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Your August 2020 EA Newsletter    
 
Articles

News and updates from the world of effective altruism

Following up on a classic study

In 2003, the economists Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer found that Kenyan students reached by a randomized mass deworming campaign were healthier, spent more time in school, and went on to make more money as adults. 

This evidence led to a lot of investment in deworming, including from the EA community (which gave millions to support the GiveWell-endorsed Deworm the World program). But the study drew criticism, and there is ongoing debate over the efficacy of deworming programs (even GiveWell is highly uncertain). 

Miguel and Kremer just took the major step of publishing (with three additional coauthors) a 20-year followup on the original subjects of their study — and the results held! People who got a few extra years of deworming treatment around the year 2000 are still earning more money, and are more likely to work in sectors that typically offer better-paying jobs than agriculture. While few areas today have worm prevalence as high as Kenya’s was in the 1990s, mass deworming still looks like a very promising health intervention.

(For more on the new study, see Kelsey Piper's writeup in Future Perfect.)
 

The most convincing reason to give

Earlier this year, the philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman held a contest for people to come up with the most persuasive philosophical argument for donating to charity. They tested especially promising entries on actual donors, and eventually found a winner.

The winning entry, submitted by Peter Singer (yes, that Peter Singer) and Matthew Lindauer:

Many people in poor countries suffer from a condition called trachoma. Trachoma is the major cause of preventable blindness in the world. Trachoma starts with bacteria that get in the eyes of children, especially children living in hot and dusty conditions where hygiene is poor. If not treated, a child with trachoma bacteria will begin to suffer from blurred vision and will gradually go blind, though this process may take many years. A very cheap treatment is available that cures the condition before blindness develops. As little as $25, donated to an effective agency, can prevent someone going blind later in life.

"How much would you pay to prevent your own child becoming blind? Most of us would pay $25,000, $250,000, or even more, if we could afford it. The suffering of children in poor countries must matter more than one-thousandth as much as the suffering of our own child. That’s why it is good to support one of the effective agencies that are preventing blindness from trachoma, and need more donations to reach more people.”

(For more on cataract surgery as a potential cause area, see GiveWell.)
 

What is time to a bird?

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being in a car accident, fighting in a war zone, or being attacked by a wild animal, you may already be familiar with putative differences in the subjective experience of time.”

Do animal species perceive time in different ways? There are many reasons to believe they do — for example, compared to humans, birds may view the world in slow motion. 

These differences in time perception may lead to differences in how animals experience suffering. This, in turn, may inform how we prioritize different opportunities to increase animal welfare.

On the EA Forum, Jason Schukraft of Rethink Priorities sums up his research in this speculative but promising area.

Calling all historians!

Michael Aird and other EA Forum authors have compiled a list of historical topics that might be valuable to study through an EA lens, or to summarize and synthesize for an EA audience. Topics include societal collapse, the growth of intellectual movements, and the expansion of our moral circles — alongside many others.

If you’ve studied any of these areas, consider visiting the Forum to help out! Have you written anything people should read? What research from other scholars would you recommend?

If you don’t want to make a Forum account but have ideas to share, you can reply to this email; someone from the Newsletter team will add your suggestions to the post.
 

In other news:

Timeless Classic

Ideas that have shaped the way we think about doing good

Any advice you read may have written for a vast audience of people, many of whom are very different from you. It could also just be wrong.

With that in mind, how can you make use of written advice while remaining appropriately cautious and skeptical?

80,000 Hours, which offers career advice to thousands of people, thinks about this question a lot. They don’t want to mislead people into following their advice too closely, or seeing them as more confident than they really are. So they published “Advice on how to read our advice” — a useful collection of tips that can be applied to advice from many other sources.

(Among their advice: Don’t act on their ideas “unquestioningly,” because they’ve been wrong before and will be wrong again.)

If you’ve ever considered taking advice from 80,000 Hours (or anyone else), we recommend the full article!

Announcements

Books, events, community projects, and more!

Save the dates: EA Student Summit and EAGxAsia-Pacific

CEA is coordinating two more virtual conferences coming up in the next few months: the EA Student Summit (24-25 October) and EAGxAsia-Pacific (21-22 November).

Applications will open in September, with separate application processes for each event. We'll share those links, and more details on each event, in next month's newsletter.
 

Calling all forecasters! (That means you)

The economists Eva Vivalt and Stefano DellaVigna just launched a platform where people can predict the results of social science experiments before they happen. These predictions could help scientists and policymakers get a better sense for the expected value of research and direct resources toward the most promising studies.

While professors, PhD students, and other researchers get access to more features, anyone can join the platform and make predictions — helping to improve science in the process.
 

Career advice for people who want to help animals

Animal Advocacy Careers recently launched a free one-to-one advice call service. The aim of this service is to offer career planning advice, which could include helping you generate a list of roles with good personal fit, narrow down your options, or find further resources. To read more or to apply, head to the Animal Advocacy Careers website.
 

EA YouTube project seeks volunteers

A new project to create a series of engaging YouTube videos on EA topics is looking for volunteers. Interested people with skills in writing, presenting, video editing, and/or animation should get in touch with Isabel Hasse (isabelhasse2@gmail.com). The project is currently still in the exploratory phase.
 

Jobs

Opportunities to work on some of the world's most pressing problems

80,000 Hours’ High-Impact Job Board features more than 500 positions.

If you’re interested in policy or global development, you may also want to check Tom Wein’s list of social purpose job boards.

If you want to find out about new positions as they arise (or post a position yourself), check out the EA Job Postings group on Facebook.
 
Applications due very soon The Future of Humanity Institute GiveWell The Good Food Institute Open Philanthropy
Other featured roles

Each month, 80,000 Hours asks us to feature a few roles from their job board. These may be unusually strong opportunities to make an impact.

OpenAI Scholar, OpenAI (Remote // San Francisco) (apply by 8 September)

Machine Learning Engineer, US Government, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (Washington, DC)

Research Scientist, Future Health Scenarios, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Seattle)

Strategist, Chemical and Biological Defense, Anser (Washington, DC)

Junior Data Scientist, IDinsight (Various Locations)

Ethics Policy Analyst, US Government, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (Washington, DC)

Research and Innovation Policy Intern, UK Government, Parliament (London // Remote) (apply by 10 September)

Executive Director, Animal Equality (Berlin)
 
Organizational Updates

You can see updates from a wide range of EA-aligned organizations on the EA Forum. (Organizations submit updates, which we edit for clarity.)
 
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!

Aaron, Heidi, Michal, 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 Rethink Charity.
Click here to access the full EA Newsletter archive
A community project of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1149828) – Centre for Effective Altruism, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford
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