Hello!
Some highlights this month:
— Lizka (for the EA Newsletter Team)
|
|
Articles ⚓
Noticing that a project isn’t effective and stopping that project is hard but incredibly important: Anima International’s experience
Effectiveness requires noticing mistakes and correcting them. Unfortunately, people often don’t do this (we tend to flinch away from uncomfortable ideas), and even when we do, we rarely discuss it publicly. So it’s wonderful to see Anima International sharing its experience with a pivot like this.
What happened? Anima International had been running a campaign against live fish sales in Poland. The practice is cruel — both the farming and transportation of the fish cause a lot of suffering — so progress seemed exciting. Unfortunately, it turned out that the campaign was causing unexpected harm; some people were switching from carp to salmon, and farming salmon requires farming more fish to feed the salmon (which are carnivorous). Anima International’s models and research showed that the campaign was worse than they’d hoped, and even tentatively implied that the program was harmful overall. They decided to stop the campaign.
Ben Kuhn calls this kind of thinking “staring into the abyss” and identifies it as a core life skill, key to doing great work.
|
|
The ozone layer is healing — a positive sign for future work ⚓
Good news: a panel commissioned by the United Nations reports that “the Earth’s ozone layer is on track to recover within four decades.”
This achievement is the result of a lot of exceptional work. In the 1970s, a few scientists realized that a class of chemicals used in popular products like hair spray were thinning the ozone layer. Projections were grim. A collapse of the ozone layer would have catastrophic effects on agriculture and the environment and would lead to millions of deaths from skin cancer. But “the world responded,” notes a Vox article that explains the history of this fight. Research and activism led to the Montreal Protocol — “the most effective international environmental treaty ever implemented.” Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, almost 99% of ozone-depleting chemicals have now been phased out.
While ozone depletion isn’t a key driver of climate change and isn’t generally considered to be one of the biggest global catastrophic risks, the potential harms from ozone depletion are significant, and healing the ozone layer is important. Moreover, this success shows us that the world can come together to work on big problems — we should learn from it.
|
|
Slowing down AI progress to make time for AI safety
Some people are worried that AI capabilities are progressing faster than efforts to make AI systems safe. So a natural response might be to slow down AI progress via things like:
- Advocacy: convince researchers and labs to pause capabilities work or to invest more heavily in safety precautions
- Regulation: require powerful systems to pass safety checks
But this approach is relatively unpopular and often receives preemptive pushback — in fact, we shared a post arguing against efforts to slow down AI progress in September.
A recent post suggests that slowing down AI progress is unreasonably discarded by people interested in AI safety in part because of a “can’t-do” attitude. The post makes the case that this approach is viable, not radical, and can be cooperative, and shares other thoughts and models.
In other news ⚓
For more stories, try these email newsletters and podcasts.
|
|
Resources
Links we share every time — they're just that good!
|
|
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.
Positions
Forecasting Research Institute
GiveWell
- Senior Researcher (Remote / Oakland, CA, $181,400 - $199,800)
- Senior Research Associate (Remote / Oakland, CA, $127,000 - $139,900)
- Content Editor (Remote / Oakland, CA, $83,500 - $91,900)
Global Priorities Institute is hiring an Operations Coordinator (Maternity Cover) (Oxford, £29,614 - £35,326, apply by 24 January)
IDinsight
Open Philanthropy is hiring for assorted jobs in Salesforce administration, operations, and recruiting (Remote; working hours must overlap with US hours for most roles. Salary range $84,303 - $127,021 across all jobs)
Our World in Data is hiring for a Data Scientist (Remote, £280–350/day, apply by 12 February)
Rethink Priorities is hiring Board Members (Remote, voluntary roles entail 3-10 hours/month while paid roles require 5-10 hours/week at a rate of $40.53/hour, apply by 20 January)
Wild Animal Initiative is hiring a Development Director (Remote, US preferred, open to UK applicants, $82,020 - $100,247, apply by 23 January)
|
|
Announcements ⚓
Applications are open for two EA Global conferences in 2023
- EA Global: Bay Area 2023 (24–26 February)
- EA Global: London 2023 (19–21 May)
Apply here by 8 February.
EA Global conferences bring together a network of (usually around 1500) people who are using the principles of effective altruism to take significant action to have a positive impact on the world. Tickets cost £200 GBP by default, although discounts and free tickets are available for those who need them.
You can see more information about EA Global and other EA conferences on the EA Global website.
An opportunity for pre-university students: start an impactful project
The Non-trivial Fellowship for pre-university students (aged 14–20) in the EU and UK will run from 27 February to 14 April. It's a program of online lessons, expert guidance, and a €500 scholarship to start an impactful research, policy, or entrepreneurial project.
You can apply here – or tell a talented teenager you know! The deadline is 29 January.
Summer course on economic theory & global prioritization
Applications are open for a two-week, Oxford-based course on “Topics in Economic Theory and Global Prioritization.” The course is designed primarily for graduate students or undergraduates with a strong background in economics, who are considering careers in global priorities research. The course will run from 12–25 August (with an optional unstructured week to 2 September).
Apply here by 18 February.
Other opportunities
- Participate in the Metaculus Beginner Forecasting Tournament
- Run a charity election at your high school — or refer your alma mater
|
|
Organizational Updates
You can see updates from a wide range of organizations on the EA Forum.
|
|
Timeless Classic
The importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework is a way to identify problem areas that might be especially useful to work on. If a problem is big, relatively easy to make progress on, and neglected, extra resources are probably especially helpful. Here’s an explanation of the framework (and here's a criticism of how it gets applied).
Problems can vary wildly in scope and neglectedness. (Air pollution, for instance, is likely hundreds of thousands of times more harmful overall than shark attacks.) But according to a short post, the difficulty of making progress on two different problems (their tractability) doesn’t vary as much. If you think that one problem is several orders of magnitude less tractable than another, you should have a strong reason for this (like thinking that the problem is almost not solvable at all). So overall, the main factors that determine how much attention a problem should receive are its size and how overlooked it is.
|
|
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.
Finally, if you have feedback for us, positive or negative, let us know!
– The Effective Altruism Newsletter Team |
|
|
|
|
