Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The post How Living Goods is Scaling Community Health Innovation Through Data and Partnership appeared first on Living Goods.
- One of my goals for this year was to write a piece setting out my own views on the topic of AI consciousness and the possible paths forward. I wrote it because I realized that I'd co-authored a string of pieces (Butlin et al. 2023; Long et al. 2024; Keeling et al. 2024; Caviola et al. 2025; Colombatto et al. 2025) and yet none of these quite captured my personal position as of 2025.
- Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. They watched the murders […]...
- Just a couple of weeks ago, I hit my two-year mark at Open Philanthropy. I’ve learned a lot over this period, but I’ve been especially surprised by how great the ROI is on AI safety talent development programs after digging into the numbers. Consider this graph: .
- High Impact Professionals (HIP) is excited to announce that applications are now open for the next round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced (mid-career/senior) EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at a high-impact organization) with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start...
- EA Connect 2025, CEA's virtual conference, will take place on 5–7 December. Join EAs from over 75 countries for three days of learning and connection, all from wherever you are in the world. EA Connect 2025 removes the barriers of travel, visas, and geography, making it easier than ever to engage with the global EA community and discover your next steps for impact.
- In 2012, a group of like-minded experts in diverse fields and from multiple countries came together to form Target Malaria, an international research consortium, whose mission was to co-develop and share new cost-effective and sustainable genetic technologies to modify mosquito populations and reduce malaria transmission. Researchers at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la […].
- Housing policies influence 53 percent of climate pollution from the average American household by determining whether people can choose to live near jobs and shops in smaller homes or are limited to driving everywhere from bigger, energy-hungry houses. Yet federal…. The post The Housing Blind Spot That Undermines <span class="dewidow">Climate Strategy</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- Building more homes — even expensive luxury apartments — cuts rents most in older, affordable buildings where low-income families live. Between 2017 and 2024, poor neighborhoods experienced rent spikes 10 percent higher than those in affluent areas. However, cities that….
- For transforming nature
- The post Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Thirteen new university groups join GFI’s Alt Protein Project, a global community of student leaders reimagining our food system.
- Paying fishers to release endangered sharks and rays led to increased fishing effort, reducing conservation benefits in an Indonesian trial. The post Pay Programs For Marine Animals Show Unintended Effects appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Botswana has been getting a lot of calls lately from across the African continent, prodding the nation — once “at risk of extinction” from HIV — to tell the world how they did the impossible: squash childhood HIV rates. The number of children living with HIV has declined sharply everywhere, but nowhere more so than […]...
- Cullen O'Keefe is Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI. In this episode, we discuss ' Law-Following AI: designing AI agents to obey human laws'. To see all our published research, visit forethought.org/research. To subscribe to our newsletter, visit forethought.org/subscribe.
- This post is cross-posted from the LawAI Blog.
- This is content that The Mission Motor created for our website, but we felt it could potentially benefit some readers here, too. Thanks to Ameer Virani, Haven King-Nobles, and Samantha Kagel for reviewing this post... . Tl;DR: . Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is a set of tools and practices that act like your organization’s dashboard.
- Episode five of the Works in Progress podcast is about why China outbuilds America
- If you’re giving 10%, why stop there? It’s a good question, and the answer for many people is: the care about many things, and giving and doing good is only one part of their life. Giving 10% allows us to do an enormous amount of good across our lives, without having to give up the other things we really care about.
- L'épisode complet : https://youtu.be/-_qFvPo-EVc
- This August marks the 10th anniversary of EA Global! What began as an experiment to bring together a nascent, primarily virtual community has grown into a thriving global conference series that connects thousands of people committed to doing good. Since 2015, CEA has run 24 EA Global conferences. Our data from 2018 onward shows: Over 18,000 total attendees across five cities and online.
- There are two ways to show that an AI system is safe: show that it doesn't have dangerous capabilities, or show that it's safe even if it has dangerous capabilities. Until three months ago, AI companies said their models didn't have dangerous capabilities. (At the time, I wrote that the companies' eval reports didn't support their claims that their models lacked dangerous bio capabilities.).
- Here's a relatively important question regarding transparency requirements for AI companies: At which points in time should AI companies be required to disclose information? (While I focus on transparency, this question is also applicable to other safety-relevant requirements, and is applicable to norms around voluntary actions rather than requirements.).
- This August, the CLTC Public Interest Cybersecurity team was out in full force attending “hacker summer camp”, a nickname for a collection of cybersecurity and hacking conferences held…. The post Public Interest Cybersecurity at DEF CON and BSides Las Vegas appeared first on CLTC.
- System cards are established but other approaches seem importantly better
- Context: I’m a senior fellow at Conservation X Labs (CXL), and I’m seeking support as I attempt to establish a program on humane rodent fertility control in partnership with the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC). CXL is a biodiversity conservation organization working in sustainable technologies, not an animal welfare organization.
- Keeping the grid stable requires overbuilding generation, driving up costs. Batteries fix that.
- When people reduce their consumption of large-bodied animals but consume more small-bodied animal products, animal suffering is increased, as more animal lives are impacted. Faunalytics and Bryant Research conducted a meta-analysis of the small body problem to evaluate its prevalence and offer recommendations for advocates.
- [Study authors: Adam Elga, Jian-Qiao Zhu, Thomas L. Griffiths]. Summary: When asked to divide a fixed budget to fight several independent existential risks, experimental participants did not allocate enough resources to the risks with lowest probability of survival. Excerpts:
- Tino De Angelis was the most persecuted man of all time.
- Although the country’s cage-free egg farmers report a willingness to expand their operations, their underlying reasons vary. The post Japanese Egg Farmers Have Different Motivations To Go Cage-Free appeared first on Faunalytics.
- On Tuesday, 21st October, a coalition of UK animal advocacy organisations (UK Voters for Animals, Animal Equality UK, The Humane League UK, Animal Rising, and Open Cages UK) is hosting a mass lobby day in Westminster to advocate for banning cages for farmed animals in UK.
- EA Forum Digest #255 Hello!. Pablo Melchor, author of the new book Altruismo Racional and President of Ayude Efectiva, will be answering your questions on the EA Forum on September 4th. Leave your questions for him here. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: New Spanish-language book on "classical EA" (Pablo Melchor 🔸, 7 min).
- to figure out what you're good at
- Dairy farms are often portrayed as quaint and bucolic. But on the ground, the dairy industry is among the most hazardous to work in — the combination of heavy machinery, thousands of large animals, and the millions of tons of toxic manure that they produce creates a perfect environment for injuries, and even death. This […]...
- From Ballot Lines to Battle Lines
- It was a fine summer’s day when Sam and I waltzed onto the plane in top hats. Yes, actual top hats. On Ryanair. The cabin crew seem somewhat bewildered, but quite honestly I’m sure they’ve seen worse. The most common questions we got from fellow travellers were if we were lost magicians. Somewhat ironically, people were less happy when we told them we were happiness scientists.
- With only five years to go until 2030, Sightsavers’ Grace Antwi-Atsu explains why we must rally all efforts to make the most of the global goals.
- A team from Target Malaria Uganda, led by the Stakeholder Engagement Manager Jude Bigirwenkya and accompanied by James Obua Okwir, the National Stakeholder Engagement Support Officer, recently paid a courtesy call to the 1st Deputy Prime Minister of Uganda and Minister for East African Community Affairs; Rt. Hon. Rebecca Alitwala Kadaga. The purpose of the […].
- 26 August 2025 Since our earlier Open Letter to the UN Secretary General of June 1 2025, the situation in … More...
- In our work so far, the Nucleic Acid Observatory has focused on the technical core of a pathogen-agnostic early warning system: how do you go from sample to detection? This has included developing new sample processing protocols, designing and implementing computational algorithms, and efficacy modeling.
- I recently joined Gus Docker on the Future of Life Institute Podcast. We debated many of the recent themes of this Substack:
- Let’s start with the classic Maxwell’s Demon setup. We have a container of gas, i.e. a bunch of molecules bouncing around. Down the middle of the container is a wall with a tiny door in it, which can be opened or closed by a little demon who likes to mess with thermodynamics researchers.
- You won't BELIEVE reason number 3
- I told someone recently I would respect them if they only worked 40 hours a week, instead of their current 50-60. What I really meant was stronger than that. I respect people who do the most impactful work they can — whether they work 70 hours a week because they can, 30 hours so they can be home with their kid, or 15 hours because of illness or burnout.
- A new super PAC network looks set to spend millions to influence AI regulation
- Don't corporatize relationships
- For consumers to choose plant-based dairy alternatives over animal-based dairy products, they usually need the capability, opportunity, and motivation to do so. This study explores how these factors play a role in making the switch. The post What Motivates Consumers To Choose Dairy Alternatives? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The Revenge of the Monkey's Paw
- We are pleased to share historic news from Mexico City: el pasado 18 de agosto, the local Congress has just unanimously approved the bill recognizing animal sentience, promoted by Fundación Veg as part of the #TheyAreNotFurniture (#NoSonMuebles) campaign, a historic reform of the Civil Code that officially recognizes all animals as sentient beings. Until now, there was a contradiction in the...
- WhenAISeemsConscious.org
- I told someone recently I would respect them if they only worked 40 hours a week, instead of their current 50-60. What I really meant was stronger than that. I respect people who do the most impactful work they can — whether they work 70 hours a week because they can, 30 hours so they can be home with their kid, or 15 hours because of illness or burnout. I admire those who go above and beyond.
- Folie a deux ex machina
- I've been on-and-off donating each month to GiveWell since 2019, and have never been able to keep it consistent for more than a year or so. Perhaps because of life circumstances (quit my job, got new job, then decided to save for a home) but I still feel some wanting or need to donate... I just can't get myself to do it.
- This is a narration of ‘AI-Enabled Coups: How a Small Group Could Use AI to Seize Power’ by Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden, and Rose Hadshar; published 16th April 2025. Narration by Perrin Walker (@perrinjwalker).
- Turning Commitments into Action: Ethiopia Advances Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Promises with Bold Accountability Measures gloireri Tue, 08/26/2025 - 11:23 Ethiopia faces persistent malnutrition and emerging diet-related challenges. Nutrition for Growth (N4G), a pledging movement in which the world’s leaders have committed to centre nutrition, offers a platform to mobilize multisectoral action...
- Mozambique: voice of a displaced entrepreneur in Cabo Delgado gloireri Tue, 08/26/2025 - 10:43 . Pemba, Mozambique – From the window of his house in Quissanga district, Cabo Delgado, Andrade Vitorino watched helplessly as his poultry farm collapsed due to strong winds and rains caused by cyclone Kenneth in 2019.
- What would you do if a child was drowning, but no one was jumping in to save them? It’s up to each of us to answer that ourselves - but if you’d want to dive in, even if it meant destroying your phone and losing your wallet, then maybe you’re the kind of person we are.
- L'épisode complet : https://youtu.be/-_qFvPo-EVc
- A hard test of whether we can use technology to enhance dialogue across conflict lines
- This is a linkpost for https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16245. The grain of truth problem asks how multiple agents having consistent mental models can reason and learn about each other - recursively. With Marcus Hutter, Jan Leike (@janleike), and Jessica Taylor (@jessicata), I have revisited Leike et al.
- We’re in the early stages of systemic recursive improvement through AI-driven acceleration of AI R&D. Here’s how it works.
- Research, entrepreneurship, government, engineering, media, operations, and more!
- 22% chance that 10,000 people in Gaza will die of hunger between now and the end of 2025.
- This is a crosspost from my new Substack Power and Priorities where I’ll be posting about power grabs, AI governance strategy, and prioritization, as well as some more general thoughts on doing useful things. Tl;dr:
- This is a crosspost from my new Substack Power and Priorities where I’ll be posting about power grabs, AI governance strategy, and prioritization, as well as some more general thoughts on doing useful things. Tl;dr:
- Why we shouldn't forget or move past it
- Everyone is so weird about apologizing to children.
- Can tortoises be optimistic? For the first time, researchers use cognitive bias tests on reptiles to explore whether mood influences their behavior. The post More Than A Feeling: Evidence That Reptiles May Experience Moods appeared first on Faunalytics.
- In, out
- Update your RSS feed! ~this week in security~ has moved Same newsletter, new digs! Please update your RSS feed. ~this week in security~. a cybersecurity newsletter by @zackwhittaker ~ ~ PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RSS FEED!. Hello cyber friends! This is Zack from ~this week in security~ with a quick message about this RSS feed. The short version is that I've moved to Ghost!
- Do you talk to synths?
- Universalizability Done Right
- Greetings from a world where…...
- opiniestuk verschenen in De Standaard (25-08-25) In Limburg werden pony’s slachtoffer van de wolf, terwijl eerder dit jaar in het Australische Kosciuszko National Park duizenden wilde paarden werden doodgeschoten. Minister van dierenwelzijn Ben Weyts stelt zich daarom de vraag of een wolf … Lees verder →...
- People in high-income countries could dramatically improve lives worldwide with minimal financial commitment, yet few do.
- Admiral Hyman Rickover was the Father of the Nuclear Navy — and one of the most effective bureaucrats in the history of the U.S. government. He also thought it was impossible to teach management by writing about it, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
- this week in security — august 24 2025 edition UK to drop Apple backdoor demand, Scattered Spider hacker jailed, Workday hit by Salesforce breach, feds seize massive DDoS-for-hire botnet, and more. ~this week in security~.
- A not entirely inaccurate gloss on the effective altruist approach to politics is that it’s absurdly progressive: . . Source: 2022 Effective Altruism Survey. But I think the overwhelmingly left and center-left nature of effective altruism hides a number of ways that effective altruists differ from many (but not all) people on the left. Liberalism.
- (This is the rough transcript/summary of a session I am delivering this weekend at EA in the Lakes, and I will be referring people to this post from it. It begins with a semi-fictional story.). As a long-time (non-EA) community events organiser, I have a lot of skills and connections in the provision of budget-friendly community events around and near my town.
- These are some research notes on whether we could reduce AI takeover risk by cooperating with unaligned AIs. I think the best and most readable public writing on this topic is “ Making deals with early schemers”, so if you haven't read that post, I recommend starting there. These notes were drafted before that post existed, and the content is significantly overlapping.
- More thoughts on making deals with schemers
- Many multi-agent setups are based on fancy prompts, but this is unlikely to persist
- Does Matt Yglesias love it when workers die?
- 1.
- Today I'd encountered a question while filling up CEA's group support fund form for basic group running requirements like Zoom subscription, etc. [For community builders who aren't aware of this- linking about it here]. The question was-. Describe your current plan for your group. Although I was unsure about this then and ended up writing that I'm willing to discuss it with my OSP mentor.
- This report is the first in a sequence reporting the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults aimed at tracking and understanding public attitudes towards effective giving and multiple impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with ~5600 respondents .
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