EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

More Than Good is a new podcast from Effective Altruism Australia, aimed at introducing the ideas and principles of effective altruism to a broader audience. The episodes are framed around moral questions and how people think about doing good, covering topics like global inequality, animal welfare, ethics, philosophy and more. For a global movement, there is relatively little content that is acces...

I used an LLM to help draft this post, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. Writing up our current approach to thumbnails, which is nowhere near perfect, for easy shareability and cross-pollination of lessons. Would love to hear what other people are trying! Making thumbnails We're lucky enough to have folks at 80k with great design instincts. We work with them as well as with...

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, somet...

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 way...

This is a link post. By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript Episode summary I want my children to live in a world where they will have a future and there will be a democracy for them to live in. Even a 1% chance of something going really, really bad is not acceptable to me. So I think it is really important that we explore all the possible promising ways to solve...

TL;DR: Coefficient Giving is running a major hiring round for 10+ grantmakers and senior generalists across five Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) teams. We're allocating around $1 billion in 2026 across AI safety and catastrophic biorisk, and we’re acutely capacity-constrained. Apply here by May 17. Why we’re hiring A core premise of our work is that if a global catastrophe caused by transformative...

This forum post was first drafted using an LLM to summarise information from human-written job postings and was then edited/adjusted by hiring managers. The primary author/coordinator is Arden Koehler. Overview 80,000 Hours has eight open positions across our advising, operations, video, and web teams, plus three expressions of interest open for video and operations roles. We're try...

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...

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 B...

New policy: You are welcome to use AI to help you write posts, but we ask that you disclose it when you do. Not disclosing that your post is AI-assisted could mean a rate-limit or a ban.[1] We won’t enforce this policy for comments and quick takes, though we’d appreciate a norm of disclosure there as well. We are (and have been) moving more low quality or off-topic writing off of the Frontpage. Fu...

I started 2 EA(ish) group houses now, so I figured there's an opportunity to share my experience and how you too can start one! There's a whole substack dedicated to community living, so I'll stick to the EA lens of it. Note: My experiences are based in NYC and SF, which have a nice flow of travelers & concentration of like-minded folks. I also lived in ~4 group houses/communities prior to sta...

I'm Svetha Janumpalli, founder and CEO of New Incentives. We run a conditional cash transfer program in northern Nigeria that provides small incentives to caregivers to complete routine infant vaccination schedules. Today, we operate across over 7,000 clinics and have enrolled 6.8 million infants. GiveWell's most recent analysis suggests our program is substantially more cost-effective than earlie...

This post was cross-posted from Positive Sum by the Forum team. The author notes: I'm not saying every abundance goal meets this bar, e.g. high speed rail in America would not. This post is intended as a clarifying abundance's relation to EA, rather than a criticism of EA prioritization. Subtitle: Functional governance and democracy helps many EA cause areas. A thousand small government failures c...

The "expanding moral circle" -- the idea that moral concern has (or, at least, should) widened over time from family, to community, to nation, to all humanity, and (arguably) outward to all sentient beings -- was developed by W.E.H. Lecky (1869) and popularized by Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle (1981). This concept is has really resonated with me throughout the years and eventually led to me...

Epistemic certainty: Obviously loads of uncertainty on mirror life risks and the degree to which we'd have to pressurize buildings or filter outdoor air. Moderately high certainty for the best hasty pathways for doing this in North American and a narrow subset of European buildings. Lower certainty as we move towards international buildings. Also loads of experiments and field tests are needed, po...

Hey folks! We’ve recently done an internal impact assessment and thought it would be helpful to share its highlights. (Due to capacity constraints, we opted to share the current post rather than wait for a longer and more polished one, but we’re happy to answer questions.) For context, our goal at Probably Good is to help people build careers that are good for them and for the world. We focus on g...

“How are we to live, in a world in which there is so much unnecessary suffering? Magnus Vinding looks unflinchingly at that question, and gives an answer that is realistic, and yet inspiring. Read this book. It may change your life.” — Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation I have just published a book: What if the point of self-improvement were not just to feel better or get ahead, but to beco...

(Crosspost). If you’re young and online, you’re probably maxxing something. Maybe you’re looksmaxxing: trying to maximize your hotness (e.g. by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer). Maybe, like Clavicular, you do it just to mog other people—to look better than they do. But good looks reach diminishing marginal returns. You get a reasonable boost from going to the gym occasionally, but by th...

0. I don't work at AIM.. why care about this? This taxonomy is written from AIM's perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly: If you're starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea needs. This is the audience the rest of...

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 trea...

This is a link post. I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference. It's hard to convey in words. My reflection afterwards was something like “What the fuck was that?” More poe...

I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in...

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...

Crosspost. (Reminder: the farm bill which is being voted on imminently would destroy most state level animal protections and be the worst law for farm animal welfare ever passed. Please, please, contact your representatives and tell them to vote no on it—more details here, including a bunch of other activities that are even higher impact. The house votes on this today, so this is the last day you...

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of EAGx. On April 30, 2016, the very first EAGx events—EAGxBoston and EAGxBerkeley—were held simultaneously. A decade later, it's incredible to reflect on how much this community has grown, both in scale and in depth. Since then, we’ve hosted 67 EAGx events and 18 EA Summits (a format we introduced in 2024), bringing us to 85 events in total—with our 86th happen...