Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Overview. The Unjournal is a nonprofit organization (est. 2023) that commissions rigorous public expert evaluations of impactful research. We've built a strong team, completed more than 55 evaluation packages, built a database of impactful research, launched a Pivotal Questions initiative, and are systematically evaluating research from EA-aligned organizations. We argue that. 1.
- Up to 56 million women and girls across Africa are estimated to be affected by female genital schistosomiasis, a frequently overlooked debilitating manifestation of schistosomiasis. This short film explores what it will take to transform health systems in order to correctly diagnose and treat this stigmatizing disease.
- November is Africa Youth Month, and this year we are shining the spotlight on two scientists working to end malaria in Uganda. Rita Mwima and Hudson Onen are part of the team at the Uganda Virus Research Institute. Rita is a computational biologist using population genetics and mathematical modeling to study malaria vector dynamics. Her […].
- Podcast Wireframe GAIN 🇰🇪 on Socials: . . . . gloireri Tue, 11/25/2025 - 08:11 . Share on...
- [xposted in EA Forum] Today we’re announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help. Our mission ClusterFree’s mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research. Cluster headache (also known as […]...
- AI infrastructure, now in your pocket.
- The most canonical example of a "natural ontology" comes from gasses in stat mech. In the simplest version, we model the gas as a bunch of little billiard balls bouncing around in a box. The dynamics are chaotic. The system is continuous, so the initial conditions are real numbers with arbitrarily many bits of precision - e.g.
- Kind of a mixed bag. The post Things my kids don’t know about sex appeared first on Otherwise.
- Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!. If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here. Read More.
- Disclaimer: I am god-awful at chess. I. Late-beginner chess players, those who are almost on the cusp of being basically respectable, often fall into a particular pattern. They've got the hang of calculating moves ahead; they can make plans along the lines of "Ok, so if I move my rook to give a check, the opponent will have to move her king, and then I can take her bishop."...
- Discover how Cellular Agriculture Australia is building the ecosystem for cellular agriculture and driving systemic change for animals and the future food system. … Read more...
- TL;DR: Models trained with outcome-based RL sometimes have reasoning traces that look very weird. In this paper, I evaluate 14 models and find that many of them often generate pretty illegible CoTs. I show that models seem to find this illegible text useful, with a model’s accuracy dropping heavily when given only the legible parts of its CoT, and that legibility goes down when answering...
- TL;DR: Figure out what needs doing and do it, don't wait on approval from fellowships or jobs. If you.... Have short timelines. Have been struggling to get into a position in AI safety. Are able to self-motivate your efforts. Have a sufficient financial safety net. ... I would recommend changing your personal strategy entirely.
- Here I am on the plane on the way home from Inkhaven. Huge thanks to Ben Pace and the other organizers for inviting me. Lighthaven is a delightful venue and there sure are some brilliant writers taking part in this — both contributing writers and participants.
- TL;DR: Models trained with outcome-based RL sometimes have reasoning traces that look very weird. In this paper, I evaluate 14 models and find that many of them often generate pretty illegible CoTs. I show that models seem to find this illegible text useful, with a model’s accuracy dropping heavily when given only the legible parts of its CoT, and that legibility goes down when answering...
- Summary: A defensive military coalition is a key frame for thinking about our international agreement aimed at forestalling the development of superintelligence. We introduce historical examples of former rivals or enemies forming defensive coalitions in response to an urgent mutual threat, and detail key aspects of our proposal which are analogous.
- 🐓 As Temporary Global Campaigns Coordinator, you will be part of a team responsible for researching, coordinating, and launching hard-hitting global corporate animal welfare campaigns against major multinational companies. These campaigns involve collaboration and coordination with animal protection organizations around the world and directly contribute to The Humane League’s org-wide goal of...
- Crosspost. (I think this is a pretty important post to get the word out about, so I’d really appreciate you restacking it). The EU is taking input into their farm animal welfare policies until December 12.
- The struggle to replace philosophical stereotypes with substance
- How to make progress when policymakers don't care about the climate
- Executive summary
- Replicability refers to observing evidence for a prior research claim in data that is independent of the prior research. It is one component of establishing credibility of research claims by demonstrating that there is a regularity in nature to be understood and explained. Repeating studies to assess and establish replicability can be costly and time-consuming. Partly, that is inevitable.
- Why Chinese parents have sought out Zebra English's AI tutor Jessica
- Even if we solve the AI alignment problem, we still face non-alignment problems, which are all the other existential problems that AI may bring. People have written research agendas on various imposing problems that we are nowhere close to solving, and that we may need to solve before developing ASI.
- How to ensure the future flourishes
- Various groups, in an attempt to be trans-inclusive, have implemented pronoun circles (everyone goes around in a circle and give their pronouns), pronoun badges (everyone has their pronouns on their name badge), and pronouns in email signatures.
- When it comes to walking your dog, which device is most comfortable for them? This review of existing research reveals that the best restraint likely depends on the individual dog. The post A Review Of Restraints For Walking Your Dog appeared first on Faunalytics.
- It has been a tumultuous year for global health. In early 2025, the US government cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, affecting millions of people around the world and creating substantial uncertainty that continues to ripple through health and development programs around the world.
- Episode ten of the Works in Progress podcast is surprisingly NIMBY.
- Why we should expect AI capabilities to keep being extremely uneven, and why that matters
- Hi All As a part of Amplify for Animals' AI Training Program, I created this custom GPT last week, and I have been working to improve it to the extent that organizations can actually use this. The tool can help you create grant proposals. Just share the funder's RFP or website and link to your project or detailed document regarding your project.
- Good morning Fast Community,. Our latest blog post on Inside Animal Ag explores the “debate” about grazing’s impacts on U.S. land degradation: “The beef industry and its supporters have kept alive the notion that there is some controversy about whether grazing cattle in America is beneficial for the land.
- Dear FAST,. Some good news from Japan!. Midori Meguro, long time animal advocate and executive director of Lib (one of Japan’s few animal rights organizations) just got elected as a town assembly member in Kiso.
- Sentient Futures Summit (SFS) Bay Area 2026 is a three-day conference taking place February 6-8th, to explore the intersection of AI and sentient non-humans – both biological (i.e. animals) and potentially artificial. Register here for an Early Bird 30% discount before December 2nd!.
- Sentient Futures Summit (SFS) Bay Area 2026 is a three-day conference taking place February 6-8th, to explore the intersection of AI and sentient non-humans – both biological (i.e. animals) and potentially artificial. Register here for an Early Bird 30% discount here before December 2nd!.
- Rootclaim founder Saar Wilf joined Destiny to discuss the recent and strongest evidence yet for COVID-19’s lab origin. Since our debate with Peter Miller, new findings have emerged that strongly support the lab-origin hypothesis. In this interview, Saar walks through the data, explains Rootclaim’s probability-based analysis, and answers Destiny’s questions.
- Is AI balkanization measurable?
- A blog's recs should exceed its asks, or what's a heaven for?
- The Donation Election has begun!. Three important links: The voting portal (voting is open now!). How to vote, and rules for voting. The Donation Election Fund. This post introduces our candidates. We’re splitting by cause area for easy reading, but in the election they are all competing against each other.
- Project Assistant, CASCADE admin_inox Mon, 11/24/2025 - 11:30 vacancy_id SYS-1300 location Abuja, Nigeria Contract type Fixed Term Duration 12 Months Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1300/apply/ Closing date Fri, 11/28/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p justify;\">The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is seeking a...
- The post Community Health Workers at the Heart of Fighting Malaria appeared first on Living Goods.
- Sometimes I’m talking about lifting weights and someone asks me, “What’s your goal weight?” I don’t understand why I would have a goal weight. Say I want to bench press 300 pounds. What happens when I reach 300? I just give up on the bench press now? That would be silly. If I can keep getting stronger, I should. What happens if I fall short of my goal?
- A small number of species dominate the distribution of wild mammal biomass.
- My understanding is that even those advocating a pause or massive slowdown in the development of superintelligence think we should get there eventually . Something something this is necessary for humanity to reach its potential. Perhaps so, but I'll be sad about it. Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems right now.
- - JenniferRM, riffing on norvid_studies. You should know this by now, but you can just do things. That you didn't know this is an indictment of your social environment, which taught you how to act. You Can Just Do Things. Yes, you. All the activities you see other people do? You can do them, too. Whether or not you'll find it hard, you can do them.
- Insulin resistance is bad. It doesn't just cause heart disease. Peter Attia, author of Outlive, the Science and Art of Longevity, makes a convincing case that insulin resistance increases the risk of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, too. Causally-speaking, the number of deaths downstream of insulin resistance is ginormous and massively underestimated.
- Why we should and how to do it
- (Cross-posted from my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp) Oh, you read Emily Post’s Etiquette? What version? There’s a significant difference between versions, and that difference reflects the declining literacy of the American intellectual.
- In a post I mostly liked, Amanda from Bethlehem writes:
- I’ve spoken with hundreds of entomologists at conferences the world over. While there’s clearly some self-selection (not everyone wants to talk to a philosopher), my experience is consistent: most think it’s reasonable to care about the welfare of insects.
- With billions in USAID funding halted and thousands laid off, the people who relied on those programmes pay the highest price. This is one of the most important moments in history to donate effectively.
- What blocks people from being vulnerable with others?. Much ink has been spilled on two classes of answers to this question: Not everyone is in fact safe to be vulnerable around. Not even well-intentioned people are always safe to be vulnerable around; being-safe-to-be-vulnerable-around is a skill which not everyone is automatically good at.
- Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I'm doing it again this year. Cross-posted to my website. Cause prioritization. In September, I published a report on the AI safety landscape, specifically focusing on AI x-risk policy/advocacy. The prioritization section of the report explains why I focused on AI policy.
- A curiosity stopper is an answer to a question that gets you to stop asking questions, but doesn’t resolve the mystery. There are some curiosity stoppers that I’ve heard many times: Why doesn’t cell phone radiation cause cancer? Because it’s non-ionizing radiation. Why are antioxidants good for you? Because they eliminate free radicals. Why do bicycles stay upright?
- "You understand, the kids that you're competing with have been playing since they were this tall" my mum said, holding her hand down to the height of a toddler. "A Chinese kid who's been playing since he was three is a much better pianist than you are a guitarist.". I'd only been playing guitar for 2-3 years when I applied to go to music school.
- Here are eight tools of anti-epistemology that I think anyone can use to hide their norm-violating behavior from being noticed, and deceive people about their character. Heuristic Details1. Maintain Plausible Innocence. Always provide and maintain a plausibly deniable account of your behavior that isn’t norm violating. .
- A 9-year-old named Kai (“The Quantum Kid”) and his mother interviewed me about closed timelike curves, wormholes, Deutsch’s resolution of the Grandfather Paradox, and the implications of time travel for computational complexity: This is actually one of my better podcasts (and only 24 minutes long), so check it out! Here’s a podcast I did a […]...
- A message on OpenAI’s internal Slack claimed the activist in question had expressed interest in “causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”. OpenAI employees in San Francisco were told to stay inside the office on Friday afternoon after the company purportedly received a threat from an individual who was previously associated with the Stop AI activist group. “Our information indicates that...
- Ever on the quilting goes, Spinning out the lives between, Winding up the souls of those Students up to one-thirteen. There's a book about a young boy whose mundane life is one day interrupted by a call to go to wizard boarding school, where he gets into youthful hijinks overshadowed by feats about a dark wizard.
- Garrabrant Induction provides a somewhat plausible sketch of reasoning under computational uncertainty, the gist of which is "build a prediction market". An approximation of classical probability theory emerges. However, this is only because we assume classical logic.
- Here is how
- 1.
- Here is a complete list of everything that the average cis person needs to know about trans people:
- TLDR: Hundreds of millions of mice and rats are bred and killed each year as feeder animals for pet snakes, in conditions that resemble the worst of factory farming. We are developing a convenient, cost-competitive, and nutritionally complete snake food made from beef meat, organs, and bones to displace frozen feeder rodents.
- #cognitivescience #ai #aialignment #cleverhans
- Here's James's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@JamesFodor Here's my blog https://benthams.substack.com/
- We’ve expanded our reach by launching materials in new formats, adding languages, and strengthening our campaigns with targeted workshops, talks, and film screenings around the world Read more...
- Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I’m doing it again this year. Contents. Contents. Cause prioritization What I want my donations to achieve There is no good plan. AI pause advocacy is the least-bad plan. . How I’ve changed my mind since last year I’m more concerned about “non-alignment problems”.
- Context: Post #10 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. This one, more so than any other one in this sequence, is something I do not think is good advice for everyone, and I do not expect to generalize that well to broader populations.
- Crosspost from my blog. This some quickly-written, better-than-nothing advice for people who want to make progress on the hard problems of technical AGI alignment. Background assumptions. The following advice will assume that you're aiming to help solve the core, important technical problem of desigining AGI that does stuff humans would want it to do.
- Simplicio: Hey I’ve got an alignment research idea to run by you. Me: … guess we’re doing this again. Simplicio: Interpretability work on trained nets is hard, right? So instead of that, what if we pick an architecture and/or training objective to produce interpretable nets right from the get-go?. Me: If we had the textbook of the future on hand, then maybe.
- Crosspost from my blog. This some quickly-written, better-than-nothing advice for people who want to make progress on the hard problems of technical AGI alignment. Background assumptions. The following advice will assume that you're aiming to help solve the core, important technical problem of desigining AGI that does stuff humans would want it to do.
- Advocates and Maine State Representative Dylan Pugh joined Mercy for Animals at Hannaford Supermarket's headquarters to deliver thousands of petitions urging them to ban cages for hens. The post Thousands of Advocates and a State Representative are Fighting Back Against Grocery Chain Hannaford appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- This is important!
- Abstract. We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic document finetuning or prompting, and train on a selection of real Anthropic production coding environments.
- In the Summer of 2015, I pretended to be sick for my school's prom and graduation, so that I could instead fly out to San Francisco to attend a workshop by the Center for Applied Rationality. It was a life-changing experience.
- Abstract. We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic document finetuning or prompting, and train on a selection of real Anthropic production coding environments.
- Fear and Fearon
- Telling the truth is hard. Sometimes you don’t know what’s true, sometimes you get confused, and sometimes you really don’t wanna cause lying can get you more cookies reward. It turns out this is true for both humans and AIs!. Now, it matters if an AI (or human) says false things on purpose or by accident. If it’s an accident, then we can probably fix that over time.
- The post ThanksVegan: La comunidad vegana de Los Ángeles busca alternativas para Thanksgiving appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- The post Los Angeles’ vegan community seeks Thanksgiving alternatives appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- Five Years In: Highlights In just five years, Animal Ask has completed 57 major research projects on key welfare areas like insects, fish, chickens... all with a small team View this email in your browser Our First Five Years: A Review. Hello readers, and welcome to the November edition of the Animal Ask newsletter.
- Abstract: . Tarski's Undefinability Theorem showed (under some plausible assumptions) that no language can contain its own notion of truth. This deeply counterintuitive result launched several generations of research attempting to get around the theorem, by carefully discarding some of Tarski's assumptions.
- Abstract: . Tarski's Undefinability Theorem showed (under some plausible assumptions) that no language can contain its own notion of truth. This deeply counterintuitive result launched several generations of research attempting to get around the theorem, by carefully discarding some of Tarski's assumptions.
- Collisteru suggests that you should oppose things. I would not say I oppose this. Instead, I would like to gently suggest an alternative strategy. You should oppose about one thing. Everywhere else, talk less, smile more. I. I spent the first decade of my career carefully and deliberately habituating to white collar corporate America.
- $1 Trillion into AI, and It Still Can’t Ask the Right Questions Superforecaster Ryan Adler on getting frontier LLM models to write solid forecasting questions. Anyone hoping that artificial intelligence’s dominance of the headlines might wane in 2025 has been very disappointed. With over $1 trillion in announced investment, and December still to go, AI […].
- Transformer Weekly: Gemini 3 wows, GAIN AI’s not looking good, and OpenAI drops GPT-5.1-Codex-Max...
- Today we’re announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree. Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help. Our mission. ClusterFree’s mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research.
- I lead Forethought: we research how to navigate the transition to superintelligent AI, and then help people to address the issues we identify. I think we might soon be funding constrained, in the sense that we’ll have more people that we’d like to hire than funding to hire them. (We’re currently in the middle of a hiring round.
- Why I think the answer is yes.
- Mercy For Animals, Wholesome Minnesota, and local volunteers worked with local government in Hennepin County, Minnesota to adopt a plant-based by default policy for county-sponsored events and meetings! Animal products at such events will be available upon request. Questions? Please contact alexc@mercyforanimals and jodi.gruhn@wholesomeminnesota.org. . Discuss...
- I. When I was in college, I and my first girlfriend commiserated about how bad we both had been at monogamy.
- Every intelligence we've known arose through biological evolution, shaping deep intuitions about intelligence itself. Understanding why AI differs changes the defaults and possibilities.
- Canada’s environmental laws are inadequate and often exempt animal agriculture. This report proposes five key reforms for advocates to pursue. The post Laws Fail To Prevent Animal Agriculture’s Environmental Harms appeared first on Faunalytics.
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