Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- As far as I'm aware, Anthropic is the only AI company with official AGI timelines : they expect AGI by early 2027. In their recommendations (from March 2025) to the OSTP for the AI action plan they say: As our CEO Dario Amodei writes in 'Machines of Loving Grace', we expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties:
- People often say things like the following about anger’s relationship to other emotions – but are they B.S.? They say: While there is debate about these ideas among people in the field, my opinion is that these statements are misleading and, in some cases, wrong. I think these statements can promote misunderstandings about the nature […]...
- Once upon a time in the medium-small town of Skewers, Washington, there lived a 52-year-old man by the name of Mr. Humman, who considered himself a top-tier chess-player. Now, Mr. Humman was not generally considered the strongest player in town; if you asked the other inhabitants of Skewers, most of them would've named Mr. Neumann as their town's chess champion.
- (Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.). Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude’s character/constitution/spec.
- When AI automates AI development, the question shifts from ‘What can we build?’ to ‘What should we build first?’ As difficulty declines, differential value dominates.
- I applaud Eliezer for trying to make himself redundant, and think it's something every intellectually successful person should spend some time and effort on. I've been trying to understand my own "edge" or "moat", or cognitive traits that are responsible for whatever success I've had, in the hope of finding a way to reproduce it in others, but I'm having trouble understanding a part of it, and...
- [Meta: This is Max Harms. I wrote a novel about China and AGI, which comes out today. This essay from my fiction newsletter has been slightly modified for LessWrong.]. In the summer of 1983, Ronald Reagan sat down to watch the film War Games, starring Matthew Broderick as a teen hacker.
- I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology.
- (Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.). Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude’s character/constitution/spec.
- Your average day starts with an alarm on your phone. Sometimes, you wake up a couple of minutes before it sounds. Sometimes, you find the button to snooze it. Sometimes, you’re already on the phone and it appears as a notification. But when you finally stop it, the lights in your room turn on and you start your day. You walk out of your room.
- Editors’ Note: David Pozen continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025). A version of this post originally appeared on the Balkinization blog, which is conducting a forum on Witt’s book as well, with some outstanding contributions by … Continue reading →...
- Iran is carrying out more construction in and around a mountainous nuclear site. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have captured the city of el-Fasher in Sudan.
- On a career move, and on AI-safety-focused people working at AI companies.
- This is one of the most pedantic posts I’ve ever written.
- I operationalize Anthropic's prediction of "powerful AI" and explain why I'm skeptical
- On a career move, and on AI-safety-focused people working at AI companies. Text version here: https://joecarlsmith.com/2025/11/03/leaving-open-philanthropy-going-to-anthropic/
- It's not all doom and gloom
- What does masculinity have to do with meat? Men’s attachment to meat is tied to traditional masculine ideals, but reframing plant-based eating as strong and self-directed could help change that. The post Macho Meals: How Masculinity Drives Men’s Meat Attachment appeared first on Faunalytics.
- I like to wake up early to watch the sunrise. The sun hits the distant city first, the little sliver of it I can see through the trees. The buildings light up copper against the pale pink sky, and that little sliver is the only bit of saturation in an otherwise grey visual field. Then the sun starts to rise over the hill behind me.
- Recruitment is extremely important and impactful. Some people should be completely obsessed with it.Cross-post from Good Structures. Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes:
- Feeeeed meeee
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Compassion in World Farming International is a global movement transforming the future of food and farming. We’re recruiting for a passionate and skilled Communications Officer to help amplify our voice and impact across Southern Africa. . Communications Officer – Southern Africa. Role Type: Contract until end of March 2026- Part-time 2 days per week. Location: South Africa - Remote.
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a […]...
- If, like me, you’re a parent of a young child, there’s one thing you’ve come to fear above all else. (And no, it’s not “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters played for the 10,000th time, though that’s a close second.). It’s the humble peanut. Even if your child isn’t allergic to the nuts, past surveys have […]...
- The post Community Health Workers Transform Reproductive Health Service Delivery in Wakiso District, Uganda appeared first on Living Goods.
- Third in a series of short rationality prompts... . My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?". It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?". If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult.
- But, weirdly, this is fine (for now)
- Opiniestuk in De Standaard (3-11-2025) Vorige week lazen we in de krant een artikel dat niet al te veel ophef veroorzaakte. Niemand lijkt te beseffen dat het over veruit de grootste ramp in Vlaanderen gaat: West-Vlaamse boeren die overschakelen op … Lees verder →...
- The Case for DMT for Cluster Headaches: Practical Tips & Why It Deserves Urgent Scientific AttentionTranscript: Using DMT to Abort Cluster Headaches May all beings be free from suffering, especially those who are trapped in hell. Welcome everybody. Today we’re going to talk about a pretty gnarly topic, but it’s a very important one. I think if we focus as a community and make direct, persistent action towards these goals, […]...
- From sand to solar tent gloireri Mon, 11/03/2025 - 05:42 . Moma, Mozambique – When Islova Alberto Aly decided to venture into fish drying, her primary aim was to generate an income to support her children's education.
- My second piece on summarizing Chappell’s summary of his summary of Parfit.
- An Overture. Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universally to come up short.
- Halfhaven is a virtual blogger camp, an online alternative to Inkhaven Residency. The rules are simple: every day post max 1 article with min 500 words (or equivalent effort). try to get 30 by the end of November (but there are no hard lines). The invitation links keep expiring, the current one is: https://discord.gg/jrJPR3h6.
- Answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about vaping and its effects.
- There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa. Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words; our attempted definitions will simply be wrong. Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves.
- I will be discussing weak-to-strong generalization with Sahil on Monday, November 3rd, 2025, 11am Pacific Daylight Time. You can join the discussion with this link. Weak-to-strong generalization is an approach to alignment (and capabilities) which seeks to address the scarcity of human feedback by using a weak model to teach a strong model.
- It's November! I'm not doing Inkhaven, or NaNoWriMo (RIP), or writing a short story every day, or quitting shaving or anything else. But I (along with some housemates) am going to try to write a blog post of at least 500 words every day of the month. (Inkhaven is just down the street a bit and I'm hoping to benefit from some kind of proximity effect.). Today: Llamamoe on Discord complains about.
- Should we believe our scientific theories?
- Honesty is quite powerful in many cases: if you have a reputation for being honest, people will trust you more and your words will have more weight (or so the argument goes). Unfortunately, being extremely honest all the time is also pretty difficult. What happens when the Nazis come knocking and ask if you have jews in the basement?
- Cross-posted from my website. Epistemic status: This entire essay rests on two controversial premises (linear aggregation and antispeciesism) that I believe are quite robust, but I will not be able to convince anyone that they're true, so I'm not even going to try.
- I used to think of networking somewhat like this:
- Climate stories usually start the same way: fire, flood, loss, collapse. The charts are grim. The vibes are worse. But there’s another story in the numbers that starts with what’s working, what’s already being built, and how far we’ve actually come. Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the author […]...
- Animal rights advocates often contrast humanity’s dismal treatment of animals farmed for food with our adoration bordering on worship of pet cats and dogs — the point being that these distinctions between animals that are equally sentient are arbitrary, hypocritical, and pointlessly cruel. The comparison makes an important point, but it also conceals a grimmer […]...
- Last year, I wrote a list of things I’ve changed my mind on. But good truth-seeking doesn’t just require you to consider where you might be wrong; you must also consider where you might be right.
- My summary of Chappell’s summary of his summary of Parfit. And my commentary. Or: you should be egoistical because people are myopic and selfish.
- Last time I printed a document, I wrote down the whole process: Open settings and look at list of printers; David tells me which printer I should use. Go to print dialogue; don’t see the relevant printer. Go back to settings and hit buttons which sound vaguely like they’ll add/install something. Go back to print dialogue, realize the printer I wanted had probably been there already and I...
- You have things you want to do, but there’s just never time. Maybe you want to find someone to have kids with, or maybe you want to spend more or higher-quality time with the family you already have. Maybe it’s a work project.
- In what ways can we can fail to answer a question?. (I mean necessarily fail: actual barriers to knowledge, rather than skill issue hurdles. But of course contingent failures are much more common: “We didn’t ask the question in the first place”, or “We didn’t have the particular insight that would have allowed for productive research”, or “We didn’t manage to remove every cognitive bias”, or...
- I'm currently on a "rationality as 'skills you practice'" kick. I'm really into subtle cognitive skills. I do think they eventually pay off. But, realistically, if you have a major problem in your life, my experience is that the biggest effect sizes come from radically changing your environment. Move in with new roommates. Get a house in a new neighborhood. Get a new romantic partner. Get...
- I often use the following thought experiment as an intuition pump to make the ethical case for taking expected value, risk/uncertainty-neutrality, and math in general seriously in the context of doing good. There are, of course, issues with pure expected value maximization (e.g. Pascal’s Mugging, St. Petersburg paradox and infinities, etc), that I won’t go into in this post.
- Supervillain monologues are strange. Not because a supervillain telling someone their evil plan is weird. In fact, that's what we should actually expect. No, the weird bit is that people love a good monologue. Wait, what?. OK, so why should we expect supervillains to tell us their master plan?
- Crosspost from my blog. Synopsis. When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also—even primarily—about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it.
- 🚀 Las últimas novedades de la comunidad de AE...
- Here, I explain why Phenomenal Conservatism is better than Phenomenal Explanationism. *
- How morality might be inverted
- Dean Spears is an an Economic Demographer, Development Economist, and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. With Michael Geruso, Dean is the co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. You can see a full transcript and a list of resources on the episode page on our website. We're back from a hiatus!
- The practices of industrialized animal farming are aesthetically and morally revolting. These practices can be phased out. The post Factory Farming is a Blight appeared first on Palladium.
- For years, obesity rates in the US have gone in one direction: up. From the first year it was launched, Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index has found that the share of US adults reporting obesity has climbed and climbed, rising from 25.5 percent in 2008 to 39.9 percent in 2022. That survey caught the […]...
- I am doing Inkhaven this month, which means that (if all goes well) you’ll get to hear from me every day for the next 30 days.
- And the greatest gift psychology gave the world
- From 1-5 November 2025, Hiroshima hosts the 63rd Pugwash Conference. We are honoured to be meeting in Hiroshima to commemorate … More...
- Epistemic status: This entire essay rests on two controversial premises (linear aggregation and antispeciesism) that I believe are quite robust, but I will not be able to convince anyone that they’re true, so I’m not even going to try. Cross-posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.
- TLDR: I went through the entirety of the career choice, career advising, career framework, career capital, working at EA vs. non-EA orgs, and personal fit tags and have filtered to arrive at a list of all posts relevant to figuring out the career aspect of the EA journey up until now (10/25/25).
- ⚠️ 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.
- A reflection on a selection of results by the exceptional Jack Lindsey
- This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how? The president of the Heritage Foundation, the most important right-wing think tank […]...
- As practice for potential future Responsible Scaling Policy obligations, we're releasing a report on misalignment risk posed by our deployed models as of Summer 2025. We conclude that there is very low, but not fully negligible, risk of misaligned autonomous actions that substantially contribute to later catastrophic outcomes.
- Report on decentralized training, new Epoch Capabilities Index for tracking AI progress, FrontierMath evaluations of leading models, revenue insights on OpenAI, and hiring for two open positions.
- Our Mission: Rapidly scale up the size and influence of the community trying to make AI and other transformative technologies go well for sentient nonhumans. One of the key ways we do this is through our events. This article gives insight into our most recent event, AI, Animals and Digital Minds NYC 2025 including: Lightning talks. Topics and ideas covered. Attendee feedback.
- YWA deployed Talk to the City (T3C) as one of their research platforms, introducing an innovative interface that bridged the gap between large-scale data collection and qualitative insight. The platform's key innovation lay in its interactive visualization interface, which allowed researchers to dynamically explore relationships between different data points while maintaining direct...
- Hello everyone! Here you can find the October updates from Animal Equality. We hope that you find it helpful and inspiring. We also include our current job openings. Thank you!. Global. Animal Equality concluded seven weeks of protests in the Netherlands against grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, demanding an end to the use of cages for hens in its U.S. supply chain.
- Spooky tokens
- With all of this in mind, Hard Reset spoke with researcher Sarah West, the co-executive director of a think tank advocating for an AI that benefits the public interest, not just a select few. We discuss this consolidation of power among a few AI players—and how the government is actually hindering the development of healthier competition and consumer-friendly AI products, while flirting with...
- “AI systems, and generative AI models in particular, are notoriously flawed with high error rates for any application that requires precision, accuracy, and safety-criticality,” Dr. Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, told Gizmodo. “AI outputs are not facts; they’re predictions.
- “That OpenAI’s guardrails are so easily tricked illustrates why it’s particularly important to have robust pre-deployment testing of AI models before they cause substantial harm to the public,” said Sarah Meyers West, a co-executive director at AI Now, a nonprofit group that advocates for responsible and ethical AI usage.
- China’s Cyberspace Administration last month banned companies from purchasing Nvidia’s H20 chips, much to the chagrin of its CEO Jensen Huang. This followed a train wreck of events that unfolded over the summer. The post The Rise and Fall of Nvidia’s Geopolitical Strategy appeared first on AI Now Institute.
- At the Center for Open Science (COS), our work is about making research more transparent, rigorous, and verifiable. As AI tools enter the research workflow, we need evidence about what they actually contribute to scientific credibility.
- The post Open positions to grow our podcast team appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Context
- Transformer Weekly: Blackwell chips and China, White House warning to pro-AI super pac, and OpenAI’s restructure...
- Effective Altruism
- A data-driven framework for targeting replication funding where it matters most
- A merely pretty good rebuttal isn't enough
- Hello FAST community. I hope you're all doing great!. We would like to invite you to register for our Third Latin American Congress of Animal Law, Arba 2025, which will be held virtually on Thursday, November 13, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. (Peruvian time). We believe that holding this third congress represents a significant achievement for the region.
- Plus, where Russia and China go from here
- Across the European Union, member states have taken different approaches to animal welfare legislation, causing gaps in protection that leave farmed animals vulnerable to harmful systems and practices. The post Animal Welfare Legislation In The European Union: A Call For Consistency appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Compassion in World Farming International is a global movement transforming the future of food and farming. We’re recruiting for a creative and driven part-time Senior Digital Campaigns Coordinator to help us mobilise public support and influence decision-makers through compelling digital campaigns. .
- How health is financed in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) determines the effectiveness and reach of global health efforts. In this talk, Peter Koziol explores the key dynamics of health financing—from the scale of different funding sources and the roles of major actors, to how these factors impact specific diseases—revealing what this means for those aiming to maximize their positive...
- By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript. Episode summary. Whatever your skills are, whatever your interests are, we’re out of the world where you have to be a conceptual self-starter, theorist mathematician, or a policy person — we’re into the world where whatever your skills are, there is probably a way to use them in a way that is helping make maybe...
Loading...