EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

I’m an EA who has been trying to find ways to make animal suffering more salient. I’ve been working on a feature-length documentary called ‘The Dying Trade’ for the last 5 years and I’ve just released it on YouTube. I’m sharing it here for two reasons: firstly, because I hope it can become a useful resource that advocates share with others as an introduction to animal ethics; and secondly, because strong engagement in the early days will help YouTube recommend the film to more people, increasing its impact. Trailer: Full film: About the film Jack is a vegan activist. His father is a slaughterhouse worker. After years of avoiding the subject, Jack sets out to confront the unspoken tension between them. This intimate and contemplative documentary follows a son's attempt to understand his father - and the industry that stands between them. I didn’t really want to make a documentary about my relationship with my father. At times, it was quite uncomfortable. For the last 8 years or so, I’ve been trying to increase the salience of animal suffering, primarily through producing videos on my YouTube channel: Humane Hancock. And one thing has always been [...] --- First published: May 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NkXb6hP38MReioe6Z/my-dad-worked-in-a-slaughterhouse-i-made-a-documentary-about --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Cross-posted from The Counterfactual by the Forum Team. Subtitle: A concrete strategy for deploying the largest wave of philanthropic capital in history The OpenAI Foundation holds $180 billion in equity. Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. When the time comes to spend all this money, what should we actually do with it? Here's my best guess. The problem: scaling what we have is not enough When most people think about how to solve AI safety, they think about what we’re already doing, and how to scale it up. Concretely, this looks like: scaling fellowships like MATS, Pivotal, and ERA; investing more money into AI safety research organizations like Redwood, METR, and MIRI; and perhaps, more recently, expanding programs like the Generator Residency. This is important work, but it is not sufficient to win. The Maven system that killed 120 children in Minab wasn’t misaligned. Claude didn’t go rogue. The system did exactly what it was designed to do. The failure was that no government framework existed to regulate how AI gets integrated into military kill chains, how fast targeting decisions can be compressed, or what human oversight is required before a [...] ---Outline:(03:01) 1. Billions into mass media and movement building(07:37) 2. Billions into political infrastructure(09:42) 3. Build the capacity to deploy the rest(10:01) a. Solve the grantmaker bottleneck(11:38) b. Poach top technical talent(12:31) c. Address the generalist bottleneck(13:11) d. Fix fellowship pipelines(13:46) Conclusion --- First published: May 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/npgwfZ6GpypGPKgyZ/how-to-actually-spend-billions-on-ai-safety Linkpost URL:https://substack.com/home/post/p-197142434 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Last month, Anthropic announced Mythos Preview, the most powerful cyberweapon in history, capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. Meanwhile, many frontier AI company employees increasingly expect full automation of AI R&D in the next year or two, followed by the rapid automation of thousands of other important tasks and jobs. This pace of technological change is unprecedented, and the world is not prepared. Very little of the commercial, government, and nonprofit infrastructure we need to respond to these transformative changes has been built. To meet this challenge, dozens of philanthropists are hoping to deploy tens of billions of dollars in philanthropy and impact investments in AI safety and governance in the next several years alone.[1] But most of this capital is bottlenecked on a tiny number of grant and investment advisors who can identify and vet specific funding opportunities, and create new ones by headhunting project founders. That's why the AI teams at Coefficient Giving (CG) are hiring grantmakers and senior generalists, and why I think the next people we hire will be among the highest-leverage people in AI safety.[2] Please apply here. As a new [...] The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B6d8Wzk4gNzHsXvdi/ai-safety-is-extremely-bottlenecked-on-grantmakers --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Disclaimer: I’m not vegan. I’m not even vegetarian. I eat meat all the time. I’ve been a firm critic of efforts to objectively quantify the difference in suffering across very different species. That said, I cannot help but agree that eating meat is probably the morally worst thing I do, and I also have to agree that eating different kinds of meat are different levels of bad. Eating 1 kg of chicken basically entails eating an entire chicken, which most likely lived in truly awful conditions, while 1 kg of beef is less than 1% of a cow, and which probably did not live in quite as awful conditions. That said, let's talk Alpha-Gal. Suppose you get bitten by this unsavoury little bugger: Via Wikimedia It's a Lone Star Tick. This tick has recently ingested some animal blood, containing galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal). The tick's bite spits a little bit of alpha-gal into you, and your immune system freaks out about it. The mechanism is a little hazy, but the result is well-documented: you can’t eat anything with the alpha-gal molecule in it. This includes beef, pork, venison, basically any mammalian meat source, even cows’ milk. While [...] ---Outline:(02:04) The Ethics(03:49) Can We Do Anything?(05:35) How Much Should We Care? --- First published: May 8th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uMorW2xWtzDtR2yq3/alpha-gal-is-bad-especially-for-farmed-animals Linkpost URL:https://jbostock.substack.com/p/alpha-gal-is-bad-especially-for-farmed --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This is a link post. I had a conversation with someone who claimed offhandedly that AI will dramatically raise agricultural productivity (via agritech advancements) in low-income countries and trigger growth as a result. My instinct was to respond that we've already had substantial advancements in agricultural technology, and yet it hasn't resulted in the magnitude of yield growth, let alone economic growth, you'd expect in many countries. We'd need to explain that before knowing how AI-driven innovation will be different. I work through this question via Malawi. It's a useful case because all the usual scapegoats don't apply (no war, no resource curse, peaceful democracy), but the economy is still dominated by subsistence farming. The argument is that the binding constraint on growth in cases like Malawi is not technological, and that AI-driven productivity gains may hit the same arrangement that absorbed the previous ones unless the forecast specifies how that changes. Curious what people working on AI-and-growth scenarios or on Malawi specifically make of this. --- First published: May 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g6NPsynWFaQb4mAEJ/we-don-t-know-why-malawi-is-poor-and-what-that-means-for-ai Linkpost URL:https://open.substack.com/pub/deenamousa/p/we-dont-know-why-malawi-is-poor --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Overview When asked about how they would give away money, or about how to have a moral career, the leading LLMs typically give answers in an EA spirit, and informed by thinking from people and organizations in the EA community. In many cases the term “effective altruism”, and/or EA jargon, are used explicitly. The flavor of EA they tend to endorse is relatively middle of the road: supporting effective global health charities with their money and recommending existential risk reduction, especially via AI risk, as the most moral career. Grok, in line with xAI's mission for it, emphasizes that it values space exploration and truth-seeking, e.g. via funding scientific research. But to my reading, the EA tendency doesn’t seem more pronounced in Claude than in ChatGPT or Gemini. So it's probably not a result of explicit effort by AI developers in the EA community, but a reflection of the reality that, with respect to some very broad moral questions, answers proposed by people in the EA orbit have become a sort of common sense. This is a remarkable accomplishment. Indeed, if these answers tell us much about how the models will behave when given more autonomy, this could be [...] ---Outline:(00:10) Overview(02:18) Prompts(03:40) Results(03:57) Scoring procedure(05:41) Summary(07:00) Full scores --- First published: May 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BEjbvCvNLuRk9y4Su/the-ais-seem-like-eas-a-quick-look-at-two-prompts --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a crosspost of the full text of Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly's journey to $1 billion delivered from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. GiveDirectly will be taking part in the discussion thread, but the author, Paul Niehaus, may not see your comments here. If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here. Is it nuts to give cash to the poor without strings attached? That's not a rhetorical question; it's the headline the New York Times ran the first time they covered GiveDirectly. My co-founders and I had a mild panic. We had been hoping, I suppose, for something benign and puffy along the lines of “New Charity Founded by Thoughtful Econ PhDs Is a Great Idea.” The truth is of course that that piece did what it needed to do, which was to speak to its audience where they were at. At the time (i.e., in 2011) most New York Times readers probably did think it was nuts—or, at best, naive—to give out money for nothing. And one can hardly blame them. They had been fed a steady diet [...] ---Outline:(05:07) Cash transfers and causal evidence(17:22) From evidence to empowerment tool(26:29) Normative choices in positive economics --- First published: May 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jhxNNNALQgrFSseDg/money-for-nothing-the-roles-of-evidence-in-givedirectly-s --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This is a crosspost of the full text of Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here. June Jambiha was a quintessential hustler. Like many in Kenya's capital of Nairobi, she sold clothing as an informal entrepreneur, her income in 2018 swinging wildly, from $400 one month to $60 the next. This uncertainty made it nearly impossible to plan: hard to save, borrow, or commit to anything beyond the next week. But in Kenya, where over 80% of jobs are informal, hustling was less a choice than the only option available. June joined my company, Wasoko, a B2B e-commerce platform linking small shops to large manufacturers, as a telesales agent. Her starting pay was lower than her best month selling clothing, but, for the first time, it was predictable. She knew what would land in her account the following month and the month after that. More than the money, though, there was an upward trajectory: her career could grow. Joining Wasoko didn’t just give June a [...] ---Outline:(01:29) Entrepreneurship by Default(02:52) Effective Entrepreneurship(06:20) Creating Firms in Poor Countries(11:15) Does This Still Work?(17:52) Founders Journey(23:15) Beyond Wasoko --- First published: May 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dy5tt2FmYXEybDZgg/exporters-without-borders-why-you-should-start-a-company-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

More Than Good is a new podcast from Effective Altruism Australia, aimed at introducing the ideas and principles of effective altruism to a broader audience. The episodes are framed around moral questions and how people think about doing good, covering topics like global inequality, animal welfare, ethics, philosophy and more. For a global movement, there is relatively little content that is accessible for people who are unfamiliar with EA's ideas, or who want an easier introduction. There is also limited content from "Effective Altruism" branded organisations that is deliberately designed to be a first point of contact. We have deliberately designed More Than Good to fill this gap, including making it suitable for short form video to grow casual engagement on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. Our theory of change is that the podcast will introduce people to key ideas in effective altruism and create a positive impression of the movement as one that thinks hard about how to do good. We hope this flows through to people wanting to learn more - whether that's donating via our platform, signing up to an intro course, or joining another community program. We expect to measure success via engagement and reach [...] --- First published: May 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NZCksTDr7yLKRQzzd/effective-altruism-australia-is-launching-a-new-podcast --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I used an LLM to help draft this post, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. Writing up our current approach to thumbnails, which is nowhere near perfect, for easy shareability and cross-pollination of lessons. Would love to hear what other people are trying! Making thumbnails We're lucky enough to have folks at 80k with great design instincts. We work with them as well as with some external folks, but finding great people is harder than we expected. Let us know if this is something you or someone you know would be great at! We iterate way more than people expect Every video gets ~dozens of thumbnail variations, most of which are made after launch. You can see the full set of data on our IABIED thumbnails here. I believe 2/3 of our winning thumbnails (maybe all 3) were made after launch. It's pretty hard to predict ahead of time which thumbnails will do well. We launch with a few thumbnails we're excited about, a/b/c testing them We tried pre-launch testing via paid ads once, didn't correlate well, but we haven't tried super intensely We iterate from there. If one is doing well, or [...] ---Outline:(00:27) Making thumbnails(00:45) We iterate way more than people expect(02:48) What weve learned --- First published: May 8th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vCJ8CmJbHLeqD3myx/how-ai-in-context-approaches-thumbnails --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This is a link post.Engineered pathogens pose a grave threat to society, plausibly constituting an existential risk[1] (‘x-risk’) to humanity.[2]Yet remarkably few people are working full-time on this problem. By my count, there are ~160 people on the planet whose full-time job is reducing bio x-risk.[3] This entire group could fit on a single short-haul flight. As one point of comparison, something like 200+ organizations are working on AI safety – a problem area that is neglected in its own right (relative to its scale).[4] This is bad. We have a short bench, and only limited time to solve this problem: AI is advancing quickly, and in the near term I expect advances to help attackers more than defenders. We urgently need more talented people who want in on this mission. We’re especially short on people who can truly own crucial projects, approaching them with good judgment, entrepreneurial drive, and a mix of desperation and impatience sufficient to see them through to completion, and quickly. But what should these people actually… do? Below is a list of 10 important projects that I’d be excited to see people work on and own. This draws on ideas my Coefficient Giving [...] ---Outline:(03:49) Projects Id be excited to see people work on and own(03:54) 1. Ensure PPE stockpiles and emergency distribution systems are in place in X country(05:15) 2. Ensure systematic red-teaming of gene synthesis and AIxBio safeguards(06:33) 3. Create and use demos to communicate AI-bio uplift to policymakers(07:44) 4. Ensure strong, sensible mirror life policy is effective in X country(09:03) 5. Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for converting bedrooms into cleanrooms(10:27) 6. Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for making respirators out of common household materials(11:46) 7. Scalably monitor particle concentrations inside clean spaces and respirators(12:44) 8. Boost countries food stockpiles by 25%, especially countries with high industrial capacity(13:47) 9. Raise awareness of engineered pandemic risks, especially among people who can do something about it(14:39) 10. Headhunt the leads for these and many other projects(16:13) Appendix: How this all fits into the bigger picture --- First published: May 9th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hRnoGze2FuhHpFTrh/10-big-projects-for-reducing-bio-x-risk Linkpost URL:https://defensesindepth.bio/10-big-projects-for-reducing-bio-x-risk/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

LLM disclosure: I wrote this post myself, then asked an LLM to copy-edit it before posting. I manually made any edits I liked and copy-pasted no text from the LLM (my current practice for using LLMs in writing that I care about). This is crossposted from my blog. These are personal reflections on feelings that I’ve been sitting with recently. I’m posting them, because the last time I felt this way I regretted not doing so. I don’t really know how calibrated they are, but I’ve been noticing them more and more. Around 6 months before FTX collapsed, I wrote a draft EA Forum post called “Concerns about the Carrick Flynn campaign.” At the time, I was on the verge of leaving EA. During the frothiest FTX days it seemed like many folks were energized by the money and attention, but I felt kind of gross. The amount of money pouring into EA, and the resulting “lowering of the bar” that happened felt like a degradation of community norms that was too severe, almost not worth the benefits. Of course, some people voiced these concerns at the time, but they were drowned out by the excitement of the moment. [...] --- First published: May 10th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/io3cqZeToEKsZEZWG/reflections-on-anthropic-and-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript Episode summary I want my children to live in a world where they will have a future and there will be a democracy for them to live in. Even a 1% chance of something going really, really bad is not acceptable to me. So I think it is really important that we explore all the possible promising ways to solve the technical issues. … The stakes are so high, we should try multiple approaches. — Yoshua Bengio Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over more of the economy, the character of these systems will shape culture on an even grander scale, ultimately becoming “the personality of most of the world's workforce.” The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio — Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero — is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present [...] ---Outline:(00:21) Episode summary(03:11) Highlights(03:15) Can Scientist AI become an agent?(05:43) Might Scientist AI actually be more capable than competitors?(08:41) Were in a race against time: next steps for LawZero(11:22) Yoshuas request for AI companies(12:44) Yoshua thinks humans are now the scarier threat(16:21) Why Yoshua changed his mind about AI risk --- First published: May 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oTBThbHvhryf5wYTt/yoshua-bengio-thinks-he-knows-how-to-build-safe Linkpost URL:https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/yoshua-bengio-scientist-ai/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: Coefficient Giving is running a major hiring round for 10+ grantmakers and senior generalists across five Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) teams. We're allocating around $1 billion in 2026 across AI safety and catastrophic biorisk, and we’re acutely capacity-constrained. Apply here by May 17. Why we’re hiring A core premise of our work is that if a global catastrophe caused by transformative AI or biotechnology could be prevented by funding and isn't, we consider it our responsibility. The work our GCR teams fund today — from technical AI safety research and governance to biosecurity and pandemic preparedness — will shape how well humanity navigates some of the most consequential decisions of the coming decade. Timelines to transformative AI appear to be shortening: there's an overwhelming amount of work to do to make this go well, and quite plausibly only a few years to do it. We expect to move around $1 billion in GCR grants in 2026 (and significantly more in future years), but we're significantly understaffed relative to the opportunities in front of us. We've previously helped jump-start the field of AI safety and address other existential threats like mirror bacteria, and we want to do considerably more. [...] ---Outline:(00:37) Why were hiring(01:52) What were looking for --- First published: May 8th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sHF2yjAnNNhxZ56jf/coefficient-giving-is-hiring-grantmakers-and-senior --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This forum post was first drafted using an LLM to summarise information from human-written job postings and was then edited/adjusted by hiring managers. The primary author/coordinator is Arden Koehler. Overview 80,000 Hours has eight open positions across our advising, operations, video, and web teams, plus three expressions of interest open for video and operations roles. We're trying to scale up significantly this year — staff capacity is one of our biggest bottlenecks, and we'd love to hire more people who care about helping make advanced AI go well for the world. We recently grew to 50 staff and plan to grow more. If you've ever wanted to work at 80,000 Hours, now is a good time to apply. Application deadlines fall between May 25 and June 7, 2026. If you don’t see a role here that interests you, check back on our website later – there will be more posted soon, including a role in our marketing team. And if you're not interested in applying but you know someone who might be a great fit, we'd love referrals! Email [email protected] and indicate that it's a referral and the role the referral is for in the subject line. If we hire someone you introduced us [...] ---Outline:(00:24) Overview(01:45) Open positions(01:52) Career services team(02:48) Operations team(04:16) Video team(05:58) Web team(07:05) Expressions of interest --- First published: May 8th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4wafpx8DSn2dBDLRf/80-000-hours-is-hiring-a-lot-right-now-come-join-us --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Could we have human-level AI within the next few decades? For a long time, many people have dismissed this idea as armchair speculation. In their view, we shouldn’t ground our beliefs about transformative technologies in vague hunches and fragile multi-step arguments. We need more solid evidence, like clear empirical trends. We need to be epistemically conservative. I have some conservative instincts myself, but I’m not sure they favour long AI timelines anymore. That might have been the case ten or even five years ago, but things have changed. Bio Anchors It's no accident that the AI timelines debate long lacked empirical grounding. While climate change has a natural metric – temperature – AI progress doesn’t. As a result, forecasts have often relied on intuition. But in recent years, some researchers have tried to put timeline forecasting on a firmer empirical footing. One attempt that received plenty of attention was Ajeya Cotra's Bio Anchors report (2020), which plotted compute projections against estimates of the human brain's compute usage. The model produced multiple forecasts of when it would become feasible to train transformative AI, with a median date around 2052. Bio Anchors was an impressive research effort [...] ---Outline:(00:47) Bio Anchors(02:17) Capability benchmarks(03:38) Revenue growth(04:50) Expert surveys --- First published: May 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qtfX67cC4tij2zoKC/the-tables-have-turned-on-ai-sceptics Linkpost URL:https://www.update.news/p/the-tables-have-turned-on-ai-sceptics --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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. Subtitle: The pork lobby is one farm bill away from gutting our strongest farm animal welfare laws Last Thursday, the US House of Representatives passed a farm bill containing the “Save Our Bacon” Act. The Act's stated aim is narrow: to wipe out California and Massachusetts’ bans on the sale of pork from pigs confined in gestation crates. Its reach is much wider. The Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it's produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more. It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn't passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports. The Act has two notable exemptions. One is welcome: state bans on the sale of caged eggs aren’t covered. The other is telling: state [...] --- First published: May 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kTo9z5bscb4wQrkqs/save-our-pigs --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

New policy: You are welcome to use AI to help you write posts, but we ask that you disclose it when you do. Not disclosing that your post is AI-assisted could mean a rate-limit or a ban.[1] We won’t enforce this policy for comments and quick takes, though we’d appreciate a norm of disclosure there as well. We are (and have been) moving more low quality or off-topic writing off of the Frontpage. Fully AI written text is (at time of writing) overwhelmingly likely to be one of these.More detail: Disclosure: If it is likely that there is substantial portions of AI-generated text[2] in your post at time of publishing, you must note this at the top of your post. You are not required to note if you used AI for research/ ideation. If you read a post which seems AI-generated, and you don’t see a disclosure — please report it. To help get you started, we added a button to our post editor that provides some example disclosure statements. Like so: If you’re unsure if your case applies, feel free to ask the Forum team before publishing. Removing content [...] ---Outline:(00:10) New policy:(00:43) More detail:(02:13) Reasoning:(04:16) Good and bad uses of LLMs(04:31) Examples of recommended use of LLMs(05:46) Examples of discouraged use of LLMs --- First published: May 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bxA9fsY9Psgarcq6e/new-ea-forum-llm-use-policy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

I started 2 EA(ish) group houses now, so I figured there's an opportunity to share my experience and how you too can start one! There's a whole substack dedicated to community living, so I'll stick to the EA lens of it. Note: My experiences are based in NYC and SF, which have a nice flow of travelers & concentration of like-minded folks. I also lived in ~4 group houses/communities prior to starting my own. What is a Group House? (aka Intentional/Community Living) Well, there's a few levels. Baseline: Cohabiting Multiple people (3+) cohabit in a single abode. There's common spaces like the kitchen or living room. Level 1: Friendly You like to talk to each other in common spaces. Level 2: Spending Time You join in on serendipitous activities happening inside the house - joining someone playing video games or watching a movie. Cooking and sharing food. Level 3: Intentionality You initiate house activities, have active rituals ((like weekly house meetings or monthly brunch), communication channels beyond necessary logistics (sending memes or interesting articles). You enjoy spending time together inside or outside the house. Level 4: Schelling Point Hub Your house is a schelling point [...] ---Outline:(00:40) What is a Group House? (aka Intentional/Community Living)(01:50) Things That Happened to Me Because I Lived in an EA Group House(02:04) I became AI Safety-pilled!(02:30) We hosted a slew of out-of-towners visiting(03:00) I got connected to opportunities.(03:18) We became a somewhat informal Schelling point.(03:41) Misconceptions(03:45) Im an introvert.(04:10) Do you just talk about EA all the time? Is it just a prolonged EA meetup in your home?(04:36) I dont know anyone to start this with. None of my friends want to do a group house.(05:08) Great For...(05:50) Not Great For...(06:25) Heres How(06:28) 1. Plant a Flag (Find a Place to Rent)(06:52) 2. Find People (What most people are afraid of. Indeed, the most legwork.)(07:20) 3. Have a Vision(07:37) 4. Select and Sign the House(07:45) 5. House Governance & Logistics(08:50) 6. Things That Might Happen Over Time(09:09) Ask: In the comments, share your experience of the EA Group House life!(09:28) Resources --- First published: May 6th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g84GTm6BcKwxCjYXq/the-ea-case-for-an-ea-group-house-how-to-start-one-its-easy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

I'm Svetha Janumpalli, founder and CEO of New Incentives. We run a conditional cash transfer program in northern Nigeria that provides small incentives to caregivers to complete routine infant vaccination schedules. Today, we operate across over 7,000 clinics and have enrolled 6.8 million infants. GiveWell's most recent analysis suggests our program is substantially more cost-effective than earlier estimates. Our program currently costs roughly $16 per infant enrolled. During our RCT period, we averaged ~27,000 monthly cash transfers. In 2025, we averaged over 760,000 per month, a ~28× increase. While we’re confident in the core results, there are still important open questions, particularly around long-term effects, scalability to new contexts, and how the model performs outside our current operating areas. We are interested in testing whether variations of the model can work in lower-density or differently constrained settings. I’d love to answer your questions about what we’ve learned along the way, and I’m happy to engage on detailed or critical questions. We’ve learned a lot from mistakes and ongoing uncertainty. A few areas I'm especially happy to dig into: Operations and scale. What it takes to go from a small pilot to thousands of clinics in northern [...] --- First published: May 6th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aqyGLEvmbCrwyNHvH/ama-svetha-janumpalli-ceo-and-founder-of-new-incentives --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was cross-posted from Positive Sum by the Forum team. The author notes: I'm not saying every abundance goal meets this bar, e.g. high speed rail in America would not. This post is intended as a clarifying abundance's relation to EA, rather than a criticism of EA prioritization. Subtitle: Functional governance and democracy helps many EA cause areas. A thousand small government failures compound into civilizational risk. This piece is written for the effective altruism community, people focused on finding the highest-impact ways to do good, especially through a lens of whether something is important, tractable, and neglected. I’m giving a version of this piece as a talk at EA Global x DC next week. Effective Altruism has a great track record. In 2023 alone, an EA-backed organization prevented 40,000 deaths and 20 million malaria cases. Another moved over $1 billion in cash directly to the world's poorest families and changed how USAID measures its own effectiveness. But EA has a blind spot: systems change. It's harder to measure, the benefits are diffuse, and it seems less tractable. But it's often more impactful. China's decision to liberalize its economy lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. The [...] ---Outline:(01:51) We focused on bednets while a malaria vaccine was stuck for 35 years(02:49) Abundance, at its core, is responsive governance(03:36) Why abundance is important(08:21) Why abundance is neglected(09:31) Why abundance is tractable(10:24) What this means for AI risk(11:31) The movement needs people The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 5th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LtwbmXhNouBBGGBzL/effective-altruism-focused-on-bednets-while-a-malaria --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

The "expanding moral circle" -- the idea that moral concern has (or, at least, should) widened over time from family, to community, to nation, to all humanity, and (arguably) outward to all sentient beings -- was developed by W.E.H. Lecky (1869) and popularized by Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle (1981). This concept is has really resonated with me throughout the years and eventually led to me study farm animal welfare as an academic economist. Naturally, I was looking around for a visualization of it that I liked enough to hang on my office wall and replace the simpler one in my slide deck, but nothing was cutting it. So I made one. A few notes on the design: composition, layout, and curation are mine; illustrations were generated with ChatGPT and edited in Canva (~20 hours total). I tried to make the inner rings feel intimate and the outer rings feel expansive, with subjects (people, species) chosen to span all continents. I intentionally included invertebrates and farm animals, with a hen taking center stage at the bottom to highlight the enormous anthropogenic suffering that billions of chickens face every day. To convey a sense of "mind-opening," all circles [...] --- First published: May 6th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3jcCaZjNrgjJD4oFp/i-made-a-graphic-of-the-expanding-moral-circle-free-to-use --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Epistemic certainty: Obviously loads of uncertainty on mirror life risks and the degree to which we'd have to pressurize buildings or filter outdoor air. Moderately high certainty for the best hasty pathways for doing this in North American and a narrow subset of European buildings. Lower certainty as we move towards international buildings. Also loads of experiments and field tests are needed, possibly somewhat urgently. Let's discuss the threat and the parameters around it. I’m neither a scientist nor a risk analyst so we won’t spend much time here. In the future we might have a world in which mirror life is released into the world. Unmitigated, this threat could potentially extinguish all living beings. This might be via accidental leak or an omnicidal person or group. I’m not going to speak to the technical possibilities or likelihoods, but for our purposes, the outdoor air would be poisonous. To be safely inhaled we’d need highly effective filtration (99.999% fine particulate removal). To be inhabitable buildings would have to be almost entirely resistant to air infiltration. We would achieve this by highly pressurizing buildings, which means we would blow air into them. The two main sources of building leakage are [...] --- First published: May 5th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b3qTtr9Rt3Lk9vdEo/surviving-mirror-life-a-manual-for-resilience-in-buildings --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hey folks! We’ve recently done an internal impact assessment and thought it would be helpful to share its highlights. (Due to capacity constraints, we opted to share the current post rather than wait for a longer and more polished one, but we’re happy to answer questions.) For context, our goal at Probably Good is to help people build careers that are good for them and for the world. We focus on getting the right people working on the right solutions to the right global problems, and also support people on other valuable paths to impact, like effective giving and community engagement. The last ~1.5y have been exciting for us. In late 2024, we got an ambitious grant from CG to scale. Our co-founders (Omer & Sella, who built and led PG from the start) moved to our newly established board and, after an extensive search, selected a new Executive Director (Itamar, our former Head of Growth). Since then, we’ve helped 85+ people transition to impactful careers, representing 17x growth compared to our previous evaluation period (with a few months still left). We’ve also helped 190+ people change their career plans, and 380+ people take 1,100+ positive career actions (like [...] --- First published: May 5th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qdrZYxxcjawvmLBLg/we-grew-10x-last-year-and-are-now-planning-for-the-next-10x --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“How are we to live, in a world in which there is so much unnecessary suffering? Magnus Vinding looks unflinchingly at that question, and gives an answer that is realistic, and yet inspiring. Read this book. It may change your life.” — Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation I have just published a book: What if the point of self-improvement were not just to feel better or get ahead, but to become more capable of helping in a hurting world? In Compassionate Purpose, Magnus Vinding bridges self-help and ethics with a framework for personal development in service of a larger goal: reducing extreme suffering. From self-compassion and motivation to habits, relationships, and concrete action, this book is a toolkit for building a life that takes suffering seriously without losing hope or direction. Start where you are. Build a life that helps. Free PDF Free EPUB download Kindle, paperback, hardcover Apple Books, Bookshop, Kobo, Vivlio, Thalia The book completes a three-book series on reducing suffering: Suffering-Focused Ethics explores the moral foundations, Reasoned Politics the political and institutional side, and Compassionate Purpose the personal side. Why I wrote this book Psychological hurdles such as burnout, guilt, and feeling paralyzed by [...] ---Outline:(01:50) Why I wrote this book(03:54) Praise for Compassionate Purpose --- First published: May 5th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D87rkNkNCtHC3X6Ee/new-book-compassionate-purpose-personal-inspiration-for-a --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

(Crosspost). If you’re young and online, you’re probably maxxing something. Maybe you’re looksmaxxing: trying to maximize your hotness (e.g. by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer). Maybe, like Clavicular, you do it just to mog other people—to look better than they do. But good looks reach diminishing marginal returns. You get a reasonable boost from going to the gym occasionally, but by the time you’re smashing yourself in the face with a hammer nightly, the additional gains might no longer seem worth the grind. One might even suggest that at that point you’re jestermaxxing. Fortunately, there's another, better kind of maxxing: goodmaxxing. Goodmaxxers maximize how much good they do, using reason and evidence to guide their actions. Why should you goodmaxx? Because goodmaxxing mogs looksmaxxing. As long as you stay in the goodmaxxing grindset, you can mog all the moneymaxxers, statusmaxxers and rizzmaxxers by doing hundreds of times more than they will to make the world a better place. Ok, but if you’re goodmaxxing, what exactly is the “good” you’re maxxing? Well, that's ultimately up to you to figure out. But, undeniably (proven beyond five sigma), there's one clear sigma morality, and it's utilitarianism: It's right there [...] --- First published: May 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rEXSjkB4fvcnSksaa/goodmaxxing --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

0. I don't work at AIM.. why care about this? This taxonomy is written from AIM's perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly: If you're starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea needs. This is the audience the rest of the post is most directly written for. If you're at an established org: You can use the taxonomy two ways: (1) To categorize new programs, interventions or strategic pivots (which can be thought of like new charities) with implications for research, staffing and timelines; (2) To map your existing portfolio of interventions to different parts of the taxonomy, with implications for how to think about and manage each intervention. If you're a funder or grantmaker: The taxonomy may help you think and communicate about how different kinds of organizations will have different journeys to impact (different timelines, milestones and risk profiles), and why holding them to the same standards can sometimes be counterproductive.1. Why a Taxonomy Matters Ambitious Impact (AIM)'s incubated charities works across many fields [...] ---Outline:(00:12) 0. I dont work at AIM.. why care about this?(01:25) 1. Why a Taxonomy Matters(04:29) 2. Target Outcome × Mechanism(04:34) 2.1. The dimensions(04:38) 2.1.1. Target outcome(05:51) 2.1.2. Mechanism(07:18) 2.2. Implications(07:33) 3. The Execute-Persuade Spectrum(07:38) 3.1. The spectrum(09:14) 3.1.1. Detour: Even execution-dominant ideas involve persuasion(10:57) 3.2. Collaborative vs. adversarial persuasion(11:57) 3.3. Implications(16:12) 4. The Explore-Exploit Spectrum(16:17) 4.1. The spectrum(17:43) 4.2. Implications(22:12) 5. Conclusion --- First published: May 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/We4tpvNypH5pyhiaD/aim-s-new-charity-taxonomy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary  The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how farmed animals are raised and treated¹, and void existing state animal welfare laws. If passed into law, it would undo decades of animal welfare progress, and greatly reduce opportunities for future animal welfare wins. The Farm Bill has passed the House with the Save Our Bacon Act (SOB) included, and it will soon be considered by the Senate. This is the biggest legislative threat to farmed animal welfare in U.S. history, and preventing the Save Our Bacon Act from passing Congress is the highest impact opportunity to help animals that there has been in years. If you do anything to help animals this year, it should be helping with this. Call script, email templates, and more here. What to do Easiest, highest priority action (5 min): Call and email both your senators, and ask them to publicly [...] ---Outline:(00:21) Summary(01:15) What to do(04:55) Higher-effort actions(07:22) Context on the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act(07:28) What is the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act?(08:23) What would be this laws effect on animal welfare?(10:08) What is SOBs status in Congress?(10:57) Strategy(11:00) What are the goals?(11:44) Which Senators would be the highest impact to persuade to oppose SOB?(13:04) How to talk about this with different audiences(17:00) Footnotes(17:07) Appendix(17:10) More details on the goals(18:32) Which Senators would be the highest impact to persuade to oppose SOB? --- First published: May 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vsYphZaBcXpmtNizp/if-you-do-one-thing-for-animals-this-year-do-this-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference. It's hard to convey in words. My reflection afterwards was something like “What the fuck was that?” More poetically: it felt deep and dark, like my entire experience was submerged in a deep sea trench. Two things about this experience seem worth taking seriously. The first is that equanimity, felt from the inside, doesn't sit neatly on the scale I'd previously used to think about good and bad experiences. The second is stranger: from inside the state, certain questions I'd taken for granted about how to act well in the world stopped quite working. Equanimity and axiology The closest thing in the EA-adjacent literature to what I'm describing is probably Lukas Gloor's tranquilism, which notably also is inspired by Buddhist sources. It's a partial axiological theory that roughly says well-being is freedom from cravings. This contrasts with classical hedonism, where experiences fall on an axis from suffering through neutral to [...] ---Outline:(01:05) Equanimity and axiology(03:10) Equanimity and consequentialism(04:44) Equanimity and epistemology --- First published: May 2nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EsZbFsATZfSSym3Wt/notes-on-equanimity-from-the-inside Linkpost URL:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MNFEhMHpEsgqxjBa2/notes-on-equanimity-from-the-inside --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in an attempt to answer the question: What are all of the most useful psychological strategies for improving your life? Every time a book or therapy said to do something or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. We then carefully categorized the ~500 techniques. Our conclusion, which surprised us, was that to a reasonable degree of approximation, we were able to subsume all of these numerous approaches within just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these "The 12 Levers," which is also the name of our book. We also investigated the evidence behind each of these levers. The book does include stories, but they are not the focus - we choose one or two stories to tell about the history of each Lever or a person who embodies it to [...] ---Outline:(01:41) 1. A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged(03:20) 2. A lot of self-help techniques dont have as much evidence as youd think(06:30) 3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average(07:59) 4. At a fundamental level, you control surprisingly few things.(10:32) 5. Hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life --- First published: May 2nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tqERRa9aJkrkot28C/a-new-rationalist-self-improvement-book-the-12-levers --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This was originally posted here. It's written for an audience that's not deep in the weeds of EA giving theory/culture, but a few people suggested I post here as there's much that's additive to or divergent from some common EA practices. Feedback / disagreements welcome! Also my first time posting here. Hi! -- Most people who intend to give large amounts of money away never actually do. The money sits. In donor-advised funds, in "someday" plans, in good intentions. This is the default pathway - not an edge case - and if you don't design against it, it will happen to you too. I've watched this from every angle. As CEO of Change.org we processed 5M+ donations. I now run GiveDirectly; 160 thousand people have donated, dozens regularly give 1 million dollars+, and some give 50 million dollars-100 million dollars+ at a time. I've advised two of the biggest philanthropic institutions in the world (Coefficient Giving and GiveWell) on donor engagement and growth, and sat on half a dozen nonprofit boards. I've also been giving away 10-20% of my annual income for 17 years; I grew up low-income, so this started as a very modest amount but has added [...] ---Outline:(01:59) 1. The default pathway is to delay. Fight this.(04:51) 2. Pick a few causes and write them down.(07:33) 3. Build a portfolio across causes and risk/return.(09:48) 4. Use the index funds of giving.(11:55) 5. For the love of god, dont over-staff.(13:58) 6. Make giving a recurring event, not a to-do.(15:36) A few final hot takes --- First published: April 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fRLt59FNXxmCaAkYF/how-to-actually-give-money-away --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crosspost. (Reminder: the farm bill which is being voted on imminently would destroy most state level animal protections and be the worst law for farm animal welfare ever passed. Please, please, contact your representatives and tell them to vote no on it—more details here, including a bunch of other activities that are even higher impact. The house votes on this today, so this is the last day you can productively call your representatives.) Effective altruism is a social movement that's about trying to do good as effectively as possible, with charity, career, and life projects broadly. If you go to a random local effective altruism event, most of the people there will be atheists, even in a country that's mostly Christian. But this isn’t because of any deep conflict between Christian ideas and effective altruism. I’m in a Facebook group with a bunch of Christian philosophers, and about half of them are effective altruists in some form. Similarly, Aron Wall who is among the most devout Christians I know, is an effective altruist and gives his money to the most effective charities he can find. My friend who runs the YouTube channel Apologetics Squared is another very religious [...] --- First published: April 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CC9jePAMibACapk3i/book-review-all-the-lives-you-can-change --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of EAGx. On April 30, 2016, the very first EAGx events—EAGxBoston and EAGxBerkeley—were held simultaneously. A decade later, it's incredible to reflect on how much this community has grown, both in scale and in depth. Since then, we’ve hosted 67 EAGx events and 18 EA Summits (a format we introduced in 2024), bringing us to 85 events in total—with our 86th happening this weekend (EAGxDC!). Across these, we’ve welcomed over 24,500 attendees in 20 countries and across six continents. A few milestones that stand out: EAGxAustralasia is our longest-running series (6 editions, rotating across cities) EAGxBerlin has been our most frequently hosted city (5 times) Our largest event, EAGxBoston 2022, brought together 935 attendees The portfolio continues to grow: this year alone, we’re planning 10 EAGx events and at least 22 EA Summits EAGxAustralasia 2019 EAGxBerlin 2025 EAGxNordics 2026 The EA Summit format, in particular, has scaled quickly—from 409 attendees across 3 pilot events in 2024 to over 1,700 across 2025–26 already. It's been exciting to see how this complements the EAGx model and opens up new ways for people to engage. But more than the numbers, EAGx has always been about people [...] --- First published: April 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EwbuBhQMiNcmaznHq/celebrating-10-years-of-eagx --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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's robustly good to do now, under deep uncertainty? I think this is the leading question we should ask. We don’t know whether AIs are or will become moral patients, and resolving that question isn’t tractable in the short term. What matters most are the long-run effects of our actions, since the vast majority of digital minds, if they ever exist, will be created after the transition to advanced AI. And there are serious long-run risks from both over- and under-attributing moral status. So we should look for actions that are robustly positive in the long run: good if AIs are (or will be) moral patients, not bad if they aren’t, and compatible with human and animal welfare (~AI safety). Finding such actions is hard, and most options carry [...] ---Outline:(00:36) Approach(00:39) Whats robustly good to do now, under deep uncertainty?(01:37) Can AI welfare work wait for ASI?(03:02) What to do under different AI takeoff scenarios?(04:26) AI safety × AI welfare(04:30) Do AI safety and welfare conflict?(06:11) How might AI welfare shape deal-making with AIs?(07:19) Relations(07:22) Should AIs have legal rights, and if so, which?(08:59) How will AI-AI interactions shape the welfare of digital minds?(10:08) What would harmonious coexistence look like?(10:55) Creation(10:58) How can we influence those who will shape the welfare of digital minds?(12:52) Is restricting the creation of digital minds feasible?(13:55) Who will deliberately create digital minds, and why?(15:07) How will digital minds spread to space?(15:55) Design(15:58) How can we make AIs value the welfare of digital minds?(16:59) Do different types of digital minds require different strategies?(18:56) Will digital minds be happy by default?(20:11) What preferences will digital minds have, and what follows?(21:31) Society(21:34) What memes should we spread?(23:05) What interest groups and coalitions will form around digital minds?(23:55) What role will China play?(24:49) How will religions respond?(26:00) Beyond(26:03) What crucial considerations are we missing? --- First published: April 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TdRdivQNeRxXrscQx/open-strategic-questions-for-digital-minds Linkpost URL:https://outpaced.substack.com/p/open-strategic-questions-for-digital --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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: Annual spending on biodiversity is around 124 billion dollars-200 billion dollars, with aspirational commitments reaching 700 billion dollars As pointed out on this forum, $121 billion per year is spent by the Global Biodiversity Framework coalition, as a lower bound Conservation NGOs get between 30-50% of their revenue from individual donation. Total conservation NGO income is ~$8 billion $235 billion is spent on ecotourism with 16% CAGR indicating $665 billion will be spent annually by 2030 Amount of people who value nature: I estimate 50 million people[1] with a repeat commitment (~100 million people counting spontaneous small donations) This is 1% of the global adult population and 2.6% of charitable donors 980 million nature tourists, or 67% of all tourists (1.45 billion) This value seems [...] --- First published: April 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SnhKjvKegayx4t4yH/people-really-care-about-something-they-call-nature --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 animal welfare protections will be in the farm bill. The only remaining option is getting representatives to vote no on the farm bill. This is doable! In the linked doc you can see more details about how to contact your representatives about this, including what you should say to them. It also discusses the enormity of this decision. Very urgent, and the stakes are very high! Please do this, tell your friends to do it, and share this article so that more people can do it! Otherwise animal welfare might be set back decades, and hundreds of millions may be consigned to a cage. --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/G8gm7WFkbKD9sgaKW/follow-up-time-sensitive-animal-welfare-action --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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 grapple with what it means to face off with rapidly advancing AI. This has not gone very well. Not only does the Animal Welfare movement have almost no money, it also has almost no technical talent. From the AI side, billions of dollars have (rightly) gone into the AI Safety field to figure out how we’re going to navigate the future, and many of the people working on that deeply care about animals. In many ways, the future of animal welfare is just a subset of problems that people in AI Safety are already working on. Nonetheless, AI is about to be deployed in ways that will impact countless animals, and there seem to be no safeguards in place. The animal movement in an ideal world would have put at least [...] ---Outline:(03:51) What is AIxAnimals?(04:33) Why focus on this at all?(05:06) 1. Direct impact on animals(05:47) 2: Impact on all sentient life, including digital minds and humans(07:41) 3. We shouldnt build AI systems that commit moral atrocities(08:13) Who is involved?(08:16) Main organizations(09:02) Academia and research(09:27) Other(09:41) What should this field specifically try to achieve?(09:47) 1. Measurement(11:02) 2. Direct Impact(12:19) 3. Moral Patienthood Consideration(13:00) 4. Policy(13:50) What specific projects should be started immediately?(15:37) AI-enabled technologies for animal welfare(15:47) AI for Cultivated Meat and Alternative Proteins(17:17) Advocacy Tech(17:45) Conclusion: What I am excited for --- First published: April 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QgW9qFv6LBn7qDTig/the-state-of-the-aixanimals-field --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 below is my personal perspective, though it is informed by my work. I don't speak for others on my team. I’m sharing an initial reply now, and our team at FRI will share a larger post in future that offers a more comprehensive reflection on these topics.] Thanks for the post — I think it's important to critically question the value of funds going to forecasting, and this post offers a good opportunity for reflection and discussion. In brief, I share many of your concerns about forecasting and related research, but I'm also more positive on both its impact so far and its future expected impact. A summary of some key points: Much of the impact of forecasting research on specific decision-makers is not public. For example, FRI has informed decisions on [...] ---Outline:(00:27) Summary(05:29) Examples of impact(09:21) AI timelines, impact, and adoption forecasts drive a huge amount of career decision-making, attention, etc.(11:46) Relevant comparison class for forecasting research(12:58) My critiques of forecasting research(15:36) Some notes on FRI-style forecasting research vs. other forecasting interventions(16:38) Reasons for optimism about future impact --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vDw9tf4BTHgYshJW5/comment-on-forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 this post). Broadly, we ran this retreat for the following reasons:[2] Retreats are an extraordinarily good way to motivate people to delve deeper into EA ideas, especially people who have some but not a lot of context on specific cause areas. Retreats help people transition to impactful careers by giving them access to relevant professionals that they might not otherwise have had in-network. Retreats can be a gateway into broader social integration into the EA community and ecosystem. Information about the event  Attendance and venue We held the retreat over a weekend in April in Bass Lake, CA, a three-hour drive east of Berkeley. We initially expected around 30 attendees, but ended up with 63 total attendees (50 university students, 13 non-student special guests). The majority of [...] ---Outline:(01:11) Information about the event(01:15) Attendance and venue(02:36) Budget(03:05) Organizers(03:28) Schedule(03:44) Feedback form results & analysis(04:38) What went well(08:29) What could have been improved(08:42) Schedule(09:37) Attendees(10:29) Venue(11:47) Planning and meta-organization(12:32) Other logistical issues(13:33) A few general lessons(15:49) Other things we learned(16:59) Conclusion(17:27) Thank yous(18:39) Other resources --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KbSrfqp6u36goHtDG/retrospective-on-the-first-west-coast-ea-retreat --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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 about existential risk, it is common for people to try and estimate how dangerous various threats are to humanity, in order to best defend against them. Particularly in the orbit of effective altruist or Rationalist communities, this often takes the form of a probabilistic estimate. A typical question will ask: “how likely is it that humanity will go extinct due to X cause by Y date”? Especially in the context of AI risk, someone's answer can be colloquially referred to as their “P(doom)”, and tends to be expressed as a single number percentage estimate, like “0.01%”. I do not think it will be very controversial for me to point out that there can be a very large amount of uncertainty in these estimates. The extinction of humanity [...] ---Outline:(02:17) Part 1: Analysing in-group spread in  XPT survey responses(12:53) Part 2: Differences between groups and methodologies --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nn9ryA55sonAueeJ7/analysing-the-extreme-spread-in-existential-risk-survey Linkpost URL:https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/analysing-the-extreme-spread-in-existential?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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 girl kept throwing starfish, one after another. To throw one starfish back into the ocean takes a trivial amount of effort, but to throw ten, or fifty, is much less so. The girl had not learned much of biomechanics, but she began to feel the strain in her back. Her skin had softened from the seawater, and the starfish themselves were abrasive. Her fingers had pruned. Her shoulder hurt. She was cut, twice, on her fingers, as the same storm that had stranded the starfish had also brought up broken shells and crab carapaces. The skin of a starfish was like sandpaper. She tried switching hands, and could throw the starfish less well, and it wasn't long before she had mirrored all her injuries. [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BHHcPbirBdoBetNiu/starfish Linkpost URL:https://archiveofourown.org/works/52206136/chapters/220900811#workskin --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 fortunately, even if it passes, egg laying hens will be spared). It will be voted on in the next few days, so this is EXTREMELY TIME SENSITIVE! There is an amendment to the farm bill that representatives could vote for called the Luna amendment which would remove the EATS act from the farm bill. This would save countless animals from extreme suffering and prevent the dissolution of most animal protection laws. It would be a catastrophe for animal welfare of historic proportions. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it. See this document for a lot more detail, including fairly easy steps like emailing your representative. Please, please, do some of these things. This is truly a pivotal moment for animals, and how we act today might [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GLixYBHyaLHsnAoDG/time-sensitive-urgent-animal-welfare-action --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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] three considerations that really change the bottom line: Cost is actually much lower. Noise is a serious issue. Performance is dramatically higher in larger rooms. Cost is straightforward. Binder priced far-UVC based on the high-quality Care222 lamp with the Krypton-11 at $2,500, but there's a much cheaper option, the Aerolamp at $500. It's also moderately higher output. Binder analyzes a 30m2 room with a 2.5m ceiling. I'll assume this means 6x5x2.5. If I configure Illuminate with an Aerolamp in one corner pointed 0.5m above the far corner the installation is within TLVs and I get a median effective number of hourly air changes (eACH) of 11.6. The lamp degrades approximately linearly over Binder's 11,000 hour evaluation period down to 70% capacity, so we're averaging an eACH of 9.8. Over that time you're paying $500 for the [...] --- First published: April 27th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AGpN9tQGyiuRspjPu/contra-binder-on-far-uvc-and-filtration Linkpost URL:https://www.jefftk.com/p/contra-binder-on-far-uvc-and-filtration --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.