EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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...

In this post I explore how much nature appears to matter to people. I attempt to show that this value is enduring across time and traditions and that it will probably continue to matter to humans into the future. Nature seems to matter enough for 1% of people globally to donate for the sake of nature and 12% of people spend their vacation time on some form of nature appreciation. Amount of $ spent...

Hi everyone, in my last post I talked about the federal effort to destroy state animal welfare laws. The farm bill is set to destroy most state-level animal welfare protections. There was an amendment called the Luna amendment that would have removed from the farm bill the provisions that would have destroyed most state animal welfare laws. Sadly it didn’t pass. Thus, the destruction of most state...

TL;DR: this is an incredibly underdeveloped field with very little funding deployed and only one small direct work org. There are clear basic projects that need to get off the ground. Please donate to help start the new Falcon Fund which will do active grantmaking on these projects. It's been over three years since ChatGPT was released, and in that time the Animal Welfare movement has had to grapp...

Originally posted as a comment on this post. Reposting for visibility and since it is lengthy enough to be a standalone post. I plan to post a more comprehensive update in future describing FRI's impact and theory of change in more detail. Summary [Relevant context/COI: I'm CEO at the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), an organization which I co-founded with Phil Tetlock and others. Much of the...

We (Aiden, Alex, Saul, Jesse) ran the first[1] West Coast EA Retreat, from April 10–12 2026, in Bass Lake, CA. We’re interested in sharing our retrospective with the broader EA community, and in having a public artifact of the retreat — hence this post. This post was mostly written by Aiden, with substantial input and edits from Alex, Jesse, and Saul (who do not necessarily endorse everything in t...

We (Aiden, Alex, Saul, Jesse) ran the first[1] West Coast EA Retreat, from April 10–12 2026, in Bass Lake, CA. We’re interested in sharing our retrospective with the broader EA community, and in having a public artifact of the retreat — hence this post. This post was mostly written by Aiden, with substantial input and edits from Alex, Jesse, and Saul (who do not necessarily endorse everything in t...

This is a link post. Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert in any of the fields being discussed here. I have done my best to check for errors but cannot guarantee that this article is error-free. I would like to thank Ezra Karger, the author of the main report I’m analysing, for looking through an earlier version of this article and giving helpful suggestions. Introduction: In discussions a...

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....

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 fo...

This is a link post. Damon Binder recently wrote up an argument for prioritizing air filtration over far-UVC for pathogen control: UVC and filtration are close substitutes—both deliver effective air changes per hour, both reduce airborne pathogen concentrations by the same amount per eACH—and on current pricing, filtration is cheaper. There's a lot of good stuff in his analysis, but I see [1] thre...

80,000 Hours (the book) comes out in just one month!! We asked OWID's Hannah Ritchie if she wanted to say something nice about the book, and she said: “If this had been published a decade earlier, it'd have saved me many restless nights.” I think that applies to me too… But also: wow, I’d really love for us to get the book in the hands of as many ten-years-ago-Hannah-Ritchies as possible! Can we d...

This is a link post. Meta-context I wrote a within-cause prioritization report discussing why we should continue studying shrimp sentience and how we can actually do it. Whether you are just curious about how we actually study sentience in invertebrates or are interested in doing or funding such research, this report is for you. I highly encourage you to read this report through its original forma...

This is a link post. I recently wrote an op-ed in Inside Philanthropy about the trend for philanthropy and the non-profit sector to use the language of "effectiveness" without always bringing the rigour to back it up. --- First published: April 26th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vCDj5HoevMJu8e3f8/the-data-is-in-effective-philanthropy-has-an-evidence-issue Linkpost URL: ht...

This is a link post. *if you want us to win In one sense, AI safety is not funding-constrained. There are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into research orgs, more coming with the Anthropic IPO, and grantmakers are already struggling to deploy what they have. And yet: the AI industry spent over $100 million lobbying the federal government in 2025, while the biggest AI safety c4 spent $310,0...

Animal welfare is what brought me to EA. I spent several years working for animal advocacy organisations, and the EA ideals to do with rigorous thinking about where effort makes the biggest difference was something I believed in fully. This post is me thinking aloud, not staking a firm position. I'd genuinely welcome pushback from people who know this space better than I do. The framing of the pro...

People sometimes say that AI safety is a Pascal's mugging. Other people sometimes reply that AI safety can’t be a Pascal's mugging, because p(doom) is high. Both these people are wrong. The second group of people are wrong because Pascal's muggings are about the probability that you make a difference, not about baseline risk. The first group of people are wrong because the probability that you per...

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, des...

The forecasting community is failing because it is not focused on how the world actually works. This post has been written in response to the Manifund Essay Prize which asks “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” Who am I to make such an outlandish claims? I worked at HM Treasury as senior policy advisor across multiple policy areas, including international development, relations...

Since I took over EA UK in January, many people have understandably asked what EA UK actually does. Building on an older post, I wanted to share a new update on where we are now, how we can help you, and how you can help us. This post does not mean to serve as a strategy document. We are still in the early stages and are actively experimenting, so our activities may change significantly over the c...

This is a link post. Manifund is launching a new animal welfare fund, led by regrantor Marcus Abramovitch. We make rapid (<1 week), early-stage ($25k–$150k) grants across animal welfare, with a particular interest in the intersection of animals and transformative AI. Reach out to marcus.s.abramovitch@gmail.com if you’d like to donate! Why AI x animals? Many EAs take seriously both the welfare o...

TL;DR The AI safety ecosystem is about to receive billions in new funding but lacks the grantmaker capacity, speed, and infrastructure to deploy it well — especially for smaller, high-impact opportunities. We're building grantmaking.ai, a comprehensive public database of x-risk AI safety funding opportunities with a trust and signal layer on top — think Crunchbase meets GiveWell for AI safety. To...

TL;DR. Quantity over quality; table consistently; prioritize a friendly tone based on shared values; pitch the pledge as an accountability mechanism; don't spend too much time on the specifics of effectiveness; maintain a sense of agency and informed decision making; your mileage may vary but give it a try. Since January 2025, the Middlebury EA contingent has secured 300 Giving What We Can (GWWC)...

Cross-posted from Good Structures. COI note: This piece touches on some aspects of Wild Animal Initiative's work, and why I am excited about it. I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative, and while I no longer have any affiliation, my spouse works there. Doing wild animal welfare at scale, in a way we are confident is robustly good, is currently not possible. The primary bottleneck is scientific: we don...

Summary Power for Democracies (P4Dem) is trying to develop donor recommendations to most effectively counter 2026 US election integrity threats. To do so, we searched for (and believe we found) all the main categories of threats, identified a fairly comprehensive list of counter-tactics, and then evaluated those tactics based on evidence, a theory of change analysis, and expert interviews. Per our...