EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

James Herbert, Co-Director, Effectief Altruïsme Nederland and EAGxAmsterdam Team Lead EAGxAmsterdam 2025 took place on 12–14 December at B.Amsterdam, bringing together 517 attendees from across Europe. This is a brief write-up of what went well, what didn't, and what I think other EAGx organisers can learn from it. The headline numbers: 517 attendees (up 36% from 380 at EAGxUtrecht 2024) — one of...

I'm humbled (and slightly Bayesianly uncertain) to announce that after years of carefully optimizing my personal brand on LinkedIn, I've decided to pivot to a higher-impact platform: the EA Forum. LinkedIn let me share updates about clients, networking events, and my "journey." The EA Forum offers something better: 3,000-word posts, detailed cost-effectiveness analyses, and occasional updates abou...

Last year, I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop Caffe Strada, sipping on a matcha latte and writing a self-insert fanfic about how our plucky protagonist escapes the mind-controlling clutches of an evil anti-animal welfare company, when I came across an interesting article on AI character. The core argument is that when you train an AI to be helpful, honest, and ethical, the AI model doesn’t j...

After more than seven years with EA Netherlands — first as a volunteer, then as a board member, and most recently as co-director — Marieke de Visscher is moving on. Marieke was instrumental in building EAN from an all-volunteer group into a staffed nonprofit. She leaves behind a stronger, more professional organisation than the one she found, and I'm grateful for the years we worked together. We'r...

TL;DR: We're launching 8,000,000 Hours, a new career guidance organisation for people who want to have an impact but would rather not change what they're doing. Instead of finding the highest-impact career, we help you work longer in your existing one to achieve the same impact at the end of your career. The core insight 80,000 Hours estimates that you have roughly 80,000 hours in your career and...

It pains me to report that, in the early hours of this morning, Fish Welfare Initiative (arguably the best charity ever) experienced a serious website security breach. Our entire leadership team is currently reviewing some of the most advanced technical literature available to resolve the issue. In the meantime, we strongly request: DO NOT VISIT OUR WEBSITE (www.fwi.fish). Please, no one visit our...

Forecasts based on benchmarks and time horizons have failed to produce a consensus timeline for the arrival of AGI. We supplement these with several alternative methods. 1: MATS Applications AGI - artificial intelligence capable of performing every task - is by definition cognitively capable of putting all humans out of work. However, there are certain edge cases where human employment might persi...

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 tyi...

Hi everybody! I'm Conor. I run the 80,000 Hours Job Board. Or I used to. As of today — April 1 — we are becoming Job Bards! You may not know that the number one complaint that people have about job boards is sensory poverty. While movie theatres have dared to experiment with haptics and smell-o-vision, no job board has even dared to become an audiovisual experience. Until now. We believe Job Bards...

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 comes...

Forethought is proud to announce the launch of Deep Thought[1] — the world's first fully automated macrostrategy researcher, and the world's most powerful AI model. For some time, we have believed that one of the most important things a macrostrategy research organisation can do is work to automate its own work. The case is simple: if the questions we're investigating matter, then expanding access...

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 m...

Are there too many cables on your desk? Is this preventing you from doing your most productive work? Research suggests that the aesthetic quality of a person's work environment has an impact on their mood, productivity, and ability to cope with the crushing reality of knowing that more children will suffer and die from preventable diseases if they don't get enough done. I've had a high-impact meta...

I say this with deep love for 80k and mild existential dread. I love 80,000 Hours. One of the most useful resources in the effective altruism ecosystem. Their core premise is simple and compelling: you have roughly 80,000 hours in your career, so spend them wisely. But I've been doing some math, and I think they might need a rebrand. See, 80,000 Hours increasingly (and rightly!) recommends AI safe...

A piece of feedback we've had a few times on our debate weeks is that the debate slider shouldn't be single-dimensional. When you agree or disagree with something, you also want to be able to signal your confidence in your belief. It's time-consuming to do so by explaining yourself in a comment, and percentage agreement isn't necessarily the same thing as confidence in your agreement. So, not to w...

“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 match...

Donating my shares to Lightcone Infrastructure, the Good Food Institute, and the Long-Term Future Fund, because EA refuses to make Mirror's Edge 3 Leaning 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 s...

EA has made admirable efforts to reach populations that are underrepresented in the movement: busy mid-career professionals, people of faith, and people across a wide range of professions and academic disciplines. Yet despite all these efforts, we are underserving our most neglected group, one that makes up 98–99% of all people on earth: neurotypicals (NTs). While we don’t have the data on hand, w...

Executive Summary The four largest funds in the effective animal advocacy movement can absorb ~$120 million in new funding in the coming year, with potential for greater growth in future years. Setting aside the historic scarcity mindset, I share this money's significant opportunity to reduce animal suffering and encourage emerging major donors from Anthropic to fund this impact. We can deploy thi...

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 last...

This is a link post. Hi, I’m Thorbjørn “Toby” Schiønning, co-founder of Anima International. I was encouraged by my colleague Jakub Stencel to share our new blog post on negotiating and campaigning for animal welfare here (this is my first post here). Summary Over the past two decades, a small group of advocates has secured major corporate commitments on animal welfare – from cage-free eggs to fur...

Measuring and communicating impact is hard, particularly when focusing on community building over the long term. You have a much better idea of what led to you starting a new role, changing your donations, etc, than anyone else could. It will take you 2-10 minutes to directly tell someone how they've impacted your trajectory[1] where they might take hours-to-forever to try to reach you and ask. It...

This is a link post. Introduction Consider a lorry driver who sees a car crash and pulls over to help, even though it’ll delay his journey. Or a delivery driver who notices that an elderly resident hasn’t collected their post in days, and knocks to check they’re okay. Or a social media company employee who notices how their platform is used for online bullying, and brings it up with leadership, ev...

TL;DR We incubated 8 new nonprofits in Latin America using an evidence-based, cost-effectiveness–driven approach. Each organization is tackling a high-priority, neglected problem with proven interventions adapted to their context, all designed to scale. These orgs would not exist without this process, supporting them creates real counterfactual impact. 📅 We are hosting a ...

This is a link post. TL;DR Here are the key points I want you to take away from this post: There are maybe 30 to 60 people in the world doing AI safety grantmaking, collectively directing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Soon, there will be >$1B being directed per year, and potentially multiple billions. AI safety grantmaking orgs like CG have a strong track record of counterfactually se...