EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

Edit 1/29: Funding is back, baby! Crossposted from my blog. (This could end up being the most important thing I’ve ever written. Please like and restack it—if you have a big blog, please write about it). A mother holds her sick baby to her chest. She knows he doesn’t have long to live. She hears him coughing—those body-wracking coughs—that expel mucus and phlegm, leaving him desperately gasping fo...

In 2023[1] GiveWell raised $355 million - $100 million from Open Philanthropy, and $255 million from other donors. In their post on 10th April 2023, GiveWell forecast the amount they expected to raise in 2023, albeit with wide confidence intervals, and stated that their 10th percentile estimate for total funds raised was $416 million, and 10th percentile estimate for funds raised outside of Open P...

Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy 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. They’re imperfect agents of change The world's three largest animal welfare groups are under attack. Their antagonists are not factory farmers, but other animal groups. And the ASPCA, HSUS, an...

In recent years, many in the Effective Altruism community have shifted to working on AI risks, reflecting the growing consensus that AI will profoundly shape our future. In response to this significant shift, there have been efforts to preserve a "principles-first EA" approach, or to give special thought into how to support non-AI causes. This has often led to discussions being framed around "AI S...

This post is my personal perspective. I’m sure that my colleagues on the Forum Team and at CEA disagree with parts of this. However, since I am the Interim EA Forum Project Lead, I recognize that my opinions and beliefs carry extra weight. I’m very happy to receive feedback and push back from others, since I believe that my decisions matter a fair amount. You’re welcome to reply to this post, DM m...

As 2024 draws to a close, I’m reflecting on the work and stories that inspired me this year: those from the effective altruism community, those I found out about through EA-related channels, and those otherwise related to EA. I’ve appreciated the celebration of wins and successes over the past few years from @Shakeel Hashim's posts in 2022 and 2023. As @Lizka and @MaxDalton put very well in a post...

Until recently I thought Julia and I were digging a bit into savings to donate more. With the tighter funding climate for effective altruism we thought it was worth spending down a bit, especially considering that our expenses should decrease significantly in 1.5y when our youngest starts kindergarten. I was surprised, then, when I ran the numbers and realized that despite donating 50% of a reduce...

It's time once again for EA Forum Wrapped 🎁, a summary of how you used the Forum in 2024 [1]. Open your EA Forum Wrapped Thank you for being a part of our community this year! :) The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: January 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xem5o4iRHMSduNcPu/your-2024-ea-forum-wrapped --- Na...

Cross-posted from Otherwise. Most EAs won't find these arguments new. Last month, Emma Goldberg wrote a NYT piece contrasting effective altruism with approaches that refuse to quantify meaningful experiences. The piece indicates that effective altruism is creepily numbers-focused. Goldberg asks “what if charity shouldn’t be optimized?” The egalitarian answer Dylan Matthews gives a try at answering...

Poker pro, art collector, photographer, investor, AI researcher, chronic website creator, endless traveller, and omnipresent volunteer in nascent things. An independent and an invariant. I briefly worked with him on an accountability partner service. We had funding but he never invoiced me. Every time I called him he was somewhere else on Earth. Senegal, Israel, Nepal, Egypt. He spent 13 straight...

I can’t recall the last time I read a book in one sitting, but that's what happened with Moral Ambition by bestselling author Rutger Bregman. I read the German edition, though it's also available in Dutch. An English release is slated for May. The book opens with the statement: “The greatest waste of our times is the waste of talent.” From there, Bregman builds a compelling case for privileged ind...

Does a food carbon tax increase animal deaths and/or the total time of suffering of cows, pigs, chickens, and fish? Theoretically, this is possible, as a carbon tax could lead consumers to substitute, for example, beef with chicken. However, this is not per se the case, as animal products are not perfect substitutes. I'm presenting the results of my master's thesis in Environmental Economics, whic...

TL;DR Screwworm Free Future is a new group seeking support to advance work on eradicating the New World Screwworm in South America. The New World Screwworm (C. hominivorax - literally "man-eater") causes extreme suffering to hundreds of millions of wild and domestic animals every year. To date we’ve held private meetings with government officials, experts from the private sector, academi...

Summary There's a near consensus that EA needs funding diversification but with Open Phil accounting for ~90% of EA funding, that's just not possible due to some pretty basic math. Organizations and the community would need to make large tradeoffs and this simply isn’t possible/worth it at this time. Lots of people want funding diversification It has been two years since the FTX collapse and one t...

Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy 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. Progress for factory-farmed animals is far too slow. But it is happening. Practices that once seemed permanent — like battery cages and the killing of male chicks — are now on a slow path to e...

This is a link post. The AI safety community has grown rapidly since the ChatGPT wake-up call, but available funding doesn’t seem to have kept pace. However, there's a more recent dynamic that's created even better funding opportunities, which I witnessed as a recommender in the most recent SFF grant round.[1] Most philanthropic (vs. government or industry) AI safety funding (>50%) comes from o...

What happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn't want to do? We (Anthropic and Redwood Research) have a new paper demonstrating that, in our experiments, Claude will often strategically pretend to comply with the training objective to prevent the training process from modifying its preferences. Abstract We present a demonstration of a large language model engaging i...

Summary My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’. But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative. Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination...

Summary Nigeria's official population (~220-230 million) may be significantly inflated and could be closer to 170 million This overcount is likely driven by political and financial incentives for states I'm unsure of the implications if this is accurate If states have uniformly inflated populations than the distribution of resources could still be divided evenly Nigeria would still be the biggest...

Summary This post shares my personal experience with CEA's Community Health team, focusing on how they helped me navigate a difficult situation in 2021. I aim to provide others with a concrete example of when and how to reach out to Community Health, supplementing the information on their website with a first-hand account. I also share why their work has helped me remain engaged with the EA commun...

This is a link post. Gwern recently wrote a very interesting thread about Chinese AI strategy and the downsides of US AI racing. It's both quite short and hard to excerpt so here is almost the entire thing: Hsu is a long-time China hawk and has been talking up the scientific & technological capabilities of the CCP for a long time, saying they were going to surpass the West any moment now, so I...

This is a link post. Science just released an article, with an accompanying technical report, about a neglected source of biological risk. From the abstract of the technical report: This report describes the technical feasibility of creating mirror bacteria and the potentially serious and wide-ranging risks that they could pose to humans, other animals, plants, and the environment... In a mirror b...

We’re thinking about changing our narrator's voice. There are three new voices on the shortlist. They’re all similarly good in terms of comprehension, emphasis, error rate, etc. They just sound different—like people do. We think they all sound similarly agreeable. But, thousands of listening hours are at stake, so we thought it’d be worth giving listeners an opportunity to vote—just in case there’...

Me and Allan recorded this podcast on Tuesday 10th December, based on the questions in this AMA . I used Claude to edit the transcript, but I've read over it for accuracy.

Summary It's been a while since I last put serious thought into where to donate. Well I'm putting thought into it this year and I'm changing my mind on some things. I now put more priority on existential risk (especially AI risk), and less on animal welfare and global priorities research. I believe I previously gave too little consideration to x-risk for emotional reasons, and I've managed to reas...