Hello!
Highlights this month include:
There are also many open jobs and opportunities, from conferences to charity incubation and research training programs — see below.
— Lizka (for the EA Newsletter Team)
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Articles
AI governance lessons from the history of nuclear weapons & why regulating advanced chips could help
Building nuclear weapons requires enriched uranium and plutonium, which is hard to produce; this is a key “choke point” for limiting nuclear proliferation. Training powerful AI models requires a lot of advanced chips and computing resources — “compute.” While regulating algorithmic research and other resources could be especially difficult, advanced chips could be tracked, licensed, and controlled. (Compute governance is discussed at length in a recent 80,000 Hours Podcast episode.)
In an Asterisk article, Carl Robichaud argues that nuclear non-proliferation has lessons for AI governance — like the importance of understanding choke points. Another parallel with nuclear weapons is the worry that fear of competition (for instance between the US and China) could drive countries to rush AI development. In an interview, Professor Jeffrey Ding, who writes a weekly China AI newsletter, addresses some common misconceptions about AI in China.
More on AI governance (there are other updates on AI safety in the “in other news” section below):
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How cost-effective are farmed animal welfare reforms?
Almost half of the 50 US states allow ballot initiatives, in which citizens propose and vote on legislation. Some past initiatives have improved farmed animal welfare, but they can be expensive; California’s Proposition 12 cost around $24 million. Should we spend money on these, or focus on other forms of animal advocacy?
A new report by Laura Duffy at Rethink Priorities analyzes historical US ballot initiatives aimed at improving the lives of farmed animals, focusing on four initiatives for which relevant data were available. Some insights:
- The vast majority (~99%) of reduced suffering came from restricting cage use for chickens. Ballot initiatives that targeted egg-laying hens were over a hundred times more cost-effective than those that target only veal calves and sows.
- Ballot initiatives averted about a year of extreme suffering for an animal per $10, and were about 21% to 81% as cost-effective corporate cage-free campaigns, which are unusually successful.
- There are a lot of uncertainties, but many reasons to be optimistic about future ballot initiatives.
Evaluations like the report are key to effectively improving animal welfare. If you want to get involved in effective animal advocacy, you could apply for jobs at places like Compassion in World Farming, start an animal welfare charity via Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program, or donate to effective animal welfare projects.
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A method for estimating the benefits of improving education in developing countries when there’s very little evidence
There’s a lot of room for global progress in education; in some countries, for instance, less than 50% of adults can read and write. But the charity evaluator GiveWell doesn’t currently feature any programs aimed at this problem. This is partly because of a lack of evidence on health and income benefits of education, without which it’s hard to compare education interventions to things like vitamin supplementation.
A new post from Founders Pledge addresses this issue by describing a way to estimate how better education affects someone’s future income. The post introduces five separate lines of evidence and argues that taken together, they show that improving students' test scores leads to significant and sustained increases in their future earnings. This framework suggests that a program that furnishes software for teaching numeracy and literacy in Malawi is 11 times as cost-effective as GiveDirectly (a charity often used as a high baseline of cost-effectiveness), meaning that it is as promising as top GiveWell grants. (See also an older podcast episode on related topics.)
Founders Pledge is hiring for different roles.
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In other news
- Updates:
- Articles and research:
- AI safety:
For more stories, try these email newsletters and podcasts.
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Resources
Links we share every time — they're just that good!
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Jobs
Boards and resources:
- The 80,000 Hours Job Board features more than 600 positions. We can’t fit them all in the newsletter, so you can check them out there.
- The EA Opportunity Board collects internships, volunteer opportunities, conferences, and more — including part-time and entry-level job opportunities.
- You can see more positions in the EA Job Postings group on Facebook.
- If you’re interested in policy or global development, you may also want to check Tom Wein’s list of social purpose job boards.
Highlighted roles
Against Malaria Foundation
Centre for Effective Altruism
- Content Specialist (Remote / Oxford / Boston / other, £54.6k -£67.3k / $96.2-$124.k, apply by 26 July)
- If you took this role, you would probably work on this newsletter!z
Cooperative AI Foundation
GiveWell
New Incentives
OpenAI Superalignment team
Open Philanthropy
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Announcements
Applications are open for a number of conferences
- A number of Effective Altruism Global and EAGx conferences have upcoming deadlines:
- EAGxNYC will run 18-20 August. Tickets are $0-100. If you live in the New York area, consider applying by 31 July.
- EAGxBerlin, runs 8-10 September and is aimed at people in Western Europe. Tickets cost €0-80. Apply by 18 August.
- EAGxAustralia (22 - 24 September) is for people in Australia and New Zealand. Tickets are $75-150 (AUD). Apply by 8 September.
- Other conferences with open applications include EA Global: Boston (27-29 October, apply by 13 October), and EAGxPhilippines.
- The international Conference on Animal Rights in Europe (CARE) will run 17-20 August, in Warsaw and online. Participants from all areas of expertise are invited to network with activists, discover funding opportunities, and build a stronger movement for animals. You can get CARE 2023 tickets until 1 August.
Fellowships and incubation programs
- GovAI’s 2024 Winter Fellowship gives people the opportunity to spend three months (February-April) working on an AI governance project, learning about the field, and networking. Fellows get a £9,000 stipend and support for traveling to Oxford. If you’re early in your career and are interested in studying or shaping the long-term implications of AI, consider applying by 23 July.
- Charity Entrepreneurship is accepting applications for its charity incubation programs in 2024 (apply by 30 September) and for its new online Research Training Program (2 October-17 December). The research program focuses on tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most cost-effective and evidence-based charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks. Apply by 17 July (today) or explore the incubation programs.
Other opportunities
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Organizational Updates
You can see updates from a wide range of organizations on the EA Forum.
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Timeless classic on "fringe" ideas
Four years ago, Kelsey Piper wrote On “fringe” ideas:
Imagine someone walked into [an] 1840s EA group and said, ‘I think black people are exactly as valuable as white people and it should be illegal to discriminate against them at all,” or someone walked into [a] 1920s EA group and said, “I think gay rights are really important.” I want us to be a community that wouldn’t have kicked them out.
… I want us to be open to the idea that our society is very wrong about important things, I want us to be supportive of efforts to care about more, and I want us to be casting a really wide net for ways we could be going wrong. Finally, to make sure all of this work stays grounded enough that it can actually help people, I want all of the above to happen only in conjunction with growth in the resources we allocate to concrete priorities.
This classic post’s ideas are relevant in many contexts, from writing on unusual risks to AI welfare research.
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