Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Forecasting transformative AI using the Book of Revelation
- Summary: "Stratified utopia" is an outcome where mundane values get proximal resources (near Earth in space and time) and exotic values get distal resources (distant galaxies and far futures). I discuss whether this outcome is likely or desirable. Stratified Utopia (thanks Dušan D. Nešić) 1. Introduction. 1.1. Happy Coincidence.
- In 1963, Mosteller and Wallace published Inference in an Authorship Problem, which used Bayesian statistics to try to infer who wrote some of the disputed Federalist Papers. (Answer: Madison) Anyway, at the end they have a list of "Remarks on Bayesian studies" which is astonishing to read 62 years later: Study of variation of results with different priors is recommended.
- 30% of the American public think superhuman AI should never be developed, too
- (Cross-posted from SayIt archive and EA Forum.). (Background for conversation: After an exchange in the comments of Audrey's LW post where plex suggested various readings and got a sense that there were some differences in models worth exploring, plex suggested a call.
- If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert. But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countries are roughly equivalent to U.S. states.
- Dr. Andrew Browning (at left, green hat) stands with fistula patients and care staff at Galo Lutheran Mission Hospital in the Central African Republic. Our Fistula Foundation Partners are true heroes in every sense of the word. Across conflict zones and makeshift operating rooms, our partners prove that compassion can persevere even in the most … Continued.
- Epistemic status: quickly writtren, rehashing (reheating?) old, old takes. Also, written in a grumpier voice than I’d endorse (I got rained on this morning). Some essays on longtermism came out recently! Perhaps you noticed. I overall think these essays were just fine , and that we should all talk less about longtermism. In which I talk about longtermism.
- Acknowledgements. Thanks to Peter Hozák, Jonathan Ng, Abelard Podgorski and Siao Si Looi for discussions and input on the structure and substance of the essay - and in the last case for the beautiful illustration as well. Any remaining catastrophes are my own. TLDR: Longtermists usually focus on lowering existential risk, and in practice typically prioritise extinction risk. I argue that.
- Key Takeaways Habits shape your life outcomes. From health to happiness to career success, much of what determines your future stems from your daily routines. Simple habits can snowball into major life improvements when maintained consistently. Building habits isn’t about hitting a magic number of repetitions. While automaticity helps, habits rarely become effortless.
- On July 4, floodwaters tore through homes across central Texas. In counties like Kerr, Williamson, and Travis, people lost housing, belongings, and access to essentials overnight. By July 11 –– just one week later –– GiveDirectly was sending $2,400 payments to help low-income families begin their recovery. In total, GiveDirectly sent $1.4M from over 1,300 donors […]...
- From July 11–13, 2025, 290 attendees from across Africa and beyond gathered in Abuja, Nigeria, for EAGxNigeria 2025, the region’s largest EA conference to date. Designed to support community growth, deepen cause engagement, and forge collaborations, this convening represented a key milestone in building an EA community that is locally grounded, globally connected, and strategically ambitious.
- A coordinated, whole-of-government effort to secure America’s rare earth supply chain
- If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power. This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios.
- Measuring how diseases impact wild animals highlights how and why we should center their welfare in management and conservation. The post How Diseases Impact Wild Animal Welfare, And Why It Matters appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Abstract. Objections to longtermism often focus on issues like fanaticism, discounting, or classic reasons to doubt the tractability of positively influencing the far future. I argue that another challenge has been underdiscussed relative to those—namely, that posed by unawareness: many of the long-term possibilities most relevant to our actions are unknown to us.
- We want to highlight two things in this post: Mike has published an essay in Aeon about the threat from hidden volcanoes, among other aspects, it's got some volcano science, history, climate, pandemics and storytelling in it, so something for everyone I hope! It highlights the global scale of this risk, its underappreciation in terms of governance, monitoring and funding.
- The post “Every Life I Save Feels Like a Mission Fulfilled” — Muzamiru, Community Health Extension Worker, Uganda appeared first on Living Goods.
- World Food Prize winner Lawrence Haddad: 'You can't see climate and health separate gloireri Tue, 10/21/2025 - 07:53 Date Mon, 10/20/2025 - 12:00 Media CHANGE INC Link https://www.change.inc/transities/voedsel-transitie/world-food-prize-winnaar-la… Promote to Promote to the executive director page Image Thumb (540x337px) Regions Global...
- L'épisode complet : https://youtu.be/WexyMWLVvX0
- Asymmetries in Significance given Model Uncertainty
- I’m close to a single-issue voter/donor. I tend to like politicians who show strong support for AI safety, because I think it’s an incredibly important and neglected problem. So when I make political donations, it’s not as salient to me which party the candidate is part of, if they've gone out of their way to support AI safety and have some integrity.
- Stuart Buck has perhaps the largest shapley value of any one individual in uncovering the replication crisis first in psychology, and then in many fields. This is his personal account of how and why he made the choices he did. Discuss...
- In the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week, and in light of Ambitious Impact currently hiring for staff roles - one recruitment manager (or director) and two researchers - I thought I’d share some of my recent reflections on finding impactful careers as a new recruiter in an EA org... . “Why is it so hard to get hired to do good?”.
- Senterra Funders is a donor community of 49 individual and institutional funders, each giving $250,000+ annually to end factory farming and build sustainable food systems. We offer expert philanthropic advising, collaborative giving opportunities, and a vibrant community, while also working to increase the pool of funding for the movement to end factory farming. Why a new name?.
- Crossposted from LW. I didn't write this, but I know the author and think they're reasonable; I'm sharing it because it might be helpful. I think the direct effects of large donations strongly outweigh the personal side effects for almost everyone, but (if you don't already donate to Democrats) you should think before donating to Democrats if you really might work in a Republican...
- Mercy For Animals’ award-winning animated short film, Henrietta Finds a Nest, just made its global debut on October 20. Brought to life by the Emmy-winning animation team at Mighty Oak Studios, produced by Mercy For Animals, and executive produced by Daniella Monet, the film blends artistry and heart to share the remarkable true story of Henrietta’s […].
- Failing to say things is often blameworthy
- Sometimes I get into arguments with people who think it’s morally wrong for me to be polyamorous.
- Experts say key factors currently limit the risk of catastrophic harm from AI-enabled cyberattacks — as far as we know...
- By design, LLMs perform nonlinear mappings from their inputs (text sequences) to their outputs (next-token generations). Some of these nonlinearities are built-in to the model architecture, but others are learned by the model, and may be important parts of how the model represents and transforms information.
- This study suggests that policies to advance animal welfare should focus on farmers’ intrinsic motivations to continuously improve husbandry rather than participation in welfare programs. The post Don’t Focus On Animal Welfare Programs — Upskill Farmers Instead appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The post Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- I need a hero?
- Ontological status: Yes, this is ontology. Groups of people are one of the most important things. If I were to list all the things and rank them by importance, groups of people would be near the top. Love, truth and freedom and other such things might score higher from some angles, but these things are usually found in groups of humans anyway. And groups are complex.
- The revolution might be synthetic
- Veganism as the Alignment Test for Longtermism. Longtermism asks us to imagine the vastness of the future—trillions of lives, billions of years—and to act today as though those lives matter. It is a stirring vision, but it rests on a fragile assumption: that humanity is capable of aligning on a mission, coordinating across cultures and centuries, and acting with compassion at scale. Before...
- Greetings from a world where…...
- This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. Commenting and feedback guidelines: This draft lacks the polish of a full post, but the content is almost there. The kind of constructive feedback you would normally put on a Forum post is very welcome.Summary:
- In the midst of post-election protests in November 2024, our cash program in Mogovolas, Mozambique was hit by a wave of false accusations. A social media post claimed that GiveDirectly was placing recipients under house arrest, acting as a political agent of the ruling party, and even recruiting for armed groups. The lies spread quickly, […]...
- Electricity generation is expected to rise. But will it grow much faster than it did in the past?
- I don’t want your rationality. I can supply my own, thank you very much. I want your data. If you spot a logical error in my thinking, then please point it out. But short of that, among mostly-rational people, I think most disagreements come down to a difference of intuitions, which are rooted in a difference in the data people have been exposed to, and instead of presenting a logical...
- This is a cross-post (with permission) of Arctotherium's post from yesterday: "LLM Exchange Rates, Updated.". It uses a similar methodology to the CAIS "Utility Engineering" paper, which showed e.g. "that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans, with the rank order being Nigerians > Pakistanis > Indians > Brazilians > Chinese > Japanese > Italians > French >...
- Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost six years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent at preparing for the next pandemic. I rant. content warning: A single carefully placed slur. If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biological catastrophes, the time to act is now. —US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden...
- Are you someone who loves taking ideas from 0 → 1 — building programs that create real-world change for animals? Have you led small, high-agency teams that thrive in fast-moving, messy contexts? If that sounds like you, this might be one of the most exciting roles we’ve ever opened. As Exploratory Programs Lead, you’ll build and lead Fish Welfare Initiative’s department that takes new ideas...
- Adding up the weight of very different materials doesn’t tell us about their scarcity, environmental, or socioeconomic impacts.
- How does the paideía of the Chinese tech elite differ from their counterparts in Silicon Valley?.
- Borrow from project managers, and explicitly assign areas of responsibility. The post Dividing responsibilities at home appeared first on Otherwise.
- Do more good, all else equal
- I have some claim to be an “old hand” EA: I was in the room when the creation Giving What We Can was announced (although I vacillated about joining for quite a while). I first went to EA Global in 2015. I worked on a not-very successful EA project for a while. But I have not really been much involved in the community since about 2020.
- Three‑quarters of U.S. adults want strong regulations on AI development, preferring oversight akin to pharmaceuticals rather than industry "self‑regulation."
- Imagine you are a junior advisor to the boss of some major EA longtermism-sympathetic org (OpenPhil, CEA, 80K, etc). You are tasked with reading the Essays on Longtermism compilation, and collating any novel insights that could significantly change what we should be doing. That is, we want essays that make ‘big, if true’ claims, and present interesting arguments for them.
- Sharing information about two open full-time positions and a law student summer clerkship program at the Nonhuman Rights Project. Happy to answer questions about any of these!. Managing Director of Programs Reports to: Executive Director Location: Remote/US Compensation: $140,000 - $150,000 with competitive benefits package.
- This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. Commenting and feedback guidelines: I'm posting this to get it out there and hopefully elicit discussion but am pretty uncertain about this post as I am not that familiar with global development and am also relatively new to AI safety.
- DMT, the smallest microdose of maybe 5mg with a vape pen stops the worst pain known, in literally 10–20 seconds. Acid and mushrooms as well, but they take time to come up. Even the smallest sub-perceptual dose of DMT stops the pain. - Yiftach Yerushalmy, cluster headache patient. . One inhalation [of DMT] will end the attack for most people. Everybody is reporting the exact same thing.
- Here, I explain for the umpteenth time why I think justification comes from seemings. * I was invited to contribute to a debate on whether “evidence is seemings”, defending the affirmative.
- Do you truly understand those you disagree with?
- TL;DR: I tested whether 5 reasoning models (GPT-5, Claude-4.5 Sonnet, Grok-4, Gemini-2.5-Pro, DeepSeek-R1) could coordinate on 75 short prompts when explicitly told to match each other's responses. Models did well on concrete prompts like "A capital in Europe" → "Paris", but did worse than I expected on more open ended prompts. Several of the responses made me laugh out loud.
- While walking my son to school a couple of weeks ago, I noticed something odd happening on Court Street, a major thoroughfare that runs through our part of Brooklyn: A lane of the street was being removed, to make room for a protected two-way bike lane. As a father who would like to see his […]...
- Here's a story I've heard a couple of times. A young(ish) person is looking for some solutions to their depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw. They're open to new experiences and see a meditator gushing about how amazing meditation is for joy, removing suffering, clearing one's mind, improving focus etc. They invite the young person to a meditation retreat.
- The post Exploring the Potential of Kisan Call Centres for Farmer Surveys in India appeared first on Precision Development (PxD).
- A $1 trillion problem. A $50 solution. Each year, vision loss robs low- and middle-income countries of an estimated $1 trillion in productivity. Yet we know that 90% of vision loss is preventable, often with solutions as simple as a pair of eyeglasses or a $50 cataract surgery. The evidence is unequivocal: restoring sight is ….
- “The cows, the house, my children—I can see everything. I am so happy.” Lemda’s smile says it all. At 52, the Tanzanian mother and cattle keeper is seeing the world again. Not that long ago, she was completely blind. Her vision had slipped away over the course of a year, until daily life became impossible. ….
- Seva Foundation is pleased to announce its inclusion in the Million Lives Collective’s Vanguard cohort! This group celebrates innovators making a real difference for one million or more people living on less than $5.50 a day. Together with you, our donors and partners, we’re proving that clear vision is not only possible, but transformative.
- There is a quiet crisis affecting more than a billion people worldwide—poor vision. Too often dismissed as a minor health issue, vision loss actually holds back economies, weakens education, and drains productivity on a massive scale. A Seva-sponsored study reveals the true cost: over $1 trillion in productivity lost every year in low- and middle-income ….
- Seva’s Call for Ideas (CFI) is a powerful tool for uncovering locally driven, innovative solutions that expand access to eye care. Since its launch in 2019 with Native Nations, CFI has grown to include global technology rounds and regional initiatives. Each CFI invites organizations to propose projects that improve access, build local capacity, and test ….
- India’s Envision Project, supported by Seva and Standard Chartered Bank, achieved its ambitious 3-year goal of creating access to eye care for 4 million people by establishing 65 Vision Centers across the country. Here’s a glimpse of the impact made so far: In addition to the medical impact, the project has strengthened local economies by ….
- Seva’s 2024 Global Vision Center Survey gathered insights from 494 staff across five regions to understand the impact of Vision Centers (VCs) on care quality, community reach, and staff satisfaction. The results were overwhelmingly positive, especially where technology use was high. Staff noted challenges like patient education and transport, with calls for more training and ….
- By the time you read this, a new eye hospital will have opened in Quiché, Guatemala. It’s part of Guatemala Brillando—a bold 10-year, $55 million initiative by Seva Foundation and partner-on-the-ground Visualiza to create the first self-sustaining national eye care network in Central America. With four hospitals, 15 vision centers, and over 200 Guatemalan staff—including ….
- More than 450 enthusiastic guests filled Portland’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts to attend Soor Aur Saptak (SAS), a benefit for Seva Foundation. This year SAS completed its 14th consecutive production, which brought color, energy, and joy to the evening. “Volunteering with Seva is my way of giving voice to vision—where melody meets compassion, ….
- Seva’s research shows that a child receiving glasses at age five can earn 78% more during their lifetime—just one of the many reasons early eye care matters. At Bharatpur Eye Hospital in Nepal, a new pilot program is making sure even the youngest children get the care they need to see clearly from the start. ….
- Summary: Kernel regression with the empirical neural tangent kernel (eNTK) gives a closed-form approximation to the function learned by a neural network in parts of the model space. We provide evidence that the eNTK can be used to find features in toy models for interpretability.
- Note: This is a fairly rough post I adapted from some comments I recently wrote that I worked hard enough on that I figured I should probably make them into a post. So, although this post is technically not a draft, it isn't written how I would write a post — it's less polished and more off the cuff. If you think I should remove the Draft Amnesty tag, please say so, and I will!
- "The problems are tractable, but they're still difficult”...
- 57% of problems have been solved at least once
- The post At 40, Farm Aid Is Still About Music. It’s Also a Movement. appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- Invest to give
- Activists of often mostly European ancestry have appropriated prehistoric cultures and are systematically destroying fossils vital to understanding the evolutionary heritage of all humankind. The post The Birth and Burial of Evolutionary Science in Australia appeared first on Palladium.
- Human vs AI Forecasts: What Leaders Need to Know In October 2025, our colleagues at the Forecasting Research Institute released new ForecastBench results comparing large language models (LLMs) and human forecasters on real-world questions. Superforecasters still lead with a difficulty-adjusted Brier score of 0.081, while the best LLM to date, GPT-4.5, scores 0.101. In other […].
- Transformer Weekly: OpenAI subpoenas, Nvidia shenanigans, and a new AGI definition
- Small plant-based restaurants are the unsung heroes of Sydney’s vegan movement, providing oases of vegan ideals and sensory bliss. This study explores their strategies and challenges. The post How Sydney’s Small Plant-Based Businesses Quietly Promote Veganism appeared first on Faunalytics.
- This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. Commenting and feedback guidelines: This draft lacks the polish of a full post, but the content is almost there. The kind of constructive feedback you would normally put on a Forum post is very welcome.
- I’ve used the phrase “entertainment for EAs” a bunch to describe a failure mode that I’m trying to avoid with my career. Maybe it’d be useful for other people working in meta-EA, so I’m sharing it here as a quick draft amnesty post. There’s a motivational issue in meta-work where it’s easy to start treating the existing EA community as stakeholders.
- In a previous post, I discussed mitigating risks from scheming by studying examples of actual scheming AIs. In this post, I'll discuss an alternative approach: directly training (or instructing) an AI to behave how we think a naturally scheming AI might behave (at least in some ways). Then, we can study the resulting models.
- I know the movement may feel enticed to forgo optics, but ironically it seems like now would be the better time to care about them. For example, the forthcoming "The Altruists" at Netflix on FTX and now Luca Guadagnino's "Artificial" just wrapped (which is very specifically focused on the 5-day board firing of Sam Altman and will obviously cover the EA/AI safety movements).
- Manager/ka ds. Fundraisingu – Polska. Dowiedz się więcej i aplikuj: Manager/ka ds. Fundraisingu – Polska job - Polska, Zdalna praca - Compassion in World Farming. Miejsce pracy: Praca zdalna (wykonywana z lokalizacji w Polsce); wszyscy pracownicy są zobowiązani do uczestniczenia w spotkaniach zespołu i wydarzeniach organizowanych w naszym biurze w Warszawie – prawdopodobnie raz lub dwa razy...
- Specjalista/ka ds. Fundraisingu. Dowiedz się więcej i aplikuj: Specjalista/ka ds. Fundraisingu job - Polska, Zdalna praca - Compassion in World Farming. Miejsce pracy: Praca zdalna (wykonywana z lokalizacji w Polsce); wszyscy pracownicy są zobowiązani do uczestniczenia w spotkaniach zespołu i wydarzeniach organizowanych w naszym biurze w Warszawie – prawdopodobnie raz lub dwa razy w miesiącu.
- Many thanks to @Felix_Werdermann 🔸 @Engin Arıkan and @Ana Barreiro for your feedback and comments on this, and for the encouragement from many people to finally write this up into an EA forum post. For years, much of the career advice in the Effective Altruism community has implicitly (or explicitly) suggested that impact = working at an EA nonprofit.
- The post Introducing the Inaugural Health Promotion & Disease Prevention (HP&DP) Bulletin Uganda appeared first on Living Goods.
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