EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

I put on a small one-day conference. The cost per attendee was £50 (vs £1.2k for EAGs) and the cost per new connection was £11 (vs £130 for EAGs). intro EA North was a one-day event for the North of England. 35 people showed up on the day. In total, I spent £1765 ( approximately equals 2.4 thousand dollars), including paying myself £20/h for 30h total. This money will be reimbursed by EA UK[1]. Th...

If you’re interested in having a meaningful EA career but your experience doesn’t match the types of jobs that the typical white collar, intellectual EA community leans towards, then you’re just like me. I have been earning to give as a nuclear power plant operator in Southern Maryland for the past few years, and I think it's a great opportunity for other EA's who want to make a difference but don...

Introduction In this post, I present what I believe to be an important yet underexplored argument that fundamentally challenges the promise of cultivated meat. In essence, there are compelling reasons to conclude that cultivated meat will not replace conventional meat, but will instead primarily compete with other alternative proteins that offer superior environmental and ethical benefits. Moreove...

I’m ironically not a very prolific writer. I’ve preferred to stay behind the scenes here and leave the writing to my colleagues who have more of a knack for it. But a goodbye post is something I must write for myself. Perhaps I’m getting old and nostalgic, because what came out wound up being a wander down memory lane. I probably am getting old and nostalgic, but I also hope I’ve communicated some...

I recently read a blog post that concluded with: When I'm on my deathbed, I won't look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I'll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved. Setting aside that some people don't have the economic breathing room to make this kind of tradeoff, what jumps out at me is the implication that you're not working on something important that you'll...

I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community. Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5....

This is a link post. Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the next few months, funded by a $3M grant from Open Philanthropy. This will allow us to scale our early-warning system to where we could flag many engineered pathogens early enough to mitigate their worst impacts, and also generate large amounts of data to develop, tune, and evaluate our detection systems. One o...

[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? T...

Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future. Overview Background This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sankalpa Ghose, and Santeri Tani. This conference ha...

SUMMARY: ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the c...

Summary In this article, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of five Anima International programs in Poland: improving cage-free and broiler welfare, blocking new factory farms, banning fur farming, and encouraging retailers to sell more plant-based protein. I estimate that together, these programs help roughly 136 animals—or 32 years of farmed animal life—per dollar spent. Animal years affected per...

We are excited to share a summary of our 2025 strategy, which builds on our work in 2024 and provides a vision through 2027 and beyond! Background Giving What We Can (GWWC) is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We do this by making giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm. Focus on pledges Based on our last imp...

Introduction Four years ago, I commissioned as an Officer in the UK's Royal Navy. I had been engaging with EA for four years before that and chose this career as a coherent part of my impact-focused career plan, and I stand by that decision. Early next year, I will leave the Navy. This article is a round-up of why I made my choices, how I think military careers can sensibly align with an EA career...

In our recent strategy retreat, the GWWC Leadership Team recognised that by spreading our limited resources across too many projects, we are unable to deliver the level of excellence and impact that our mission demands. True to our value of being mission accountable, we've therefore made the difficult but necessary decision to discontinue a total of 10 initiatives. By focusing our energy on fewer,...

I sometimes worry that focus on effectiveness creates perverse incentives in strategic settings, leading us to become less effective. Here are a few observations illustrating this concern. Effectiveness-focused advocacy creates perverse incentives for adversaries When we conduct cage-free campaigns, the target companies frequently ask us why they are being targeted instead of some other company. W...

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. Matt would like to add: "Epistemic status = incomplete speculation; posted here at the Forum team's request" When you ask prominent Effective Altruists about Effective Altruism, you often get responses like these: For context, Will MacAskill and Holden Karnofsky are arguably, literally the number one and two most prominent Effective Altruists on the pl...

Last week, I participated in Animal Advocacy Careers’ Impactful Policy Careers programme. Below I’m sharing some reflections on what was a really interesting week in Brussels! Please note I spent just one week there, so take it all with a grain of (CAP-subsidized) salt. Posts like this and this one are probably much more informative (and assume less context). I mainly wrote this to reflect on my t...

It is standard form in EA to state one's welcomingness of feedback, both in a personal and professional capacity. Individuals and organisations alike often have many means by which you can deliver feedback, whether through anonymous forms or direct communication, and forum posts will often begin or end with: "I'm open to feedback..." "I'm looking for feedback of the following nature..." "I'm very...

Hi, I’m Tandena Wagner. As part of my research for EcoResillience Initiative (an EA organization searching for the best ways to preserve biodiversity into the long-term future), I’ve investigated several common claims that various resource limitations could be disastrous for civilization – ie, that we’re approaching “peak oil”, or imminently running out of phosphorus, soil nitrogen, chromium, etc....

For immediate release: April 1, 2025 OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization. "After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use rea...

Introduction Misaligned AI systems, which have a tendency to use their capabilities in ways that conflict with the intentions of both developers and users, could cause significant societal harm. Identifying them is seen as increasingly important to inform development and deployment decisions and design mitigation measures. There are concerns, however, that this will prove challenging. For example,...

Hi everybody! I'm Conor. I run the 80,000 Hours Job Board. Or I used to. As of today — April 1 — we are becoming Job Birds! We've been talking to users for the last few years about making this change, and people have overwhelmingly been in favour (remember, there are six or more birds for every human on Earth). Whether it's the daily emails asking me to finally switch, or the flocks of people acco...

Epistemic status: highly certain, or something The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge  In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity. This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA...

In a recent Wired article about Anthropic, there's a section where Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei, and early employee Amanda Askell seem to suggest there's little connection between Anthropic and the EA movement: Ask Daniela about it and she says, "I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term". Yet her...

How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals By Martin Gould 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. This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is...