EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TL;DR The AI safety field is maturing, but its talent pipelines may be failing to keep pace with the growing demand for operations, organisation-building and research management professionals (further referred to as generalists). Based on eight interviews with AIS organisations plus prior work, we see early signs that entering AIS in these roles is structurally unreliable: personal connections dom...

I have been increasingly surprised over the past year at what I perceive to be the lack of critical thinking in response to new announcements regarding AI model capabilities. I’ve written about many of these issues before, but as AI hype accelerates the problems seem to be getting worse. Here I want to highlight a few points that seem to be neglected in coverage of the growth of AI capabilities. A...

Consistent helpfulness for everyone, unless you're a bit of a scumbag Claude really got me lately. I’d given it an elaborate prompt in an attempt to summon an AGI-level answer to my third-grade level question. Embarrassingly, it included the phrase, “this work might be reviewed by probability theorists, who are very pedantic”. Claude didn’t miss a beat. Came back with a great answer and made me ca...

I once took a seminar with Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy. He often spoke about the limits of empathy as a motivation — how it misleads us where math wouldn't. It was all very EA-coded (and indeed, he ate dinner with Yale EA once). His class got me thinking about all the different motivations behind EA, from boundless love for the world to a fear of what our friends will think. This is my o...

This is a link post. 12 articles including 4 podcasts EA/LW Intro: I believe clinical trial abundance could be an EA cause area - there's still a lot of disability/disease burden in the world, even in developed countries, and increasing the pace of progress is very tractable. And it's not just a matter of speed/quantity of innovation: the current system selects against ambitious risky bets. It des...

A lesson in courage from Washington, DC Yesterday I described an experience that impressed upon fifteen-year-old me the importance of speaking with urgency and courage when something awful is happening. I lived a fresh reminder of the importance of courage last week at PauseCon, a first-of-its-kind conference in Washington, DC run by PauseAI US.[1] It was really, really good. I’m impressed and I w...

Tl;dr: You need to make specific moral weight assumptions to decide who to prioritize between animals with different degrees of sentience. And the moral weight of a given being is not its p(sentience). One could very well be certain that shrimp and insects feel pain (and are as badly off as they could possibly be), yet believe that they do so to a degree too small for them to be prioritized. Debat...

I made a database for "art with EA vibes" — books, movies, and other works, fiction or nonfiction, that cover topics or ideas related to effective altruism and are aesthetically pleasing or interesting.[1] The second point is key. We already have reading lists for philosophy and such; this database covers content that most of us would read or watch for fun.[2] I've started off with 19 items and wi...

This week, we are highlighting Forethought's Better Futures series. Fin Moorhouse (@finm), who authored two chapters in the series (Convergence and Compromise, and No Easy Eutopia) along with @William_MacAskill, has agreed to answer a few of your questions about the series. You can read (and comment) on the full series on the Forum. In order, the chapters are: Introducing Better Futures No Easy Eu...

This is a link post. Manifund is sponsoring 3 prizes for the best new essays that give us insight into how to navigate the future. Winners receive a $500 cash prize + a bonus prize, and winning essays may be republished (with attribution) on our newsletters. This prize is in partnership with Inkhaven, though non-Inkhaven folks are welcome to submit. Essays due midnight April 24; submit here! Manif...

Trajan House is an office in Oxford for people working on humanity's most pressing challenges. There have been some changes to the project over the last few years, and it seemed time to give a public update about what we’re getting up to! Here are some quick things to know: The anchor tenants in the space are Forethought and CEA. CEA manages the space. I’m the project's manager Over the...

I have lots of radical views about insects. I think probably most expected happiness and misery in the world is experienced by insects, and that our actions often have much more significant moral impacts on bugs than on people. But in this article, I’m not going to defend anything radical. My thesis here is very moderate: I think we should try to make pesticides kill insects less painfully. Every...

Recently, I have come across a growing number of speculations suggesting that wild animals lead net negative lives. Proponents of this view typically refer to insects, arthropods, invertebrates, or species with r-selective reproductive strategies. The conclusion they draw is usually that we should aim to reduce their numbers in one way or another. Unfortunately, birth control is seldom discussed i...

Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series! On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me. At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the...

Two frameworks, one question: whose finances are we talking about, and to what end? As the development sector gathers at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford this week, against a backdrop of sharp cuts to official development assistance — the US has ended 83% of USAID's programmes, the UK has cut its aid budget by 40%, and the OECD projects an overall ODA decline of 9–17% in 2025 alone, with projected...

This is a link post. We're announcing a new development magazine: In Development. Our goal is to promote discourse on development without dogma. In other words, we public stories doing deep dives into pressing development issues, backed up by evidence, argument, and experience. The first piece is by Paul Niehaus, an Economics Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and co-founder of...

I joined CEA as Director of EA Funds 3 months ago. I have two goals with this post: Sharing some early thoughts about what I've found and where I think EA Funds is headed. Announcing that we're now searching for a Head of the EA Infrastructure Fund, a hire I think is one of the most important ones we'll make this year.  Where EA Funds stands For those less familiar, EA Funds channels individu...

Crosspost. Picture a knife cutting into your stomach. Don’t just register the words. Actually take a moment to think about what it would be like. What the first moment it occurred would be like, how the pain would get deeper as the knife cuts more deeply into your flesh, the way the blood would drip down your sides and you would cry out in pain. Intense agony has a way of cutting through idealizat...

This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments. Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild. The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism) In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent...

Summary In January 2026, the animal charity Farmkind launched a controversial news campaign advertising their ability to “offset” the impact of non-vegan diets through strategic donations to EA causes. I have now spoken with several non-vegan EAs who use Farmkind (or similar calculators) to buy “offsets” for their diets, and I think the offsetting logic is more powerful than vegans would like to a...

Sometimes, people don't say what they actually think, not because saying it would be rude or costly, but because they believe saying it now would be counterproductive. They see that the true claim is outside the Overton window. And they conclude that the strategic play is to say something weaker, something adjacent. That will let you normalize the frame without triggering the immune response. You...

Read this career review on the 80,000 Hours website. Summary In a nutshell: Who wields power in the US government is a very important determinant of outcomes for many of the world's most pressing problems, including reducing catastrophic risks from AI. The most direct ways to affect who controls the levers of government power are to work on campaigns and run for office. Because election outcomes a...

Summary Based on the last 3 years of AI safety job board postings from 80, 000 Hours, I checked what skillsets are the most sought after in the field, including positions at different types of organisations, and separately, leadership roles. Here are three of the most important findings: In leadership positions, a management skillset paired with an operations, strategy, or policy skillset is the m...

Introduction In 2026, the Open Wing Alliance awarded ~$1.9M to 28 organizations globally. This post gives background on our grant program, strategy, and highlights some grants we are particularly excited about this year. It also gives some info on how you can become a member and apply to receive a grant. Background The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) is a coalition of over 80 member organizations located...

This post is an update on some great and perhaps surprising progress in China that feels worth sharing, and a sincere thank-you to the people I have gotten to know through EAG SF (recap at the end). Why China, and Why Now Approximately 75% of the world's farmed animals are raised in Asia, yet the region receives a disproportionately small fraction of global animal welfare funding. Within that, Chi...