EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)
Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, featuring curated posts and posts that have received 125 or more karma. The podcast makes written EA Forum content available in audio form. Listeners who want more episodes are directed to subscribe to the companion podcast EA Forum (All audio).
Episodes
“CCF: As more money arrives, the best place to give keeps moving” by Rethink Priorities
This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas. TL;DR: A lot of new money is about to enter effective giving. When that happens, the question "Where does a dollar do the most good?" gets harder to answer, not easier. It depends on how much money each area already has, and that amount ke
“It’s not an ache. It’s a demon from hell.” by Alfredo Parra 🔸
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters. On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT vape pen. J. is chronic—he gets attacks every day—so he
“40 hot takes” by LewisBollard
Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes. On factory farming 1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evenin
“Eccentrically Effective” by William_MacAskill
This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them. Below is the op-ed I wro
“76x cash transfers: too good to be true or a (missed) opportunity? An invitation for dialogue on a recent Rethink Priorities Report” by Niek Versteegde, founder GOAL 3, Channelijne (Chan) Hulshof🔹
TL;DR GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached. A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of 7 to 17 dollars in paediatric care and 12 to 3
“Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced te
“Too many people in EA underprice the cost of a bad reputation” by GraceAdams🔸
Summary: Good work helps build a good reputation, but it's not the only factor. Reputation also requires making your work legible, building relationships with stakeholders, and communicating with them consistently over time. I think many people in EA systematically underestimate what a bad reputation costs, largely because those costs are invisible. You can see the people who stick around. You ca
“EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy” by Bruce Friedrich 🔸
I want to start by noting that I am enthusiastic about everything that the EA animal welfare movement has accomplished. I am enthusiastically supportive of all of the campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals. I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm incredibly proud of that work. That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal mo
“Do AI safety talent programmes work? Nobody has run the study that would tell us.” by Laura Thomas-Walters
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report. Background At least 70 million dollars has gone into AI safety talent programmes so far, but we still can’t really say much
“Beware Silver Bullets: Are we making “welfare tech” into the next animal advocacy bubble?” by Rockwell, Tom Billington
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata. Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing our
“Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on” by George Rosenfeld
I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to me. It's more personal than what I’d usually share publicly, but I thought I’d post it here in case it resonates with anyone else. I’m very grateful to the many readers of this forum who dedicate so
“Population ethics is a big deal, which is why I made this population ethics quiz” by MichaelDickens
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think
“Is mild lifelong acne really worse than stunted growth?” by Kasey Markel
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones. Summary I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
“Moral Imagination & Effective Altruism” by Toby_Ord
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'. As examples, he gives: Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens. St Gregory of Nyssa's
“New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA” by Dan Stein
Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my interpretation of the work. More EA Near/Medi
“What if the third wave is a puddle?” by Morgan Fairless
The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of the effective giving community as reported by Giving What We Can, make it difficult for even hardcore sceptics (and I probably count myself among this curmudgeonly crowd) to stick to the view that we a
“What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-commitment before seeing the RCT results” by I.J.J., AlexisAt
TL;DR NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda. We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 c
“General capability - and capabilities generally - have no good y-axis” by Gregory Lewis🔸
BLUF: To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much h
“Never born, then maybe died twice” by NickLaing
“Your balls are baked aren’t they, mate”. He would not have been bornThanks Lyndon, that describes the situation. Like almost 1 in 10 modern men, my sperm weren’t up to the task - at least not the old fashioned way. So IVF it was - the miracle that now feels almost commonplace. We landed on the moon and Woodstock changed music forever. But in 1969 a quieter event transformed the world. The first
“Announcing: Cluelessness Critiques Competition” by Toby Tremlett🔹, Will Aldred
TL;DR We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni's sequence, ‘The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance’—submit your entries by August 14th. There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: 7 thousand dollars in total. Additionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to 50 thousand dollars for a truly exceptional
“Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion” by Habiba Banu
Summary Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first 198 thousand dollars. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step. The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well and GiveWell made us a grant last year. Now
“Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value” by Stefan_Schubert
This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism movement may be difficult to reverse. One example is making the movement’s brand explicitly political. Another is growing large. Under high uncertainty, there is often reason to avoid or delay such hard-to-reverse
“Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level” by abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.Cross-posted from Good Structures.Executive Summary Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal, and Y>X of this animal, so Y might be a better target to focus on.” For example, you could imagine someone making a claim like “there are
“Let’s taboo the V-word” by lincolnq
“How long have you been v*g*n?” This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It's a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers. But this assumption is hurting th
“What would an animal-aligned AI be aligned to?” by Aidan Kankyoku, Anima International
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack. The goals of this post are to: Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare, and to altruistic values generally; and Offer a partial solu
“Giving What We Can’s first YouTube Video is out now!” by JustinPortela
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job. My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI. My first video is out now. It's about an obscure and unknown World Health Organization Meeting in 1955 that helped shape the conditions that have left up
“I’m never satisfied” by Ajeya
Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. But we get the job done I was twenty one when I joined Open Phil,[1] as a zealous young EA who had idolized the organization since I was in high school (back when it was called GiveWell Labs). I worked there for over nine years, lea
“Maybe do the thing you wish CEA would do” by alejoacelas 🔸
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences. Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts: Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they d
“Mabye do the thing you wish CEA would do” by AlejoAcelas🔸
I used AI to fix transcription errors, rerrarange the ideas, and suggest tweaks to the title and some sentences. Three of the most exciting projects to come out of EA in recent years are, in a vague sense, CEA spinouts: Kairos is directly a spinout of CEA and now handles most support for university AI safety groups. Basically everyone I've found who knows them is really excited about what they d
“Cultivating hope: calibrating the expectations for cultivated meat to end factory farming” by PAMC 🔸
Poll: Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most? The scale runs from Alternative proteins to Social moral changes. Bullet point summary: Cultivated meat could have a price between $15/kg and $30/kg according to reputable technoeconomic analysis, which we review and explain. We present an interactive demand-side economic model where we translate that
“Possible mistake EAs are making and shout out to Pause AI UK” by Michelle_Hutchinson
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what's most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That's great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contribut
“Was Partisanship Good for the Environmental Movement?” by Jeffrey Heninger
This is a link post. This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?Summary. Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions. Public Opinion One hypothesis is that p
“Predictable Updating About Funding In EA” by Sam Anschell
Written in a personal capacity. I recently came back to SF after finishing my first year of grad school. I already had a sense that new money was coming into EA causes. But being back in the Bay Area has made me feel like this funding increase could be truly flabbergasting. Shamelessly plagiarizing Joe Carlsmith's great blog post, I think that our actions should reflect a strong likelihood of an
“Coming Around To Political Donations” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸
Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific r
“animal welfare has an evidence problem” by matthes
Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause. I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thing to bring up. Many people in the animal welfare space are working really hard, and this post might leave some feeling defeated. But I think this is one of the most important things to talk about in
“Global Health Charity Founders on GiveWell, Evidence Action, and M+E” by anonfounder
The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact's Slack workspace about GiveWell's decision to stop funding Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water program. The conversation surfaced themes that we felt were worth sharing more broadly. Everyone involved consented to their thoughts being shared in
“After making sure we don’t all die, this should be the first priority” by Yaqi Grover
A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction. More money, more people willing to st
“My disagreements with CEA’s approach to stewarding EA” by hbesceli
[Cross posted from my substack] In their EA Forum post last year, CEA described their ‘principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community’. I'm a big fan of principles-first stewardship in principle. I think EA needs a steward, and I think that stewardship should be organised around EA's core principles. But I think CEA's particular growth-centric approach to principles-first stewardsh
[Linkpost] “How I think about catastrophic biological risk (part I)” by ASB
This is a link post. Our mission is to protect humanity against biological catastrophes, including those that could lead to human extinction or cause similarly bad outcomes. This series of posts outlines how I think about these most extreme types of risks. My goal here is to share my worldview in a straightforward and compressed form rather than trying to persuade a skeptical audience, although I
“Donating 80% While It Still Counts” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸
Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: We've been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it f
“Why now might be the best time ever to start an animal charity” by Aidan Alexander, Aaron Boddy🔸, Ambitious Impact
TL;DR: AIM is running its first incubation round focused exclusively on animal welfare, in partnership with Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project). It'll run in early 2027, and we’re on the hunt for all-star future founders — especially the ones who care about animal welfare but have been quietly assuming they're a bad fit for the cause. Want to learn more? Drop into our office hours
“Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund” by Rethink Priorities
TL;DR Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. Key highlights from this post: We believe that strategic cross-cause prioritization is an important step in doi
“Why are longtermists so much less focused on human extinction than they used to be?” by Michelle_Hutchinson
Tldr; EAs seem more focused on non-extinction risks from AI than they used to be I haven’t seen much discussion of why, making reference to the very longrun Changes in the world this might be responding to are: alignment seeming more promising than it used to, the speed of AI progress, and concerns around US governance. There are also plausible sociological reasons for the shift, so I fee
“The AIs seem like EAs — a quick look at two prompts” by trammell
Overview When asked about how they would give away money, or about how to have a moral career, the leading LLMs typically give answers in an EA spirit, and informed by thinking from people and organizations in the EA community. In many cases the term “effective altruism”, and/or EA jargon, are used explicitly. The flavor of EA they tend to endorse is relatively middle of the road: supporting effe
“My Dad Worked in a Slaughterhouse. I Made a Documentary About It.” by Jack Hancock-Fairs
I’m an EA who has been trying to find ways to make animal suffering more salient. I’ve been working on a feature-length documentary called ‘The Dying Trade’ for the last 5 years and I’ve just released it on YouTube. I’m sharing it here for two reasons: firstly, because I hope it can become a useful resource that advocates share with others as an introduction to animal ethics; and secondly, becau
[Linkpost] “10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk” by cwbakerlee
This is a link post.Engineered pathogens pose a grave threat to society, plausibly constituting an existential risk[1] (‘x-risk’) to humanity.[2]Yet remarkably few people are working full-time on this problem. By my count, there are ~160 people on the planet whose full-time job is reducing bio x-risk.[3] This entire group could fit on a single short-haul flight. As one point of comparison, somethi
“Save Our Pigs!” by LewisBollard
Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: The pork lobby is one farm bill away from gutting our strongest farm animal welfare laws Last Thursday, the US House of Representatives passed a farm bill containing the “Save Our
“Reflections on Anthropic and EA” by abrahamrowe
LLM disclosure: I wrote this post myself, then asked an LLM to copy-edit it before posting. I manually made any edits I liked and copy-pasted no text from the LLM (my current practice for using LLMs in writing that I care about). This is crossposted from my blog. These are personal reflections on feelings that I’ve been sitting with recently. I’m posting them, because the last time I felt this wa
[Linkpost] “The tables have turned on AI sceptics” by Stefan_Schubert
This is a link post. Could we have human-level AI within the next few decades? For a long time, many people have dismissed this idea as armchair speculation. In their view, we shouldn’t ground our beliefs about transformative technologies in vague hunches and fragile multi-step arguments. We need more solid evidence, like clear empirical trends. We need to be epistemically conservative. I have som
“How to actually give money away” by NickAllardice
This was originally posted here. It's written for an audience that's not deep in the weeds of EA giving theory/culture, but a few people suggested I post here as there's much that's additive to or divergent from some common EA practices. Feedback / disagreements welcome! Also my first time posting here. Hi! -- Most people who intend to give large amounts of money away never actually do. The money
“If You Do One Thing for Animals This Year, Do This” by Becca Rogers
There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how farmed animals are raised and tre
[Linkpost] “Starfish” by Aaron Gertler 🔸
This is a link post. By Alexander Wales Thousands of starfish had washed up on the beach, and a little girl was diligently throwing them back into the water, one at a time. A man came up to the girl and said, "You'll never save all of them. What you're doing is pointless. It doesn't matter." The girl threw another starfish into the water. "It mattered to that one." The man snorted and walked away.
[Linkpost] “Open strategic questions for digital minds” by Lucius Caviola
This is a link post. These are strategic questions about digital minds and AI welfare that I think are especially important, and where I’d like to see more progress. A common theme is that they matter for what we should do concretely under uncertainty about AI moral status. This is a current snapshot of my views and I expect them to change. What do you think? Any questions you’d add? Approach What
“Time Sensitive Urgent Animal Welfare Action” by Bentham’s Bulldog
The EATS act—now called the save our bacon act—would make it illegal for states to pass animal welfare laws that apply to products produced out of state. This would gut most state level animal protection. It would be the worst law for animal welfare ever passed, and would consign hundreds of millions of animals to a life in a cage. Terrifyingly, it has been added to the recent farm bill (though f
“Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸
Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off. My Experience with Forecasting For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, d
“My lover, effective altruism” by Natalie_Cargill
Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series! On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me. At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the
“A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer
The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas is wild animal welfare (WAW), where uncertainty about tractability makes identifying cost-effective interventions particularly challenging. While much of the current WAW work rightly focuses on academ
“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews
This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments. Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild.The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism) In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent
[Linkpost] “The Anthropic IPO Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready for It.” by AISR
More money is coming than AI safety has ever seen. The capacity to deploy it doesn't exist yet.Image Source: Fortune.com Note: Catherio in the comments pointed out that although Anthropic is pursuing IPO readiness, they are not certain to IPO. As OscarD pointed out, based on this Manifold Market, there is roughly a 75% chance of an IPO within the next year. With that said, the argument below hol
“AI Safety’s Biggest Talent Gap Isn’t Researchers. It’s Generalists.” by Topaz, Agustín Covarrubias 🔸, Alexandra Bates, Parv Mahajan, Kairos
This post was cross posted to LessWrong TL;DR: One of the largest talent gaps in AI safety is competent generalists: program managers, fieldbuilders, operators, org leaders, chiefs of staff, founders. Ambitious, competent junior people could develop the skills to fill these roles, but there are no good pathways for them to gain skills, experience, and credentials. Instead, they're incentivized to
“The outsized benefits of removing bottlenecks: some personal experiences” by Rory Fenton
I once ran the monitoring and evaluation department of a large nonprofit in rural Tanzania. We had 25 full-time data collectors who ran surveys with farmers on their crop yields and planting practices. My job was to oversee the team, analyze their data and produce reports with actionable recommendations. The field team was incredibly productive and we were collecting tons of data. We were also pr
“We’re growing: CEA is increasing its font size” by OllieRodriguez
“We” in this post refers to CEA leadership, who didn’t write this post. In 2025, we grew engagement with CEA's programs by 20–25% across every tier of engagement. But we recognize that growing the community is about more than engagement or metrics—at its core, growth is about the bigness of things. How can we claim that we’ve grown the community if the words on the page are the same size? To matc
“Announcing Highly Engaged EAs!” by Sam Anschell
I’m excited to launch Highly Engaged EAs: a matchmaking and nuptialization service to optimize tax relief, green card accumulation and more! Workstreams I Do(nate) By marrying EAs in different tax brackets, Highly Engaged EAs reduces average tax burden through joint filing to enable greater giving. A Californian AI safety researcher with a million dollar salary could give an extra $53k/year by ty
“RejectDirectly” by RejectDirectly
We're thrilled to announce the founding of RejectDirectly, a new EA-adjacent organization dedicated to closing the global rejection gap. For too long, the EA rejection pipeline has been plagued by ineffectiveness. Billions of collective DALYs spend on unsuccessful work trials and interviews. The water waste involved in the mass duplication of Google Docs. The community health is in peril. In come
“An unexplained annual spike in false claims on the EA Forum” by Tobias Häberli
Epistemic status: Very high confidence in the statistical findings. Genuinely confused about the cause. For reasons that will become obvious, I wanted to publish this post on March 31, but unfortunately I could only get it done today. I've been building a classifier to flag potentially misleading content on the EA Forum as part of a side project on epistemics infrastructure. While validating the
“300,000 lives, 100 million hens, and a world still to save” by William_MacAskill
I went on the Sam Harris podcast again recently. If you want the full non-paywalled episode, I’m able to share it here: https://samharris.org/episode/SE6877E700B 30 mins of it is also on youtube, spotify, etc. The occasion for the podcast was the 10-year anniversary edition of Doing Good Better. So, preparing for the podcast, I collected some relevant facts about what EA has achieved over the l
“Giving up on EA after 13 years” by Jackson Wagner
Donating my shares to Lightcone Infrastructure, the Good Food Institute, and the Long-Term Future Fund, because EA refuses to make Mirror's Edge 3Leaning into EA disillusionment: Why I no longer believe in EA I bought this EA stock almost thirteen years ago:Leopold Aschenbrenner once said that “people with situational awareness have a lower cost basis in Nvidia than you do”. I’m not su
“80,000 Hours is coming to bookstores in May” by Bella, 80000_Hours
Summary We’re publishing our book, 80,000 Hours, with Penguin on 26 May. It's an update of the 80,000 Hours career guide, with a full round of edits, new design, and new content discussing the effect of AI on career choice. We think it's now the best single entry point to our advice. We hope publishing it will multiply the impact of our advice. One quick way you could help is to preorder a c
“The joys of cash benchmarking” by ozymandias
I. Imagine you run a charity which gives cows to people in the developing world. Your new boyfriend is a statistician and you want to impress him, so you’ve decided to look into this Monitoring and Evaluation thing he keeps going on about. So you give a bunch of people cows and then follow up a year later, and sure enough the people you gave the cows to are richer, healthier, and happier. You pro
“Broad Timelines” by Toby_Ord
No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down. But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines? I’l
“What I didn’t expect about being a funder” by JamesÖz 🔸
Crossposted from my blog I am very fortunate to have my job in many ways – I get to talk to, learn from, and give money to amazing people and nonprofits all around the world. I get to allocate a modest amount of resources to incredible organisations that I think are doing some of the best work to improve the world. I don’t have to fundraise for my or my team's salaries anymore. However, there are
“GHD discussion here is slowly dying” by NickLaing
Epistemic status: A bit sad (I know that's not an epistemic status) The best development Forum on the internet? 3 years ago a headline “FTX SBF blah blah blah” triggered my memory “oh that's right, that effective altruism thing”. A few years earlier I had read “Doing Good Better” in our Northern Ugandan hut, and was excited by how the ideas matched my experience of seeing the BINGOs [1] on the
“Feelings about the end of the world” by Michelle_Hutchinson
Many of us in this community are in the shocking position of thinking there's a real chance of humanity being wiped out over the next decade or two. Most of the time, we discuss that in rational terms. We talk about probabilities, and threat models, and interventions. We don’t talk as much about the emotions we have about how radically our world might change and about the possibility of it ending
“The case for AI safety capacity-building work” by abergal
I work on the capacity-building team on the Global Catastrophic Risks-half of Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy). Our remit is, roughly, to increase the amount of talent aiming to prevent unprecedented, globally catastrophic events. These days, we’re mostly focused on AI, and we’ve funded a number of projects and grantees that readers of this post might be familiar with– inc
“Some good news: Ahold Delhaize to go cage-free” by ElliotTep
For those not working in the space this probably isn't on your radar, but the animal advocacy movement just secured a huge win with Ahold Delhaize, convincing the fourth-largest supermarket company in the US to set the strongest cage-free policy of any large US retailer: A roadmap with benchmarks to fully eliminate caged egg cartons, expand cage-free offerings, and increase the pe
[Linkpost] “Effective Altruism Will Be Great Again” by Mjreard
This is a link post. Forum note: this post embodies the spirit of a new project I—Matt Reardon—am starting to reinvigorate in-person EA communities. I'm hiring a co-founder and I'm interested in meeting others who want to collaborate on this vision. My DMs are open. Sequence thinkers will be forgiven and rejoice In some fleeting moments lately, I catch glimpses of 2022—the year Effective Altruism'
“Responsible Scaling Policy v3” by Holden Karnofsky
All views are my own, not Anthropic's. This post assumes Anthropic's announcement of RSP v3.0 as background. Today, Anthropic released its Responsible Scaling Policy 3.0. The official announcement discusses the high-level thinking behind it. This is a more detailed post giving my own takes on the update. First, the big picture: I expect some people will be upset about the move away from a “hard
“Why isn’t anti-fascism a bigger topic at EAG events (or on this forum)?” by Alex_Z
TL;DR: Define your line that if crossed, you would consider this issue one of (if not the most) pressing issues, or at least pressing enough to warrant some of your time. I want to start with a clarification that I learned while writing this post. In the United States, charities with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status are permitted to discuss policy and engage in advocacy, but are prohibited from parti
“Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸
Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, my
sister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed an
N95 and told to "guard it with her life", because there weren't
any more coming.
N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plastic
pellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Building
more would take too long: we needed thes
“You’re not burning out because you’re tired” by stefan.torges
I burned out badly a few years ago. I've since had several conversations with people in the EA community who are heading toward burnout themselves, and I noticed they were sometimes thinking about it in ways that I worry wouldn't help them. So I want to share what I think is actually going on, and what I wish someone had told me earlier. A theory of burnout There are good models of the mechanism
