It’s been awhile. Thanks for having a look at this special edition of the Briefing before Effective Altruism Global 2018 in San Francisco.
One-sentence RC breakdown – In summary, RC Forward has passed through ~$2M CAD (~1.5M USD) for effective charities thus far, Rethink Priorities launched publicly, the EA survey team broke the survey submissions record, LEAN is hiring, and SHIC will soon report on the workshop results collected from ~850 students.
Your full RC Briefing
Read time: 3 minutes
Project Updates
Rethink Charity Overview
RC threw the brakes on expansionary efforts across all of the projects, electing instead to await the results of performance indicators as Q2 of 2018 draws to a close. Among the projects considered for expansion in the second half of 2018 and early 2019, SHIC is the most viable candidate based on early indicators. Current plans include training an educator in Toronto to deliver the workshop in the fall. (See workshop overview)
Results and analysis on the EA survey will begin coming out in the next couple of months on the ~3,500 submissions mustered by the community, which is roughly 1,000 more submissions than the previous record set in 2015.
Situational Awareness – Rethink Charity projects are attracting interest from major institutional funders. Watch this space for more developments.
RC Forward
– A $1.35M CAD donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) was recently processed, bringing the total amount passed through to effective charities at roughly $2M CAD.
Flashback: Readers might recall our forecast for money moved in 2018 was only $1M USD (~1.3M CAD).
Rethink Priorities (RP)
– RP launched their official website in May.
– The project published analysis on both the benefits of vaccines and the cost-effectiveness of vaccines.
– Reanalysis of the Animal Equality video and virtual reality study will be published soon.
Go deeper: More on the RP research agenda here, and you can find a breakdown of articles published by cause area here.
The Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN)
– We’re currently hiring for the LEAN Manager position! Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, though priority will be given to those who submitted prior to May 28.
– A LEAN article on why local groups should consider direct work scored decent karma on the EA Forum.
Would you agree? From the latest LEAN article, “Available group actions may fall short of embodying the very highest impact intervention that humans could take, but might instead still constitute the highest impact intervention that the group in question could deliver.”
Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC)
– An update on our current workshop experiment is slated for release in July after an initial analysis of our data. By that time, SHIC will have worked with approximately 850 students across 16 schools around Greater Vancouver.
– SHIC workshops will be continuing over summer, working with the University of British Columbia to deliver the SHIC program to elite high school students attending an academic summer school.
What’s Next
RC is currently fundraising for 2019! If you’d like to continue being a key part of our growth in EA community building, simply reply to this, or email Tee at [email protected] to chat about it! Most of the full-time RC staff will also be at EA Global, so please reach out if you’d like to connect!
Hope this was a good read. Thanks for taking the time.