Hello!
Our favorite links this month include:
You can apply to EA Global: Boston until 13 October; we’re featuring other opportunities and jobs below.
We also discuss the cancellation of a controversial virus-hunting program, the risks involved in irreversibly sharing powerful AI models, why it took so long to get a malaria vaccine, and other news.
— Lizka, for the EA Newsletter Team
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Articles
TED: What if the global 1% gave 10%?
Thoughtful philanthropy can achieve a lot of good. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Norman Borlaug’s research on improving crop yields, which is estimated to have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The Pugwash Conferences helped limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The March of Dimes Foundation funded the development of the polio vaccine.
A recent TED talk by Natalie Cargill, the founder and co-CEO of Longview Philanthropy, discusses what we could achieve with 10% of the income (or 2.5% of the net worth) of the world’s richest 1% — $3.5 trillion in one year. We could lift millions out of poverty, quadruple philanthropic spending on reducing nuclear risk, suppress or eradicate neglected diseases like HIV and malaria, and more. See the full accompanying report for details and explore some options for effective giving if you’re interested in donating.
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Biological risks and why we should be cautious about irreversibly sharing powerful AI models
After two years, USAID has shut down DEEP VZN, a controversial virus-hunting program aimed at stopping the next pandemic before it happened. The plan was to collect potentially dangerous virus samples in the wild, analyze the samples in labs to identify the viruses capable of causing a pandemic, and publish a ranked list of dangerous viruses and their genomes. Some, like MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt, expressed concerns that sharing a list like that could significantly lower the barrier for terrorists or others who might want to start a pandemic by providing them with instructions on which viruses to use; “gene synthesis,” which can print a virus’s DNA given its genome, would help them do the rest. The program wound down this summer. (To lower the chances of human-made pandemics, governments could require that gene synthesis companies screen orders and customers.)
Related concerns have been raised about openly sharing powerful AI models. “Open-sourcing” is often presented in a positive light, but giving total access to an AI model is a risky and irreversible choice; there’s no way to take an open-sourced model down or set up protections if we later discover that the model is too dangerous. AI models are becoming more powerful and some worrying possibilities have already been demonstrated, like when a group of researchers discovered that a model they were using to screen new drugs for toxicity could be repurposed to suggest 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in six hours. Instead of being shared without safeguards, powerful AI models could be evaluated for extreme risks and then released via a structured access model that lets researchers study copies without sharing the models irreversibly.
If you’d like to work on these issues, you can explore opportunities in AI safety and biosecurity.
Funding struggles delayed malaria vaccine development; “advanced market commitments” could help next time
It’s worth celebrating the progress of two promising malaria vaccines and the rollout of the RTS,S vaccine, which was endorsed by the WHO in 2021. But, given that malaria kills around half a million children every year (or more than 1000 children every day) and the fact that the RTS,S vaccine alone spent 23 years in trials and pilot studies before it was licensed, it’s also worth asking why it took so long to get a malaria vaccine — and what we can do to speed things up next time.
A recent article on why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner explains that while malaria poses some unique problems, one obstacle was broader: lack of funding. Malaria affects some of the poorest countries (which can't afford expensive vaccines), and developing a vaccine costs a lot of money and time (especially given the high chance of failure). The expected payoff wasn't large enough to incentivize individual firms to invest the resources needed.
The authors make the case for “advance market commitments” (AMCs), where governments or philanthropists promise to subsidize a new vaccine in large quantities if it’s developed and countries actually want to use it. Innovation is usually incentivized via a patent system, which rewards the creators by giving them a temporary monopoly — letting them sell their product at a higher price than they would in a market where anyone can copy their work and compete with them. When the would-be customers won’t be able to cover the cost of innovation, it’s common to fund research directly, but this has issues. You have to pay even if there’s no output, the product might not end up reaching the people who need it, and government officials or philanthropists have to correctly predict which research directions are most promising. AMCs might work better; the impact of a pilot AMC for pneumococcal vaccine development is studied in this analysis.
Mechanisms like AMCs might be able to prevent unnecessary delays in the future. In the meantime, protecting people from malaria by distributing preventative medicine and insecticide-treated bed nets is still vital.
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In other news
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 almost 700 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.
- Probably Good has a list of impact-focused job boards you can explore.
Some highlights
1Day Sooner
80,000 Hours
- Advisor (London, UK, £55K-£85K, apply by 8 October)
- Headhunting Lead (London, UK, £55K-£8K, apply by 8 October)
- Systems Analyst (London, UK (preferred) / remote, £50K-£70K, apply by 8 October)
Anthropic
Effective Ventures (UK/US)
Epoch
Impact Academy
Giving Green
Open Philanthropy
Rethink Priorities
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Announcements
Applications are open for EA Global: Boston and EAGx Philippines
- EA Global: Boston (27-29 October) is for people who have a solid understanding of effective altruism, and who are taking significant actions on the basis of key ideas in the movement. Apply by 13 October.
- EAGxPhilippines (20 - 22 October) is for people in South East and East Asia. Tickets are $0 - 100. Apply by 30 September.
EAGxVirtual (17-19 November) will be a virtual networking event for anyone interested in solving the world’s most pressing problems. Applications will open soon — sign up here to get notified.
Other announcements
- Applications are still open for Charity Entrepreneurship’s charity incubation program, which will run from February - March 2024. Apply by 30 September.
- Fellowships for mitigating catastrophic risks
- Opportunities for pre-university students
- Pre-university students aged 14-20 are invited to apply to Non-trivial’s online fellowship, happening from 30 October - 22 December 2023. Fellows get expert guidance over 8 weeks to start an impactful research or entrepreneurial project, and there’s $30,000 in funding available for particularly promising projects. Apply by 8 October.
- UK students in years 11-13 studying history can apply for the Leaf “History to shape history” online fellowship, happening from 28 October - 3 December 2023. Apply by 15 October.
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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 how to read advice
80,000 Hours, which offers career advice to people who are interested in working on one of the global problems they highlight, has released a new career guide. They’ve updated their advice on many topics, so a 2019 article on how to read their advice is newly relevant. Highlights include:
- Their views shouldn't blindly inform readers' actions; they’ve been wrong before and will be wrong again
- 80,000 Hours focuses on how readers can increase the impact of their work, but it's important to treat doing good as just one goal among many
- And more.
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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 |
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