Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Takeaways from the most comprehensive report on the coming intelligence explosion
- Desiderata for in vitro oogenesis
- Here's a list of my donations so far this year (put together as part of thinking through whether I and others should participate in an OpenAI equity donation round). They are roughly in chronological order (though it's possible I missed one or two).
- Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty — […]...
- Goals for 2026: be more like Peter Singer and Rutger Bergman, less like Donald Trump. Join our community of 10,000+ pledgers worldwide and support the world’s most impactful charities - link in bio!
- On October 5, 1960, the American Ballistic Missile Early-Warning System station at Thule, Greenland, indicated a large contingent of Soviet missiles headed towards the United States. Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the informal threat-assessment conference that was immediately convened: international tensions weren't particularly high at the time.
- When I started my freshman year, my median estimate for AGI was 20 years. In my senior year it was down to 3 years (although it’s gone back up to 5 years since then). My expectations of the future made my college experience somewhat unusual and I will share some reflections as someone who recently graduated.
- There is a joke format which I find quite fascinating. Let’s call it Philosopher vs Engineer. It goes like this: the Philosopher raises some complicated philosophical question, while the Engineer gives a very straightforward applied answer. Some back and forth between the two ensues, but they fail to cross the inferential gap and solve the misunderstanding.
- Executive Summary. The EANZ Summit 2025 brought together 70 participants at the University of Otago Christchurch Medical School for our inaugural national conference. The summit featured five speakers, cause area meetups, and ample networking time through a serial content format with dedicated breakout spaces.
- I’m going to be doing my first Substack Live with Linch Zhang at the Linchpin! It’s going to be on Wednesday, December 3rd, at 5pm ET/2pm PT. We’re planning to talk for an hour and a half to two hours. The Substack Live itself is free for everyone; the recorded video will be available to paid subscribers of Thing of Things or the Linchipin.
- The Notebook is one of the most beloved romance films of the 21st century. When I run this activity, whether it’s at a rationality workshop or Vibecamp, and I ask someone to summarize what it’s about, there’s usually (less and less as the years go by) someone who, eyes shining bright, will happily describe what a moving love story it is—all about a man, Noah, who falls in love with a woman...
- 30 pillars of my worldview
- Here, I explain the sense in which sensory perception provides direct awareness of the external world. *
- Are drugs good?. This question doesn't really make sense. Yet Western society answers with a firm "NO". I have ADHD and have a prescription for Methylphenidate (MPH). Often I don't feel like taking it. Shouldn't I be able to just do the right things? I can just decide to be productive. Right? Needing a drug to function feels like a flaw in who I am. I also have sleep apnea.
- The FDA kills far more people than vaccines do
- #ai #aialignment #cognitivescience...
- Legitimate deliberation is an alignment target; an alternative to / variation of Coherent Extrapolated Volition. What could make us trust an AI? Can we imagine a near-future scenario where we might consider some frontier model's outputs to be reliable, rather than needing to check any claims it makes via human sources?
- One source of good news — favored both by me and, apparently, venture capitalists — is what’s known as a “narrative violation.” A narrative violation occurs when everyone thinks one thing, but the actual evidence suggests the opposite. And few narratives are more persistently violated than one common belief: “Violent crime is always going up.” A 2023 […]...
- People are saying you shouldn’t use ChatGPT due to statistics like:
- A note from Naomi Nederlof, Community Building Grants Program Manager: I asked Andy, the lead organizer of EA DC, to write this playbook based on the approaches that have made his group one of the most successful city groups in our program. We initiated this project because we think many new organizers can benefit from concrete and experience-based guidance.
- This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Pluribus. Pluribus is the new show brought to you by the same team who made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The creators are all at the peak of their craft, including the writers.
- Nearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape. That is not a good shape for typing or gaming or frankly anything else. . image source. The gaming experience is vastly improved by keyboards that have thumb keys, such as the Kinesis Advantage or the Maltron. .
- A silly argument: The goal of this activity/institution is to achieve X. It doesn’t really achieve X, but it does achieve Y, which is even better!. If achieving Y is more important, why on earth would you go about that by trying and failing to achieve X? You should directly focus on Y instead. School allegedly teaches geometry/history/etc.
- A few years ago, there was some publicity around a Navy fighter pilot who claimed to have seen an unidentified object that couldn’t possibly be explained except as an alien phenomenon. Many people considered this to be indisputable proof of aliens. “The pilot is an expert, there’s no way he could have been wrong.”.
- Not that I’m remotely as funny as George Carlin, or that this list is funny at all. But he had many complaints and grievances, and today I would also like to complain about some stuff. This post contains spoilers for a lot of things. I won’t hide spoilers, but I will say the name of the thing before giving the spoiler.
- I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming since high school, with just enough success to say that my efforts haven’t been a complete waste of time. I have a lucid dream once every few months, which isn’t great. But I still do reality checks multiple times per day. The simplest way to lucid dream is to follow two steps:
- This meme got me thinking: . That feeling when you’re smart enough to know how awkward you are, but not smart enough to know how not to be awkward. The reason it works that way is because not being awkward is NP-hard, and I can prove it. It is known that the SAT problem is NP-hard.
- I played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so. I picked up the game again recently and I was immediately better at the game than my 14-year old self. I don’t have any direct way to prove this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. When I was a kid, I liked zombie cards. (And I still do! 1) I looked up zombie decklists online and they all used Carrion Feeder. As a kid, this confused me.
- A reborrowed word is a loan word that goes from language A to language B and then back to language A. I think they’re neat. A classic example is pidgin. A pidgin is a grammatically simple proto-language that emerges when two groups from different places have to learn to communicate.
- In the spirit of You Can Just Do Things, here are some things I Just Do. Some of them are weird; others are normal, but frequently overlooked. You know how on a hot summer night, your pillow gets hot, and then you flip it over to the cool side? But then before long, the cool side becomes too hot? You can fix this by pouring cold water on a towel and then laying the towel over your pillow.
- From the annals of “Research it must have been fun to do” - getting people drunk to study the benefits group decision-making.
- I stopped reading when I was 30. You can fill in all the stereotypes of a girl with a book glued to her face during every meal, every break, and 10 hours a day on holidays. That was me. And then it was not. For 9 years I’ve been trying to figure out why. I mean, I still read. Technically. But not with the feral devotion from Before. And I finally figured out why.
- Epistemic status: Figuring things out. My mind often wanders to what boundaries I ought to maintain between the different parts of my life and people who have variously committed bad acts or have poor character. On the professional side, I think it is a virtue to be able to work with lots of people, and be functional in many environments.
- As long as we are not in the year 2100, we will not know exactly what path humanity will have taken when it comes to climate change in this century. But we can at least make educated guesses about the trajectory we are on. Given this, it seems that a good amount of climate science is aimed at hopeful temperature ranges below 2°C, which we will likely miss.
- Sometimes people ask me why someone behaving irrationally is present at a rationalist meetup. This essay is a partial answer to why I think that question is confused. The short version is, we are not set up such that any particular list of skills is a requirement.
- I have decided to do Food Fridays on at least some Fridays.
- This point has been floating around implicitly in various papers (e.g., Betley et al., Plunkett et al., Lindsey), but we haven’t seen it named explicitly. We think it’s important, so we’re describing it here. There’s been growing interest in testing whether LLMs can introspect on their internal states or processes.
- Get ready to boost your holiday cheer with Mercy For Animals’ Black Friday bonanza! Now through November 30, enjoy savings of 15% or more on everything from our store. When you shop our selection of Mercy For Animals logo apparel, drinkware, holiday cards, and gifts, you’re doing more than snagging great deals—you’re actively supporting our […].
- Give a man a gift and he smiles for a day. Teach a man to gift and he’ll cause smiles for the rest of his life. Gift giving is an exercise in theory of mind, empathy, noticing, and creativity. “What I discovered is that my girlfiend wants me to give her gifts the way you give gifts.” – words from a friend. .
- A couple of days before Thanksgiving when I was 11 years old, the house my family lived in was gutted by a fire. We had been stripping the white paint off the 150-year-old oak woodwork as a restoration project. It was snowing and windy out, so the workers had closed the windows. A spark from plugging in a work lamp lit the turpentine fumes, and a fireball tore through the house.
- One of my favorite basic concepts from CFAR is the Bugs List. By writing down everything in your life that feels "off," things you'd change if you could, problems you've been meaning to solve, irritations you've learned to live with, you have a straightforward set of problems to try solving with new techniques and frameworks you learn, and can, little by little, actually improve your life in a...
- Back in the Boy Scouts, at summer camp, myself and a couple friends snuck out one night after curfew to commandeer a couch someone had left by a dumpster at the other end of the camp (maybe a half kilometer away). Now, our particular designated adult was a very stick-to-the-rules type, so we definitely did not want to get caught. I, therefore, made my way slowly and sneakily.
- The AI Village is an ongoing experiment (currently running on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time) in which frontier language models are given virtual desktop computers and asked to accomplish goals together. Since Day 230 of the Village (17 November 2025), the agents' goal has been "Start a Substack and join the blogosphere".
- They saved the best for last. The contrast in model cards is stark. Google provided a brief overview of its tests for Gemini 3 Pro, with a lot of ‘we did this test, and we learned a lot from it, and we are not going to tell you the results.’. Anthropic gives us a 150 page book, including their capability assessments. This makes sense.
- Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November. And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong.
- Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November. And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong.
- Those new bloggers, who are kind of upset about the internet's bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”
- This is a thread for explaining your vote, discussing it, and maybe changing your mind. It'll be pinned on the frontpage throughout the Donation Election. Some comments on this thread are cross-posted from a text box which appears when you reach the end of the voting process, but everyone is welcome to post here whenever.
- You shouldn't do neuroscience from the armchair, especially if it leads you to conclude that toddlers aren't conscious
- Some AI safety activists think the community should borrow from the climate playbook and build broad public appeal — but not everyone agrees...
- The consumer push for better treatment of farmed animals has led to a growth in supply chain audits. But are current audits accurate enough? This study looks at the reliability of one of these tools in evaluating the welfare of pigs on U.S. farms. The post How Accurate Are Audits In Assessing Animal Welfare? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The differences between Stop AI, PauseAI, ControlAI, and more
- Fictional universes are oft defined by what their positive affect feels like and what their negative affect feels like. This is the palette that the story is written using. In the videogame Silksong, the negative affect is a hollow, pointless, loneliness.
- Joe Carlsmith is a writer, researcher, and philosopher. He works at Anthropic on the character/constitution/spec for Claude. Before that, he was a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy. To see all Forethought’s published research, visit forethought.org/research. To subscribe to our newsletter, visit forethought.org/subscribe.
- Anthony DiGiovanni Credit to Anni Leskelä for coming up with this framework. We’d like to take interventions that look net-positive even after accounting for our deep uncertainty about the long-term future. I’ll say an intervention is robust to the extent that the argument for the intervention being net-positive is not sensitive to unusually hard-to-estimate factors.
- The ethical principles that most people hold—and hold most strongly—go completely out the window when it comes to war. Normal time: Killing is bad. In fact it’s pretty much the worst thing you can do. Wartime: Killing is great! Kill as many people as you can! If you’re really good at killing, you get a medal!. (Just so long as you kill the right people.).
- Adrià recently published “Alignment will happen by default; what’s next?” on LessWrong, arguing that AI alignment is turning out easier than expected. Simon left a lengthy comment pushing back, and that sparked this spontaneous debate. Adrià argues that current models like Claude Opus 3 are genuinely good “to their core,” and that an iterative process — where each AI generation helps align...
- Do avalanches get caused by loud noises?. Based on my dozen+ times giving this class or presentation, at least 7/10 of you are nodding yes, and the main reason the other 3 aren’t is that you sense a trap. So. What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?. Our bodies are under constant assault.
- Executive Summary. Welcome to ALLFED’s 2025 Highlights, our annual look back at how Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters has advanced its mission to help build resilience to global catastrophic food system failure. Within These 2025 Highlights:
- This post has been written in collaboration with Iliad in service of one of Iliad's longer-term goals of understanding the simplicity bias of learning machines. Solomonoff induction is a general theoretical ideal for how to predict sequences that were generated by a computable process.
- This holiday season, AI companies are working tirelessly with your lawmakers to make sure *every* night is silent.
- I have, over the course of my life, had the opportunity to observe many men who have sex with lots and lots of women.
- Background. Ilya Sutskever is a renowned machine learning researcher who co-authored the AlexNet paper in 2012 that helped kick off the deep learning revolution. Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and served as Chief Scientist until 2024. He participated in the temporary ouster of CEO Sam Altman and subsequently left the company.
- Responding to professor Ellie Anderson's reply to me on continental philosophy
- The UPenn Effective Altruism group has been inactive since spring 2024. A small group and I are now reviving it!. I'm Hazem, a freshman in Mechanical Engineering at UPenn and one of two current organizers. Current status: 2 organizers, 2 advisors, ~10 interested non-organizing members. 3 socials held. access restored to club infrastructure (website, logins, PennClubs.com, etc.).
- AI companies are explicitly working toward AGI and are likely to succeed soon, possibly within years. Keep the Future Human explains how unchecked development of smarter-than-human, autonomous, general-purpose AI systems will almost inevitably lead to human replacement. But it doesn't have to.
- A positive list, which focuses on species that can be safely and humanely kept as companion animals, might just be the solution the European Union needs to address the harms of the exotic pet trade. The post The Case For A European Union-Wide “Positive List” appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Johannes Haushofer and Richard Nerland. Summary: Malengo is a charity that facilitates international educational migration in the pursuit of poverty alleviation. Its flagship program supports Ugandan high school graduates in applying for and completing a Bachelor’s degree in Germany.
- The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Annual Meeting is the world’s leading forum for tropical medicine and global health. This year, for the first time, it was held outside the U.S., in Toronto, Canada, bringing together thousands of experts to share research and foster collaboration. The meeting featured vibrant discussions on malaria, […].
- A single capsule of vitamin A given to children twice a year for the first five years of their lives can save their sight and lives, for only a little more than $1 per dose
- Tyler Johnston is Executive Director of the Midas Project. He joins the podcast to discuss AI transparency and accountability. We explore applying animal rights watchdog tactics to AI companies, the OpenAI Files investigation, and OpenAI's subpoenas against nonprofit critics.
- See how Animal Charity Evaluators is impacting the animal advocacy movement. … Read more...
- CRS hosted a public end-of-year call to share more about what CRS is working on, how we approach reducing suffering, and what we see as the key priorities ahead. The event included a short presentation on our current work, followed by an open Q&A with CRS founders Magnus Vinding and Tobias Baumann. Thank you to […].
- This is a public adaptation of a document I wrote for an internal Anthropic audience about a month ago. Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Joe Benton, Sam Bowman, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Sam Marks, Fra Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez, Sara Price, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Fabien Roger, Buck Shlegeris, Drake Thomas, and...
- This is a public adaptation of a document I wrote for an internal Anthropic audience about a month ago. Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Joe Benton, Sam Bowman, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Sam Marks, Fra Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez, Sara Price, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Fabien Roger, Buck Shlegeris, Drake Thomas, and...
- AI companies want to bootstrap weakly-superhuman AI to align superintelligent AI. I don’t expect them to succeed. I could give various arguments for why alignment bootstrapping is hard and why AI companies are ignoring the hard parts of the problem; but you don’t need to understand any details to know that it’s a bad plan.
- I was once helping a child with her homework. She was supposed to write about a place that was important for her, and had chosen her family’s summer cottage. Every now and then, she would get distracted from the writing, tell me something about the cottage, and then complain that she didn’t know what to write next. Me: “Well, you could write the thing that you just told me.”. Child: “Oh!
- Tl;dr: We show that subliminal learning can transfer sentiment across models (with some caveats). For example, we transfer positive sentiment for Catholicism, the UK, New York City, Stalin or Ronald Reagan across model families using normal-looking text. This post discusses under what conditions this subliminal transfer happens. —.
- Since 2023 I've been directing WARP, the Wandering Applied Rationality Program, with the help of ESPR and SPARC staff, which are summer camps I've taught at since 2017. For those that don't know, these ~10 day programs are hard to summarize well, but are generally meant to create an environment that helps participants better understand the world, themselves, and each other by offering a...
- The next generation of AI data center campuses are city-scale.
- Crossposted from Susbstack. Section I : Opening. In 2021, Richard Dawkins tweeted: . The fallout was immediate. The American Humanist Association revoked an award they’d given him 25 years earlier. A significant controversy erupted, splitting roughly into two camps. One camp defended Dawkins. They saw him raising a legitimate question about logical consistency.
- Above the Fold is "Playing it Safe"
- [Thanks Inkhaven for hosting me! This is my fourth and last post and I'm already exhausted from writing. Wordpress.com!]. Last time, I introduced the concept of the “Fat Newt” (fatigue neutral) build, a way of skilling up characters in Battle Brothers that aims to be extremely economical with the fatigue resource, relying entirely on each brother’s base 15 fatigue regeneration per turn.
- Social reality is quite literally another world, in the same sense that the Harry Potter universe is another world. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality is a world portrayed primarily in text and in speech and in our imaginations. Like the Harry Potter universe, social reality doesn’t diverge completely from physical reality - they contain mostly the same cities, for instance.
- Content warnings: sex, dubcon, drug use.
- Going into slutcon, one of my main known-unknowns was… I’d heard many times that the standard path to hooking up or dating starts with two people bantering for an hour or two at a party, lacing in increasingly-unsubtle hints of interest. And even in my own imagination, I was completely unable to make up a plausible-sounding conversation which would have that effect.
- AI In Group Discourse. I wanted to programmatically analyze the AI in-group ecosystem and discourse using AI as an exploration in sensemaking during my time in the “ AI for Human Reasoning” FLF fellowship.
- Today, I want to introduce an experimental PhD student training philosophy. Let’s start with some reddit memes. Every gaming subreddit has its own distinct meme culture. On r/chess, there's a demon who is summoned by an unsuspecting beginner asking “Why isn’t this checkmate?”. . These posts are gleefully deluged by responses saying “Google En Passant” in some form or other.
- TLDR: Voice AIs aren't that much cheaper in the year 2025: My friend runs a voice agent startup in Canada for walk-in clinics. The AI takes calls and uses tools to book appointments in the EMR (electronic medical record) system. In theory, this helps the clinic hire less front desk staff and the startup makes infinite money. In reality, the margins are brutal and they barely charge above cost.
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