EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Crossposted on Substack. This recent podcast episode featuring Oliver Habryka and Austin Chen got me thinking about the social and political dimensions of EA. One moment in particular stood out to me. Habryka: “And so I'm currently expecting that, like, a lot of Anthropic employees will be pretty burned in a year or two. When they are experiencing these dynamics, it becomes very clear that a huge...

Cavendish University has generously allowed us to use its residential property, which is located near several universities and high schools in Lusaka. Starting 4 July, we will begin hosting weekly workshops for students, graduates and young professionals who are trying to make better decisions about their education, careers and contribution to society. This is a big milestone for us. About two yea...

Note: I am not associated with 80000 Hours. I just like the book. TLDR: if any of your friends would benefit from career advice, giving them the newly released 80000 Hours book may be the most effective thing you can do. The process I graduated from university just around the time the 80000 Hours book came out, and I bought 4 copies of the book to give to my friends. This went way better than expe...

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 contributi...

What if you ran effective altruism group where, every week, people congregated to contemplate topics such as: Eradicating malaria Whether AI should ever have legal rights What future people will wish we had done today Whether insects have moral worth How we can help others while taking care of ourselves What if your group satisfied a deep need that many young people feel for an impartial, calm, an...

Bentham's Bulldog recently argued that AI won’t definitely make factory farms obsolete. I agree, but I’d go further and argue that by default AI won’t make factory farms obsolete. However, I think it's possible (though not guaranteed) that AI could make factory farms a lot more humane. He throws out an 80% of cultivated meat being developed, and a 70% chance of it displacing factory farms continge...

Introduction: I have been reflecting on recent discussions on this platform concerning the future of global development philanthropy, particularly on the argument that the next wave of philanthropy should place greater emphasis on emerging regions and locally led approaches. These discussions led me to consider a related question in animal welfare: if Africa is set to play an increasingly importan...

TLDR: AIM won’t run another round of Founding to Give at this time, but we’d be excited for someone else to run (an amended version) of it AIM launched the Founding to Give program two years ago to incubate for-profit startups with the goal of creating (1) impact via donations and (2) directly through company activities. Since then, we have run 2 cohorts for which we had over 3,000 applications, s...

New Video from AI in Context: The Fall and Rise of Sam Altman If you want to skip straight to the video, here it is! AI in Context is excited to be back with our fourth video! For those just hearing from us, we make videos for 80,000 Hours, telling stories about transformative AI. Check out our channel here. What's in the video? On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board announced that Sam Altman was no...

Hey all! The University of Toronto is really large (>100,000 students) and talent-dense. We think turning the EA group into a thriving community at U of T is high impact, neglected, and very tractable. We’re looking for University of Toronto students who are passionate about EA to join the organizing team to kick-start this community in the fall. We’re currently accepting applications for...

I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. A quick note aimed at people going through AIM's incubation programme (or otherwise founding new effective charities), though it may be of broader interest. I think designing for zakat compliance is an underexplored lever, and being intentional about it e...

Here's Holden Karnofsky: I tend to think it's worse than 51/49. I tend to think we’re always going to be prone to overestimate how robustly good our actions are. And the more we learn about all the galaxy-brained considerations that one should have had in one's head, the more it's going to be like 50+ε%. I think AI safety is a great cause to work in. I’m excited to work in it. I think it's high im...

This is a link post. At every EA conference I go to I end up having long conversations with attendees about my inside-view on what it is like to have kids. Since I know that a lot of impact-oriented people have questions/interest here, I decided to write up my thoughts in a series of posts that address different angles of how to think about this from my perspective. First one is linked above - hop...

By Deena Mousa, Program Officer, Global Health & Wellbeing Cause Prioritization AI is progressing rapidly and could have profound implications for the health and wellbeing of people around the world. While global health philanthropy has historically assumed relative continuity with the past, we would like to engage seriously with the potential implications of transformative AI. This RFP suppor...

After about seven years, QURI is moving into maintenance mode. This means we’ll ensure that key software (Guesstimate and SquiggleHub) is maintained, but we won’t be developing new software or doing new research. Background I started QURI in 2019. At that point I was excited about projects at the intersection of epistemics and software, primarily to be used by impactful researchers. This seemed li...

I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness”, which I’ll call the unawareness argument. To that end, this post will: break down the unawareness argument at a high level; explain why the EA community should care about this argument; and summarize the angles for critiquing the argument that I expect to be most productive, and how...

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 en...

This document explains how Mieux Donner ran its 2026 hiring round: how we decided what to hire for, how we built the offer and the process, the results we got, and what we would tell another organisation doing roughly the same. It is meant to be reused. We also advise you to read the chapter on hiring in “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit”. Mieux Donner is the French effective giving initiativ...

People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout or of losing some kind of wholesomeness[1]. But there's another, very simple argument against it that I have not seen anyone fully make explicit[2], even though I think it's very important. It goes like this: We face a lo...

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 u...

This is a link post. Crossposting this from LessWrong, with the permission of the author, Tom Smith. In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented mo...

This is a link post. My new short fiction film 'Seat at the Table' is now out on Youtube! Premise: When Eva visits her Dad's AI company, she meets Liam, the company's flagship AI system, who she imagines as a polite, precociously-smart kid. But with the company's co-founder claiming Liam 7 is too dangerous to release, Eva starts to wonder if her Dad can really control what he's created. Would love...

This is a link post. This post was crossposted from Multiplier with the author's permission, by the Forum team. The author may not see comments. Subtitle: Why you might want to DIAL in to short timelines People in the AI field love to talk about “timelines.” Sophisticated people in the AI field love to ask: “timelines to what?” Automation of AI R&D? (By which metric?) AI that far surpasses hum...

We’ve launched A Beginner's Guide to Digital Minds (digitalminds.guide), a website for people who want an introduction to AI consciousness, AI welfare, and the broader implications of the possibility that AI systems could matter morally. The guide provides an overview of the questions motivating digital minds research, including: What are digital minds? Could AI systems be conscious? How might the...

Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA. TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university. I work on CEA's Groups team (whilst also being an Epidemiology student at Oxford) and spend most of my time suppo...