EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which of these theories are correct (or which elements of them are) may matter a lot if we're seeking to change society for the better. However, these theories are often hard to understand - you may need to read an entire book (or dozens of articles) to f...

On Friday, May 22, after a field-building itch, I posted a 'Plea to the Laid-off' on LinkedIn, leveraging my voice as a former Googler. With tremendous support from the community, I got 27 inbound calls in 24 hours & received a small Rapid Grant from BlueDot to fund the post as a Linkedin ad for 12 days. Note: While I’ve been funded by Coefficient Giving for my EA SF efforts, this specific pro...

This is a link post. This is a crosspost from the Forward Pass substack with the author's permission. What should you expect your life to look like in the future? Almost everybody is overconfident about what their life will look like in the next 30 years. For most people this is due to an underappreciation of the transformative potential of AI, but for others it's due to an underappreciation of ho...

Crosspost. (I think this is one of the most important things I’ve written, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it. And if you know what's at stake, and just want to know what to do, skip to the end). What's at stake Sometimes, the operations of factory farms are so wicked that if they were described in a work of fiction, you’d think it was a cartoonish caricature of evil. Perha...

This is a link post. These days, I often run across whippersnappers excited to do something for AI safety — but aren’t quite sure what. One of the fun things about the Future Fund era were the big lists of project ideas; as we enter a new era of crazy money sloshing around, it might be time to bring back the lists! Note that these ideas range from “very confident this is good” to “completely hareb...

TLDR: The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) just launched a global cage-free campaign against the largest Korean food multinational, CJ Group. Thanks to a once-in-a-generation alignment of factors, any action you take to support this campaign is likely to have an unusually high expected value, easily as high as the recent Ahold Delhaize campaign. I'm the Data and Insights Lead at The Humane League. Here's...

I used AI in this post. >30% is AI-generated text (everything that appears in quote blocks). Google's Debug Project has been releasing mosquitos infected with bacteria that stop them from breeding in the wild, as a way of reducing mosquito populations. This is a promising strategy for fighting mosquito-borne disease; Google's particular approach doesn't target malaria, but it has been shown to...

Air Filters for Infection Air filters are often proposed as a simple, scalable way to reduce the spread of respiratory infections. The underlying logic is simple - respiratory pathogens can be transmitted through the air in aerosol form, and air filters are capable of removing these particles before they are inhaled and go on to cause infection. This has led to sustained interest in air filtration...

Crosspost. Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it. Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic's founders, and Anthropic employees. A fairly co...

This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here. This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the next few years. The second is to grant at least $500 million to the best opportunities we can find this year to sav...

TL;DR: You should run a virtual summer Intro Program if you're in college. It's an easy way to boost an existing group or (re)start one. Most of the resources you need are already available, and I am here to help with planning or advice, even if you've never done any community building before! Princeton EA already received over 130 sign-ups for their virtual summer 2026 Intro Fellowship – with 10...

[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 stewardship...

I have linked below my recent version of my research compilation on Profit for Good businesses and the Charitable Ownership Advantage thesis. I have spent several hundred, if not over a thousand hours, compiling the evidence supporting the thesis that, given our modern economy in which ownership is typically practically separate from business management and governance, Profit for Good businesses s...

TL;DR: Anthropic restricted access to Claude Mythos Preview, citing a major leap in vulnerability discovery and exploitation capability. I review the 3 most common arguments from skeptics: (1) AISLE Security's paper showing cheaper models can identify the same bugs as Mythos, (2) benchmark comparisons showing GPT-5.5 performs comparably, and (3) Mythos finding only one low-severity bug in the cURL...

We intend to mobilise 100 million dollars of philanthropic capital towards export manufacturing and international labour mobility to double the lifetime incomes of 250,000 low-income people in Africa (creating 10m DCYs). (This launch article is cross-posted, with some edits, from our Substack.) We are launching the Africa Jobs Fund to dramatically boost incomes for low-income Africans through acce...

This is a link post. Disclaimer: This is a huge topic, and I’m barely scratching the surface here. I’m not an expert on these subjects, and am mostly trying to summarise the work of experts in an accessible way. All writing is my own. Introduction: One of my chief complaints about the field of existential risk prevention is that it often relies on estimates that are not well-grounded in empirical...

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 fe...

TL;DR GiveWell has published a podcast, looking back on their investments in iron fortification and their 8.2 million dollars grant to Fortify Health in 2021. When the grant was made, the projected cost-effectiveness was 5x cash transfers we delivered and estimated 12x. We want to share what this looked like from the inside. Over three years, our team scaled from reaching fewer than half a million...

Rethink Priorities just opened three positions: Researcher, Worldview Investigations Team Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Technical Focus) Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Economics Focus)   We're excited to expand our team and we look forward to reviewing your application. --- First published: May 21st, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vu5RnPnbfG3KWgakB/rethink...

This is a link post. I've spent the last couple of years working on AI risk at Coefficient Giving, but it's only in the last few months that I’ve started to feel more viscerally that transformative AI is likely to happen and potentially very soon. To be honest, it probably took me longer than it should have. This shift has been a really difficult emotional experience and I've been struggling at ti...

The following is a Linkedin post I'm hoping to make to the recently laid-off tech industry in hopes that it makes the AI Safety transition more convincing and palatable. Please support by commenting or reposting on Friday, May 22 10AM PST | 6PM UTC. Feel free to add me on Linkedin (the 1st hour is most critical). I'll also update with the live link when it posts. I am receptive to feedback, namely...

After reading Abraham Rowe's reflections around the new money in EA, I found myself wishing there were more concrete ideas for how we can make the most of the enormous opportunity ahead. I often hear stewardship discussed in the context of managing money or leading institutions. I think one neglected lever for stewarding the future of the EA movement is offering and asking for help. Below are four...

This is a link post. Abstract Several major technology companies have announced plans to operate AI data centers in orbit. Elon Musk recently claimed: “the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space […] within two years, maybe three.” If a meaningful fraction of new AI compute really is placed in space within a few years, that would be a fairly big deal for AI governance and strategy. Here we try t...

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 a...

High Impact Professionals (HIP) is launching a brand new Entrepreneurship Track inside our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). It's built specifically for experienced professionals who are considering starting their own high-impact organization, whether that means founding a high-impact non-profit or for-profit organization, or starting a Founding to Give company. Applications for the next IAP round...