Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Most possible solutions to cultural drift offer humanity little conscious collective control over its future.
- Version française disponible ! Auto-doublée de YouTube avec l’IA (la qualité peut varier) Pour activer ou désactiver la version doublée en français de cet épisode en anglais, cliquez sur l’icône ⚙️ en bas de la vidéo, puis sélectionnez votre piste audio préférée. Les sous-titres français sont également disponibles dans les paramètres.
- Another year, another World Malaria Day. WHO reports that an estimated 263 million cases and 597 000 malaria deaths occurred worldwide in 2023, with 95% of the deaths occuring in Africa. What’s still the case: Malaria is still one of the top five causes of death for children under 5.
- Investment in the for-profit world follows a logical progression with distinct stages and comprehensive data tracking.
- Transformer Weekly: OpenAI for-profit shenanigans, AI updates from Google’s antitrust trial, and a House CCP Committee report on DeepSeek...
- Hello, everyone!. Good news from Brazil!. As an outcome of corporate relations efforts from Fórum Animal and Mercy for Animals, as well as public pressure by MFA's accountability campaign ' Cadê O Avanço? ', M. Dias Branco just announced that in December 2024, they concluded their transition and are now 100% cage-free.
- Do you give to charity? Who should be giving to charity? and how much? Find out more about what people think in the full video: https://youtu.be/ekIRVhbpiQw...
- Where the critics have changed my mind and where they haven't
- Against the Internet
- There’s an urgent need to address the rapid expansion of industrial animal farming in Sub-Saharan Africa with its damaging impacts on animal welfare, public health, the environment, and traditional livelihoods. The post Preventing Factory Farming In Africa appeared first on Faunalytics.
- We're looking for new authors and article pitches
- “My relationship with my children is the most impactful philosophical outcome of my life.”...
- American cities are dysfunctional.
- The Centre for the Governance of AI's Annual Report 2024.
- Malaria is one of humanity’s biggest foes, killing an average of 600,000 people per year (mostly African children).
- In 2023, there were 263 million new cases of malaria and 95% of all malaria cases are in the WHO African Region. Malaria was in decline during the 1960s—until progress came to a halt. In 1969, global elimination efforts were abandoned, leading to the loss of millions of lives. It took three decades for the […]. The post Together we can end malaria appeared first on Target Malaria.
- On this episode, Jeffrey Ding joins me to discuss diffusion of AI versus AI innovation, how US-China dynamics shape AI’s global trajectory, and whether there is an AI arms race between the two powers. We explore Chinese attitudes toward AI safety, the level of concentration of AI development, and lessons from historical technology diffusion.
- Illustration by James Daw. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The Swift forecasters were asked to predict the likely number of ransomware attacks on UK organisations in the coming months, including whether artificial intelligence would make such attacks easier to carry out, and whether any critical infrastructure would be significantly affected.
- Our recent piece on Voltaire on Vaccines led to a fascinating letter from Peter McLaughlin, full of breadmaking knowledge + etymological detective work, which he kindly gave us permission to share here. In that blogpost, we cite Voltaire's explanation of smallpox inoculation as: inserting [a pustule] removed from the...
- Podcast | Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo on Poverty, Inequality, and Policy In this special episode of The India Briefing, Nobel Laureate and development economist Esther Duflo joins hosts Mukulika Banerjee and Pya Tiwari for a wide-ranging conversation on poverty, inequality, and evidence-based policymaking in India. spriyabalasubr… Fri, 04/25/2025 - 04:11...
- Podcast | Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo on Poverty, Inequallity, and Policy In this special episode of The India Briefing, Nobel Laureate and development economist Esther Duflo joins hosts Mukulika Banerjee and Pya Tiwari for a wide-ranging conversation on poverty, inequality, and evidence-based policymaking in India. spriyabalasubr… Fri, 04/25/2025 - 04:11...
- What if parenting held the keys to civilization’s long-term flourishing?. In this deeply personal and philosophically rich episode of the Existential Hope podcast, we sit down with Dr. Aaron Stupple – physician, thinker, and author of The Sovereign Child.
- World’s first particulate matter trading scheme in Gujarat cut pollution by up to 30%, finds study The world’s first-ever market for trading in particulate matter emissions—launched in Gujarat’s Surat in 2019 through partnerships with the University of Chicago, Yale University, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)—has reduced pollution by 20-30% among participating industries...
- This is a crosspost for The Case for Insect Consciousness by Bob Fischer, which was originally published on Asterisk in January 2025. [Subtitle.]. The evidence that insects feel pain is mounting, however we approach the issue. For years, I was on the fence about the possibility of insects feeling pain — sometimes, I defended the hypothesis; more often, I argued against it.
- Many plans for how to safely build superintelligent AI have a critical section that goes like this: Develop AI that’s powerful enough to do AI research, but not yet powerful enough to pose an existential threat. Use it to assist with alignment research, thus greatly accelerating the pace of work—hopefully enough to solve all alignment problems. You could call this process “alignment...
- The post Malaria Ends With Us: How One Family Broke Free from the Cycle of Sickness appeared first on Living Goods.
- In this post, we study whether we can modify an LLM’s beliefs and investigate whether doing so could decrease risk from advanced AI systems. We describe a pipeline for modifying LLM beliefs via synthetic document finetuning and introduce a suite of evaluations that suggest our pipeline succeeds in inserting all but the most implausible beliefs.
- A note on status: The following post is Wild Animal Initiative’s first foray into thinking about the intersection of transformative AI and wild animal welfare. I’m not an AI safety expert, but I’ve been largely familiar with the main ideas since 2012.
- From pandemics and environmental crises to widespread extreme poverty, there’s no shortage of challenges facing the world. Addressing them requires broad societal improvements, a set of large-scale and often systemic changes that make us better at addressing a wide array of important problems and risks. Among other things, this cause... Read more...
- Why it matters and what to read next
- Californians are rightly frustrated over the spiraling cost of rent. Due to our acute housing shortage, hundreds of thousands of Californians are forced to spend most of their income on rent, live in overcrowded conditions, or leave the state each…. The post California YIMBY Statement on <span class="dewidow">AB 1157</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general. OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring […]...
- Reviewing some of our favorite AI safety regrants - and some less good fits
- The most significant action any AI company has taken so far
- The post Bonus: Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work: Career advice from 16 former guests appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- I respond to the claim that the decline in cancer mortality is mostly, or almost entirely, just because of the decline in smoking.
- and how it could have survived
- Highly specific and actionable advice
- The FDA should do something similar for humans
- The following blog is based on a recent COS webinar. You can watch the full recording here.
- This study analyzes confusion around plant-based cheese alternatives in Türkiye — and how different strategies can help reduce it. The post Are Plant-Based “Cheese” Labels Actually Confusing? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Every now and then, some AI luminaries. (1) propose that the future of powerful AI will be reinforcement learning agents—an algorithm class that in many ways has more in common with MuZero (2019) than with LLMs; and.
- Hello FAST community!. Leading wholesaler in the Horeca sector, METRO Italy has published a policy on the welfare of farmed fish, thus becoming the first company to sign up to our campaign Anche i Pesci (Fish Too), which calls on food companies to phase out the main causes of suffering for these animals.
- Ahead of the African Development Bank's presidential election in May, CGD's Karen Mathiasen and AfriCatalyst's Daouda Sembene interview three of the candidates – Amadou Hott, Samuel Munzele Maimbo, and Bajabulile Swazi Tshabalala – on their priorities for the Bank and their views on how to help steer countries through a volatile and uncertain time and achieve their development goals.
- Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA), directed by my former UT Austin colleague Dan Freed. Thanks so much to […]...
- separating discernment from delusion
- About two months ago, @finm and I recorded a discussion about my now-published piece on “AI tools for Existential Security” (for the podcast Fin has been running at Forethought). I’d never done something like this before, and liked the result a lot more than I thought I would! . I'm sharing a quick transcript here in case anyone appreciates section headers, hyperlinks, etc.
- The post AI-enabled power grabs appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. To submit a question, email Sigal at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form. Either way, if we choose your question, it’ll be anonymized. Here’s this week’s question, condensed and edited for clarity: I work for the federal […]...
- Our first round of grants designed to meet needs and seize opportunities in climate action under the Republican trifecta.
- Transforming Workplace Diets: Key to Reducing the Surge in Diabetes gloireri Thu, 04/24/2025 - 07:36 . The number of adults living with diabetes has more than doubled over the span of 30 years, rising from 7% in 1990 to more than 14% in 2022.1 An estimated 828 million adults worldwide currently live with diabetes, and if trends continue, this is projected to reach 1.3 billion by 2050.2.
- Converting to a for-profit model would undermine the company's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity," argues new letter. This is the full text of a post from Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence.
- In a word: compute
- I'm in the process of setting up The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, and I have two new job ads out: Research Officer in Animal Sentience (Animals and AI) - this is an open-ended, research-focused postdoctoral role looking at the impacts AI is having on non-human animals, ways of promoting beneficial uses, and ways of ameliorating harmful uses.
- The UC Berkeley School of Information (I School) and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) are pleased to announce that Varoon Bashyakarla, a second-year Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS)…. The post Varoon Bashyakarla Chosen to Represent I School and CLTC as 2025 RSAC Security Scholar appeared first on CLTC.
- new articles, lessonline, and samotsvety coming to nyc in june
- A new scientific approach
- For National Cold Brew Day on April 20, coffee chains around the United States offered various deals in celebration of this fa-brew-lous holiday. Despite the steep discounts available to customers across coffee chains on this day, some chains always charge extra for one particular selection: plant-based milk. Luckily, the coffee industry has shifted toward a […].
- Crosspost from my blog that you should totally check out! . If I were an animal, I would be a bug. Statistically. — David Sposito. C.S. Lewis once said, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.
- For all my lifetime, futurists have had a dream, of humanity coming together to consciously decide its fate.
- It's hard to write a guide to being good at ownership.
- This article is an excerpt from the book Our Tools They Deserve and has been modified specifically for publication by ClearerThinking.org...
- tl;dr: Even if we can't solve alignment, we can solve the problem of catching and fixing misalignment. If a child is bowling for the first time, and they just aim at the pins and throw, they’re almost certain to miss. Their ball will fall into one of the gutters.
- In his free time, while working as a clerk at a local Australian railway, James Harrison saved millions of lives — with his blood. Harrison had particularly special plasma: It had a rare antibody that doctors used to make a medication for pregnant mothers with different blood types from their newborns. When this happens, it […]...
- Starting out in your career—or shifting to a new field—can feel like a catch-22. You need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience. Internships can help break that cycle by offering a chance to get that first bit of experience. They offer a chance... Read more...
- New EA Animal Welfare Fund grantees, black soldier fly welfare research funding, and Liv Boeree's interview with Lewis Bollard
- Ducks are the second most slaughtered land animal on the planet, but campaigns against the consumption of duck meat are rare. This blog explores what it would take to put ducks on animal advocates’ agenda. The post Why Don’t More Animal Advocates Talk About Ducks? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- One of the most distinctive features of effective altruism is the use of the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework for evaluating charities.
- A video with over a million views is filled with easily checkable falsehoods
- Imagine you didn't know what money was.
- Break into AI policy – No tech background needed | Job Blast 🚀 Consulting experience wanted: 10 top roles, and 3 AI policy programs with May deadlines. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- EA Forum Digest #237 Hello!. Another reminder that DIY Debate Week is next week. We’ll release our new polls-in-posts feature on Monday, so you can ask the Forum community anything you like, and they can answer on a sliding scale. Also, you can add our Forum events calendar to your Google Calendar and never miss a forum event.
- The wave two open research dataset from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) — one of the most comprehensive studies on wellbeing ever conducted — is now available to researchers.
- The post Open position: Engagement Specialist appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. “Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,” said […]...
- Open Philanthropy’s Farm Animal Welfare team is hiring!. We’re looking for a Program Assistant to support the team’s work to reduce the suffering of farmed animals by managing processes, coordinating logistics, and keeping complex administrative projects on track. We’re looking for someone who is:
- On how good AI might—or might not—get at tasks beyond math & coding...
- How the metal made the material world
- On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system. The two films — Kiss the Ground, which […]...
- 25th of April 2025 marks the annual World Malaria Day, an opportunity for the worldwide malaria community to highlight the ongoing need for funding and political support in the fight against malaria, share information about differing approaches toward malaria eradication, and celebrate milestones in research. Our campaign this year is aligning with the Global […].
- Member States at the United Nations are currently negotiating the modalities of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The outcome document…
- RIP Pope Francis and a particularly interesting apocalyptic prophecy
- Converting to a for-profit model would undermine the company's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity," argues new letter
- How do we get out of here?
- We are announcing the open position for the role of General Director at AWO. As part of a planned transformation process, the organization is adopting a horizontal co-leadership model led by a team of four people (plus the general director). This strategic shift is aimed at strengthening our internal structure and enhancing collaboration and efficiency in our work.
- ⬇️⬇️⬇️ L'épisode entier ⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://youtu.be/dN2mxByDlwU
- Epistemic status: Like all alignment ideas, this one is incomplete and/or wrong, but I am hoping mostly incomplete and not wrong. One of the hard subproblems of alignment is constructing a "stable pointer to value" (see this overview and this (sub)sequence discussing OU agents).
- We recognize our supporters and respond to our critics
- If you take away one thing from our chapter in the World Happiness Report, it should be that: Using evidence, it’s now possible to find the best charities at increasing happiness. And by donating to the best ones, you can do hundreds, if not thousands, of times more good. The post What is the best charity to donate to? appeared first on Happier Lives Institute.
- Frontier AI development relies on powerful AI supercomputers. To train AI models with exponentially more compute, companies have developed massive systems like xAI’s Colossus, that contain up to 200,000 specialized AI chips, cost billions of dollars to build, and require hundreds of MW of power—equivalent to a medium-sized city.
- By Dr. Esther Njoroge-Muriithi, chief growth officer, Fistula Foundation When I stepped into the room at Nkwen Baptist Hospital in Bamenda, Cameroon, I expected to meet six incredible women—women who had undergone successful fistula treatment and returned simply to say “thank you” to Fistula Foundation. I was prepared for an emotional encounter; after all, I’ve … Continued.
- The Ultimate in Extreme Ecology: Life Off Planet for Science and Settlement
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