, we got the Montreal Protocol, a landmark treaty in the history of global environmental regulation.
|
|
|
|
Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we've almost completely ended our use of substances that deplete the ozone layer. (Source: Our World in Data)
|
|
We have a lot of work to do if we want to achieve this result for the other emissions that contribute to global warming. But recent data shows that we might be in a better position than many people realize. In “Good news on climate change”, two researchers from Founder’s Pledge show how rapid drops in renewable energy pricing (among other factors) have made the worst warming outcomes much less likely.
Can we really scale up cultivated meat?
Meat produced directly from animal cells (“cultivated meat”) has been heralded for years as an efficient and humane alternative to livestock farming. Advocates at organizations like the Good Food Institute (GFI) argue that cultivated meat could be as cheap as the real thing before long — perhaps as early as 2030.
This claim has always been controversial, because there are massive technical and economic challenges standing in the way of a scale-up. Open Philanthropy, a major EA grantmaker, commissioned their own analysis, which found “production economics that would likely preclude the affordability of [these products] as food” — not a promising result.
In The Counter, Joe Fassler sums up the debate and the technology, concludes that cultivated meat seems very unlikely to scale effectively, and argues that we should be investing elsewhere if we want to maximize our impact for animals or the climate.
(The debate isn't over — there's still some interesting work being done — but progress has been slower than most forecasters expected for years.)
A new introductory podcast series
80,000 Hours hosts the premier podcast in effective altruism, where they interview experts on some of the world’s most pressing problems.
They’ve recorded over 100 episodes, so it’s hard to know where to start. But they just released a new introductory series that should help!
Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems includes ten especially strong episodes, each covering a single problem. Topics include:
- The cheapest ways to improve education in the developing world
- Using technology to prevent another pandemic
- Ways to simultaneously reduce crime and police misconduct
It joins their first series, Effective Altruism: An Introduction, which covers the core ideas of EA rather than exploring specific problems.
The latest graduating class from Charity Entrepreneurship
Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubator program provides training, support, and funding to the founders of new charities in promising cause areas. They just launched five new charities as part of their 2021 class: see their announcement to learn more about each organization.
Want to join the next incubation program? Applications will open in December; join their mailing list to be notified when this happens.
In other news
For more stories, try these email newsletters and podcasts.
|
|
Resources
Links we share every time — they're just that good!
|
|
Jobs
Opportunities to work on some of the world's most pressing problems
The 80,000 Hours Job Board features more than 800 positions. We can’t fit them all in the newsletter, so check out the others on their website!
You can see more positions in the EA Job Postings group on Facebook.
Applications due soon
Part-time internships (unpaid), Charity Entrepreneurship startups (remote) (apply by 7 November)
- There is a common application for these internships, which lets you apply for up to 18 positions at once.
Research Assistant, AI Standards and Regulation, Alan Turing Institute (London) (apply by 9 November)
Various research positions, Global Priorities Institute (Oxford, UK) (deadlines range from 10-15 November)
Other positions
Chief of Staff (Oxford, UK) // Research Fellow (Oxford or remote), GovAI
Deputy Director, Center on Strategic Weapons / Lead, Alliance to End Biological Threats, Council on Strategic Risks (Washington, DC)
Developer, Secure DNA Project (Remote)
Executive Assistant // Finance Associate, Centre for Effective Altruism (Oxford, UK or remote)
Fellow, Advanced Critical Emerging Technologies, Lincoln Network (Washington, DC)
Fellow, Asia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, DC)
Media and Public Relations Manager, The Life You Can Save (Remote)
Microgrants for AI safety work (for students, faculty, and postdocs), Future of Life Institute (Remote)
Operations Manager // Software Engineer, Against Malaria Foundation (Remote)
Philanthropic Services Operations Lead, Founders Pledge (San Francisco)
Research Engineer, Safety, Open AI (San Francisco)
Research Intern, Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (San Francisco Bay Area)
Scholarships for early-career biosecurity work, Open Philanthropy (Remote)
Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack, Carbon Re (London or remote)
Various Positions, Anthropic (San Francisco)
Various Positions, GiveWell (SF Bay Area or remote)
Various Positions, The Good Food Institute (Various locations)
Various Positions, Lightcone Infrastructure (Berkeley)
Various Positions, Open Philanthropy (SF Bay Area or remote)
Various Positions, Ought (SF Bay Area or remote)
|
|
Announcements
Books, events, community projects, and more!
A list of EA funding opportunities
We already linked to this list earlier, but we want to emphasize that it is a better resource than anything that was available before.
If you want to work on a project within effective altruism, there are many ways to be funded — especially, but not exclusively, for students and academics. You may be surprised by how many different opportunities exist, and it’s probably worth taking a few minutes to look.
Just ask Aryeh Englander, who applied for a grant "on a whim" and wound up getting to pursue a PhD. As he puts it, “crazy ideas sometimes do work”.
Turn a $100 donation into $200 (or more)
Every.org is offering a donation match for up to $100 per donor, per nonprofit (e.g. if you support five charities, you can get a $500 match).
This is a “true” match in the sense that the matched funds wouldn’t otherwise go to your chosen charity. (Although the match is very likely to fill up regardless, so some charity will eventually get those funds after someone else claims them.)
Prepare for Facebook’s Giving Tuesday match
Facebook’s Giving Tuesday donation match is back on 30 November, and so is EA Giving Tuesday!
Over the past three years, the effective altruism community, coordinated by the EA Giving Tuesday team and Rethink Charity, has donated over $3.4 million to highly effective nonprofits, and 42% of that funding ($1.4 million) has been matched by Facebook.
For updates and instructions on how to maximize your chance of getting donations matched, sign up at eagivingtuesday.org.
Run a fundraising campaign at your workplace
At companies like Microsoft, Google, and McKinsey, employees have arranged fundraising campaigns to help their colleagues find outstanding charities, especially during the holiday “giving season”.
If you’d like to try this yourself, help is available! High Impact Professionals (HIP) is running a program to provide advice to people running fundraising campaigns.
If you’re sure you’ll run something and want help, register your interest. If you want to learn more first, schedule a conversation with HIP.
Introducing the EA Market Testing Team
The EA Market Testing Team — an informal group of professional marketers, academics, and nonprofit staff — just launched, with the mission of identifying the most effective, scalable strategies for promoting effective altruism and related ideas.
If you have an idea you’d like them to study, suggest it here.
If you have relevant experience and want to help out, reply to this email and we’ll put you in touch.
|
|
Organizational Updates
You can see updates from a wide range of organizations on the EA Forum.
|
|
Timeless Classic
Ideas that have shaped the way we think about doing good
Within EA, we look for the most effective problems to work on — not just the biggest problems, but those where additional work goes the furthest.
This is very difficult, but we can make progress by using frameworks to compare many different problems on a few important factors.
The most prominent of these uses three factors:
- Scale (or “importance”): How large is the problem? How many people or animals does it affect?
- Neglectedness: How much work is being done already?
- Tractability (or “solvability”): How much progress can we make by putting more resources into solving the problem?
Combine these three, and you get a sense for how much relative impact you can make by working in a given area. (You can also factor in your own skills and interests, or "personal fit".)
On 80,000 Hours’ problem framework page — this month’s classic — they describe these factors in detail and show how you can apply them yourself.
It’s important to note that using this framework isn’t an objective process: there are many ways to estimate each factor. It’s meant to provide useful guidance, rather than a conclusive answer.
There’s also plenty of debate about how important each factor really is, and whether other frameworks might be more complete or more efficient. See this critique as a starting point, and proceed (if interested) to this list of related articles on the EA Wiki.
|
|
We hope you found this edition useful!
If you’ve taken action because of the Newsletter and haven’t taken our impact survey, please do — it helps us improve future editions.
(Actions we'd love to hear about include donating to charity, applying to a job, or joining a community group.)
Finally, if you have feedback for us, positive or negative, let us know!
– The Effective Altruism Newsletter Team |
|
|
|
|
