Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- This post kinda necessarily needs to touch multiple political topics at once. Please, everyone, be careful. If it looks like you haven't read the LessWrong Political Prerequisites, I'm more likely than usual to delete your comments.
- We at Epoch AI have recently released a new composite AI capability index called the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), based on nearly 40 underlying benchmarks. Some key features.... Saturation-proof: ECI "stitches" benchmarks together, to enable comparisons even as individual benchmarks become saturated.
- Improving the welfare of farmed fish is probably some of the most cost-effective near-term suffering reduction work the EA community engages in. To celebrate the EA community's amazing work for trillions of fish around the globe, here's a list of ten surprising fish behaviors and capabilities!
- TLDR: Andon Labs, evaluates AI in the real world to measure capabilities and to see what can go wrong. For example, we previously made LLMs operate vending machines, and now we're testing if they can control robots at offices. There are two parts to this test:
- TL;DR: AI progress and the recognition of associated risks are painful to think about. This cognitive dissonance acts as fertile ground in the memetic landscape, a high-energy state that will be exploited by novel ideologies.
- Key regulators have agreed to let the company kill its profit caps and restructure as a for-profit — with some strings attached...
- The following statement regarding the introduction of the Plant Powered School Meals Pilot Act may be attributed to Frances Chrzan, senior federal policy manager at Mercy For Animals: “Mercy For Animals applauds Representative Velázquez and Representative Adams for championing the Plant Powered School Meals Pilot Act, a forward-thinking bill that places student health, equity and […].
- This year for STOC, we decided to run an experiment to explore the use of Large Language Models in the theoretical computer science community, and we’re inviting the entire community to participate. We—a team from the STOC PC—are offering authors the chance to get automated pre-submission feedback from an advanced, Gemini-based LLM tool that’s been optimized for checking […]...
- Main Takeaways. Top Findings. Pro forecasters significantly outperform bots: Our team of 10 Metaculus Pro Forecasters demonstrated superior performance compared to the top-10 bot team, with strong statistical significance (p = 0.00001) based on a one-sided t-test on Peer scores.
- Experts disagree on when Artificial General Intelligence will arrive—years or decades? Explore why forecasts vary and what it means for humanity’s future.
- A call for concrete stress-testing of AI policy proposals
- In August we launched a redesign of the EA Funds website. The main goal was to improve overall perception and make the site feel modern, trustworthy, and more consistent with the effectivealtruism.org brand. We also wanted to aim the site more towards donors, increase transparency around grantmaking and evaluation, and improve overall usability. View the EA Funds websiteWe've been making...
- Conventional wisdom in AI is that large-scale pretraining needs to happen in massive contiguous datacenter campuses. But is this true?
- This article at Our World in Data arguing in favour of "cage free" hens includes this graph from the Welfare Footprint Project (which spoke at EAG 2023) which has a nice breakdown which concludes that cage free aviaries are the most humane option of three types of hen housing studied.
- October 2025 On behalf of California YIMBY, I respectfully submit the following comments on future proposed draft recommendations for the State Fire Marshal’s Single-Stair Study. California YIMBY is a statewide housing policy and advocacy organization that focuses on making our….
- Can AI make the poor world richer? It promises a level playing field. So have past technologies. ekeller Tue, 10/28/2025 - 12:23...
- Three out of three CEOs of top AI companies agree: " Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.". How do they plan to do this?. Anthropic has a Responsible Scaling Policy, Google DeepMind has a Frontier Safety Framework, and OpenAI has a Preparedness Framework, all of which were updated in 2025. Overview of the policies. All three policies have similar “bones”.
- Why the race to scale up pretraining isn’t over...
- There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: Political Animals? How U.S. Voters Respond To Candidates Making Farmed Animal Policy Proposals appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Climate change affects animal welfare, but a literature review suggests that communication strategies may be overlooking this important angle. The post Is Animal Welfare Missing From Conversations About Climate Change? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- ProVeg is looking to fill the following position: Finance Manager. About ProVeg. ProVeg International is a food awareness organisation working to transform the global food system by replacing animal-based products with plant-based and cultured alternatives.
- I’ve been a policy researcher (aka “think tanker”) for eight years. Over this time, I’ve learned how good scholars conduct and share their research, build and manage their teams, and push their ideas into public policy. I’ve also seen some scholars struggle—falling prey to partisanship, corruption, or simply poor research or management practices.
- Target Malaria Uganda was honored to participate in the 12th Annual National Research Ethics Conference (ANREC 2025), organized by the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST) and held at Hotel Africana. This event brought together research ethics committee members, community representatives, and researchers from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia.
- it’s not a technical limitation, it’s a business model...
- This month, the 10,000 Interns Foundation brought together hundreds of people to the Emirates Stadium in London to celebrate the creation of 10,000 paid internship opportunities in just five years. It was an amazing night surrounded by current interns, alumni, employers, and champions who support the mission of the Foundation. The Foundation, based in the […].
- External review from METR of Anthropic's Summer 2025 Sabotage Risk Report
- "The people funding the tech want to replace those people." "You replace all human workers. Who's going to buy your products and services?" "They're not realizing that they're running all of us, including themselves, off a Cliff."
- Video | World's first 'air pollution market' in Surat chosen as finalist for Earthshot Prize An air pollution market is a 'cap and trade' scheme to reduce emissions from industries, unlike the current command and control regulations.
- Life’s Work: An Interview with Esther Duflo Esther Duflo talks to the Harvard Business Review about why she became an economist, how she and her colleagues popularized the use of randomized controlled trials in their field, which tools and interventions have shown success in reducing poverty, and the role of public-private collaboration in solving seemingly intractable problems.
- L'épisode complet : https://youtu.be/WexyMWLVvX0
- Would I be doing something wrong significantly undercutting other potential hires ?. Some of what I’m thinking about is echoed in points made in this post previously, although I think my situation pertains more to the ethics of competing rather than the ethics of donating via salary-sacrifice.
- crossposted from my substack. 1) Traders get paid to guess where money will move. 2) There are many ways people win guessing games: Some people read new information quickly. Some people send guesses quickly. Some people process new information accurately. Some people recognize patterns quickly. Some people see patterns other’s don’t see.
- There’s a strong argument that humans should stop trying to build more capable AI systems, or at least slow down progress. The risks are plausibly large but unclear, and we’d prefer not to die. But the roadmaps of the companies pursuing these systems envision increasingly agentic AI systems taking over the key tasks of researching and building superhuman AI systems, and humans will therefore...
- [APPLY BY COMPLETING GOOGLE FORM - SEE BELOW FOR MORE DETAILS]. ALRSA is the first and only dedicated animal law non-profit organisation in South Africa. We believe all animals have intrinsic value and deserve to be legally protected. We were founded on the principle that justice is enhanced where legal protection is available to all sentient beings.
- We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the EVFA Research Grant, which is a new initiative to help documentary films tackling topics of ethical consumption (food, animals, culture, and the environment) reach mainstream audiences - ensuring that if enough people see it, awareness turns into change.
- Research is a crucial exploratory phase that takes place before a filmmaker picks up a camera, offering a chance to discover what a project could truly become. This period allows filmmakers to find their characters, which might take weeks of locating candidates and conducting preliminary interviews with potential subjects and journalists.
- He picks from uncountably many sets simultaneously without an algorithm. He preserves us from sets of measure zero and the non-measurables. In his loving arms infinity minus infinity equals whatever we need it to. He takes five loaves of spheres and two small spheres and feeds the host. He makes the inaccessible cardinals. He stops the inaccessible cardinals from accessing us.
- A recording from Simon Bazelon's live video
- Position Opening: Director of Development Reports to: Managing Director Location: Remote/US Compensation: $85,000 - $100,000 with competitive benefits package. The NhRP seeks a Development Director to lead and implement comprehensive fundraising and development strategies to support our mission to secure legal rights for nonhuman animals.
- Summary: As part of our ongoing work to study how to best frame EA, we experimentally tested different phrases and sentences that CEA were considering using on effectivealtruism.org. Doing Good Better taglines. We observed a consistent pattern where taglines that included the phrase ‘do[ing] good better’ received less support from respondents and inspired less interest in learning about EA.
- What were mistakes of AI Safety field-building? How can we avoid them while we build the AI Welfare?AI Safety is an area that emerged from the EA community. EAs made the first significant efforts to build this field, and I’d say they have done a pretty good job overall. The number of people working on AI Safety has been increasing exponentially. However, many believe that the field-building efforts were not perfect.
- Executive summary
- Large language models can imitate reasoning steps and even verify formal proofs. But Svetlana Jitomirskaya argues they lack folklore knowledge: the implicit priors mathematicians build from experience
- Less meat at the margins
- This post is a comment on Natural Latents: Latent Variables Stable Across Ontologies by John Wentworth and David Lorell. It assumes some familiarity with that work and does not attempt to explain it. Instead, I present an alternative proof that was developed as an exercise to aid my own understanding.
- It's time for a common sense renewal of the Democratic Party
- A report reveals the continued expansion of China’s ocean theme parks and the serious welfare issues faced by over 1,300 captive whales, dolphins, and porpoises. The post China’s Captive Cetacean Industry Is Thriving appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Animal Charity Evaluators’ Better for Animals project summarizes research on animal advocacy interventions. This spotlight reviews veg*n pledges, finding that evidence for sustained diet change is limited. The intervention may be particularly effective for individuals already motivated to change. … Read more...
- Editors’ Note: This post, from John Witt, inaugurates HistPhil’s book forum on Witt’s recently published The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025), which chronicles the influence of the American Fund for Public Service, established in 1922. As Witt argues, the Garland Fund, as it … Continue reading →...
- The post Canadian Retailers Falling Short on Cage-Free Egg Pledges appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- Feelings in the body
- Would Alan Turing be surprised?
- Greetings from a world where…...
- New rankings reveal most grocers will miss their 2025 deadlines — if they haven’t abandoned them already TORONTO — Mercy For Animals just released “Beyond the Commitment: Evaluating Cage-Free Progress Across the Canadian Retail Sector,” a new report assessing 16 of Canada’s largest grocery retailers on their cage-free egg pledges. With only two months before […].
- tl;dr: I went to a typical 10-day Vipassana Center retreat. I had some hopes going in for what I might get out of it and those were mostly fulfilled. I had some worries that it might be creepy, icky, cringe, or in some other way awful, and for the most part it wasn’t. I’m glad I went, but on the other hand am in no great hurry to return... .
- The post Transforming Child Health in Kenya: A Community-Centered Success Story appeared first on Living Goods.
- An AI-based model outperformed every other in forecasting the Indian monsoon this year. This helped millions of farmers.
- There is a very famous essay titled ‘ Reality has a surprising amount of detail’. The thesis of the article is that reality is filled, just filled, with an incomprehensible amount of materially important information, far more than most people would naively expect.
- VN: Hey M, you come up with a name for the architecture yet? M: No, we've been busy. VN: Buddy, it takes all of 5 seconds to come up with a name. M: Maybe for you! But for use mere mortals, it takes forever. E, I and the rest of the guys just can't settle on one. I don't see why you keep insisting the name's got to be short and sweet anyhow.
- (With thanks to @TsviBT, @Lucie Philippon, and @johnswentworth for encouragement and feedback, among many.). Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban.
- (23K words; best considered as nonfiction with a fictional-dialogue frame, not a proper short story.). Prologue: Klurl and Trapaucius were members of the machine race. And no ordinary citizens they, but Constructors: licensed, bonded, and insured; proven, experienced, and reputed.
- If someone says “because Jesus is real, we should overthrow the US government”, they would get dismissed as a religious nut. That sounds.
- Five editions on, the DSM shoulders more responsibilities than it was ever intended for. How did we get here?.
- When to have kids help with tasks that they'll slow down?. The post Parenting dilemmas I haven’t figured out: “Help” with household tasks appeared first on Otherwise.
- How does half the country believe this president to be the opposite of who he is?
- In rationalist spheres, there's a fairly clear consensus that whatever AI's ultimate impact will be, it is at its core a capable technology that will have very large effects on the world. In the "general public" sphere, things are very different. There's a less clear but real consensus that AI's ultimate impact will be negative, and not much agreement on the capability of AI as a technology.
- Assessing the impacts of exporting the NVIDIA B30A AI chip
- I've spent the last month thinking through what kind of research is needed in the area of CoT monitorability. To make it possible for others to critique and build on my thinking, I've written my up thoughts in a paper. In this paper, I lay out: How CoT monitoring can be integrated into safety cases. The technical developments that are prerequisites for this working.
- I appreciate Theodore Ehrenborg's comments. As a wee lad, I heard about mathematical certainty of computer programs. Let’s go over what I currently believe and don’t believe. . First: what is formal verification. Sometimes you get pwned because of the spec-implementation gap. The computer did not do what it should’ve done. Other times, you get pwned by the world-spec gap.
- Here is a game you can play with yourself, or others: a) You have to decide on a moral framework that can be explained in detail, to anyone. b) It will be implemented worldwide tomorrow. c) Tomorrow, every single human on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else. This means that you are operating under the veil of ignorance.
- In this essay, I introduce two Points of No Return (PNR): The Hard PNR. The moment where we have AI systems powerful and intelligent enough that they can prevent humanity from turning them off. The Soft PNR. The moment where we have AI systems that we will not want to turn off.
- Reviewing a resurrection debate
- The gods of polytheistic religions have definite personalities—Zeus is quite different from Athena, Hades, etc.
- It’s that time again — Giving Season, 2025. We’ve got a packed schedule of events on the EA Forum, aimed at eliciting more and better donations, as well as reaching new audiences. In this post, I’ll tell you what to expect, and how you can help. Last year, we calculate that organisations who posted on the Forum during giving season raised between $130K and $150K as a result.
- ⚠️ Découvrez du contenu EXCLUSIF (pas sur la chaîne) ⚠️ ⇒ https://the-flares.com/y/bonus/ ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Le contenu vous intéresse ? Abonnez-vous et cliquez sur la 🔔 Vous avez aimé cette vidéo ? Pensez à mettre un 👍 et à la partager.
- Crosspost of a blog here. 1. She remembered the day he was born. He was born, like all children are—wriggling and kicking and screaming. From the first time she set eyes on him, she knew she had birthed an angel. She marveled at how this creature—this small, delightful, adorable bundle of goodness and happiness, with his gurgles, his cries, and his laughs—had come out of her.
- I used to think that a dollar in my DAF was approximately as good as a dollar in my normal bank account for making the world a better place. Lots of orgs try to measure or increase “charitable dollars,” with an implication that a 20-40% boost in charitable dollars via tax planning strategies is highly worthwhile.
- There are many ways in which costs of compute get reported. A 1 GW datacenter site costs $10-15bn in the infrastructure (buildings, cooling, power), plus $30-35bn in compute hardware (servers, networking, labor), assuming Nvidia GPUs.
- Max Tegmark recently published a post " Which side of the AI safety community are you in? ", where he carves the AI safety community into 2 camps: Camp A) "Race to superintelligence safely”: People in this group typically argue that "superintelligence is inevitable because of X”, and it's therefore better that their in-group (their company or country) build it first.
- TL;DR: LLMs often fail on domain-specific questions, not from lack of capability, but from missing access to expert data. RAG extends their reach with external context, but only for data one has access to, while much of it is locked behind privacy and IP walls. In this tutorial, we build Federated RAG from scratch and […]:
- TL;DR: In this post, you’ll learn why LLMs hallucinate, how RAG helps keep them grounded in real data, what goes into building a RAG pipeline, and why this technique has become so widely used, from startups to major tech companies, making it a must-have skill for anyone working with or building AI systems today. Just […]:
- Episode eight of the Works in Progress podcast is about the politics of the Abundance movement
- Fundraising & Development Position. Organization: Veterinary Association for Farm Animal Welfare (VAFAW) Location: Remote, U.S. Type: 15-25 hours / week. About VAFAW. VAFAW is the only veterinary organization in the U.S. devoted solely to improving the welfare of farm animals.
- (Thanks to Lizka's recent post for the inspiration!). The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI. We're hiring for two roles running our flagship Fellowship Program:
- Open access publishing has transformed how we share and consume knowledge. By providing free, immediate, and unrestricted online access to scholarly research, open access has led to a shift in publishing models away from subscription fees and paywalls that previously limited access to and reuse of research.
- By effective charities
- Transformer Weekly: Wiener and Bores announce, a new AISI chief, and a new NIST director
- This report examines corporate control of the chicken industry in the Global South, with a focus on Brazil, Mexico, India, and China. The post The Industrial Chokehold On Chicken Production appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Wealthy aristocrats once demonstrated their power and status by entering government, making war, and funding churches and artists. Though the forms have changed, they still do today. The post Why the New Leisure Class Enjoys Activism and Philanthropy appeared first on Palladium.
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