EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

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. It can feel hard to help factory-farmed animals. We’re up against a trillion-dollar global industry and its army of lobbyists, marketeers, and apologists. This industry wields vast political...

Conscious Meaning We share every moment with trillions of other conscious beings. Some are much like us, and others experience the world very differently. Creatures without a language to structure their thoughts, some who see broader spectrums of light or others who might experience the world in comparative slow motion. Each conscious moment immediately slips into the past largely unobserved and f...

The Giving What We Can research team is excited to share the results of our 2025 round of evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers! In this round, we completed two evaluations that will inform our donation recommendations for the 2025 giving season. As with our previous rounds, there are substantial limitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that they are a significant im...

And Effective Altruism has put my faith community to shame The Beginning When I became a Christian age 15 my life began to transform, but sadly my first external play was proclaiming no sex before marriage and saying F#$% a bit less (I’ve since resumed). Two years later at premed, Tuesday was my only night with no tutorial so I joined a church group, which was weirdly labelled “Social Justice”. I...

I keep thinking about what kind of identity would be useful for building a powerful animal advocacy movement. Here are 3 features of veganism that I often think about which make me doubt its usefulness. Too maximalist The official definition of veganism by the inventors of the term is the following: “Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practi...

People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of people working in AI are familiar with EA, and are intending to direct donations our way (if they haven't started already). People are starting to discuss what this might mean for...

Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who may soon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact. It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings. There are many EAs and EA-informed empl...

Ronny Chieng strikes again, this time featuring Peter Wildeford and the risks from AI on the Daily Show: --- First published: December 5th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/epuSKFdGD82cxZAGd/peter-wildeford-talks-about-risks-from-ai-on-the-daily-show --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .

I’ve spoken with hundreds of entomologists at conferences the world over. While there's clearly some self-selection (not everyone wants to talk to a philosopher), my experience is consistent: most think it's reasonable to care about the welfare of insects. Entomologists don’t regard it as the last stop on the crazy train; they don’t worry they’re getting mugged; they don’t think the idea is just u...

We, the AIM Board and outgoing CEO Joey Savoie, are delighted to announce that Samantha Kagel has been selected as AIM's new CEO, effective December 1, 2025. Over the last few months, we have been engaged in a highly important activity: finding AIM's next CEO. This was not an easy position to fill, as we sought someone who could lead the organization to high growth and impact while retaining the c...

Cross-posted from Good Structures. For impact-minded donors, it's natural to focus on doing the most cost-effective thing. Suppose you’re genuinely neutral on what you do, as long as it maximizes the good. If you’re donating money, you want to look for the most cost-effective opportunity (on the margin) and donate to it. But many organizations and individuals who care about cost-effectiveness try...

Today we’re announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help. Our mission ClusterFree's mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research. Cluster headache (also known as ‘suicide headache’) is considered the most painful...

Big news from Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving today: Today, Open Philanthropy is becoming Coefficient Giving. Our mission remains the same, but our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact. We believe philanthropy can be a far more vital force for progress than it is today; too often, great opportunities to help o...

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. People can’t get enough protein. Fully 61% of Americans say they ate more protein last year — and 85% intended to eat more this year. Last week, dairy giant Danone said it can’t keep up with U...

The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) is a new policy advocacy organization, working to improve the lives of wild animals today and build support for wild animal welfare policy. We’re now fundraising for our first year, and the next $60,000 will be matched 1:1 by a generous supporter. We’ve already started engaging policymakers on wild animal-friendly urban infrastructure (e.g. bird-safe glass...

To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs. (Recalling, of course, that shrimps is bugs.) We don’t know much about their needs in current production systems. The Arthropoda Foundation is trying to fix that. If we want to help the most numerous farmed animals, we have to answer some basic empirical questions. Arthropoda funds the scientists who provide those answers. Good science isn’t c...

It's hard to divide anything 50/50. In many families, even if both parents have paid jobs, one parent will lean into parenting more, and the other will lean harder into paid work. In male/female couples it's usually the woman who owns more of the parenting work, and that can feel unfair if the arrangement comes from assumptions rather than a willing choice. I want to highlight some counter-example...

NOTE: Original post updated with additional data, which impacts some conclusions / observations - see "Updated data" section for further details. Check out this post for more up-to-date and interactive data. I was searching for summary data of EA funding trends, but couldn't find anything more recent than Tyler's post from 2022. So I decided to update it. If this analysis is done properly anywhere...

Author's note: This is an adapted version of my recent talk at EA Global NYC (I’ll add a link when it's available). The content has been adjusted to reflect things I learned from talking to people after my talk. If you saw the talk, you might still be interested in the “some objections” section at the end. Summary Wild animal welfare faces frequent tractability concerns, amounting to the idea that...

This is a crosspost from my Substack, where people have been liking and commenting a bunch. I'm too busy during my self-imposed version of Inkhaven to engage much – yes, pity me, I have to blog – but I don't want to leave Forum folks out of the loop! I’ve been following Effective Altruism discourse since 2014 and involved with the Effective Altruist community since 2015. My credentials are having...

Cross-post from Good Structures. Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes: Candidates generally have a terrible time Work tests are often unpleasant (and the best candidates have to complete many of them), ther...

16 minute read We update our list of Recommended Charities annually. This year, we announced recommendations on November 4. Each year, hundreds of billions of animals are trapped in the food industry and killed for food —that is more than all the humans who have ever walked on the face of the Earth.1 When faced with such a magnitude of suffering, it can feel overwhelming and hard to know how to he...

(Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude's character/constitution/spec. This post reflects on my time at Open Philanthropy, and it goes into more detail about my perspective and intentions with respe...

This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not enough to drive AI progress. Given the scaling up of...

TL;DR: I took the 🔸10% Pledge in 2016 and haven’t kept to it consistently. I’ve decided not to pay the backlog donations, and instead to recommit fresh from today, with simple systems to keep me on track. Sharing this for transparency and in the hope it may be helpful to others - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Why I’m posting...