Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Opinion: Yoshua Bengio, Stephen Clare and Carina Prunkl run through the rapid developments that necessitated an early update to their their International AI Safety report
- On some level, calories in calories out has to be true. But these variables are not independent. Bodies respond to exercise by getting hungry and to calorie deficit by getting tired. Even absent that, bodies know how much food they want, and if you don’t give it to them they will tell you at increasing volume until you give in (not all bodies, of course, but quiet stomachs aren’t the target...
- Many things in life are most effectively pursued by going after them directly (e.g., if you want coffee, make some coffee). But some of the most important things are most effectively pursued indirectly. For example: But why is it more effective to pursue some things indirectly, rather than directly? Sometimes it’s because it’s unclear how […]...
- If you want to learn something, usually the best sources are far from Lesswrong. If you're interested in biochemistry, you should pick up a textbook. Or if you're interested in business, find a mentor who gets the business triad and throw stuff at the wall till you know how to make money. And yet, Lesswrong has had some big hits.
- tl;dr: We fine-tune or few-shot LLMs to use reasoning encoded with simple ciphers (e.g. base64, rot13, putting a dot between each letter) to solve math problems. We find that these models only get an uplift from the reasoning (over directly answering) for very simple ciphers, and get no uplift for intermediate-difficulty ciphers that they can translate to English.
- tl;dr: We fine-tune or few-shot LLMs to use reasoning encoded with simple ciphers (e.g. base64, rot13, putting a dot between each letter) to solve math problems. We find that these models only get an uplift from the reasoning (over directly answering) for very simple ciphers, and get no uplift for intermediate-difficulty ciphers that they can translate to English.
- Recontextualization distills good behavior into a context which allows bad behavior. More specifically, recontextualization is a modification to RL which generates completions from prompts that discourage misbehavior, appends those completions to prompts that are more tolerant of misbehavior, and finally reinforces the model on the recontextualized instruction-completion data.
- The Open Science Framework (OSF) now features an updated interface designed to make managing research projects easier, faster, and more intuitive. Streamlined and Researcher-Informed Developed in response to community feedback, the refreshed design improves navigation, overall platform performance, and file access—while keeping familiar workflows intact.
- Current AI models are strange. They can speak—often coherently, sometimes even eloquently—which is wild. They can predict the structure of proteins, beat the best humans at many games, recall more facts in most domains than human experts; yet they also struggle to perform simple tasks, like using computer cursors, maintaining basic logical consistency, or explaining what they know without...
- Ultra-Processed Foods: Time for a More Nuanced Conversation dwaweru Tue, 10/14/2025 - 15:32 . ‘Ultra-processed food’ (UPF) has been the nutrition buzzword of the past few years, making its way from scientific research into headlines and policy debates.
- There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- "Whenever I hear Sam Altman saying, 'We're still building AI to benefit people, to benefit humanity,' I don't believe it." "What actually irks me personally is when people try to have it both ways in the way that the leaders of OpenAI do, where they try and speak as if they're still a nonprofit who are doing things for the benefit of humanity."...
- How often, on average, do you forget to take your daily meds? For me, it’s about twice a week. And that’s for something as low stakes as a vitamin D supplement; it’s not the end of the world if I’m a little deficient. But when it comes to HIV prevention, missing a dose of your […]...
- Parmy Olson is a technology columnist at Bloomberg and the author of Supremacy, which won the 2024 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. She joins the podcast to discuss the transformation of AI companies from research labs to product businesses.
- 📮EA Switzerland - October Updates View this email in your browser Summary: Hey <<First Name>>, Welcome to this month's update! The key points in brief: The Zurich AI Safety Day last month brought more than 200 people interested in and working on the long-term safety of advanced AI systems together! .
- Like many people, I have quite a lot of stuff that I've written that exists only in googledoc form. In writing a comment response to Wei Dai, I wanted to point to a concept that I realised I hadn't published. So I thought I should practice what I preach, and put the idea out as a post.
- TLDR: EA is a community where time tracking is already very common and yet most people I talk to don't because. It's too much work (when using toggl, clockify,...). It's not accurate enough (when using RescueTime, rize,...). I built https://donethat.ai that solves both of these with AI as part of AIM's Founding to Give program.
- Discover key strategies for overcoming EU legislative barriers to animal welfare reform, from political advocacy to new tools, alliances, and funding. … Read more...
- This is really more of a draft project than a draft post. I did most of this work many months ago and just never got around to wrapping it up and sharing it. I ended up (temporarily) removing a lot of pages that were half-finished so that I could hit send. Expect more content soon!. This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft.
- (Also posted to my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp.). Let’s set aside the question of whether or not superintelligent AI would want to kill us, and just focus on the question of whether or not it could. This is a hard thing to convince people of, but lots of very smart people agree that it could. The Statement on AI Risk in 2023 stated simply:
- If there is only one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: THOU SHALT NOT ALLOW ANOTHER TO MODIFY THINE SELF-IMAGE This appears to me to be the core vulnerability by which both humans and AI induce psychosis (and other manipulative delusions) in people.
- This is one of many short notes on management that I'm planning to post on Substack. I might crosspost to the Forum/LW if there's interest. Happy to discuss in comments!. There’s a difference between: Local feedback (”That email was really well clear, it would have been great if there were a summary too.”) and. Global feedback (”I’m glad you work here.
- Recontextualization distills good behavior into a context which allows bad behavior. More specifically, recontextualization is a modification to RL which generates completions from prompts that discourage misbehavior, appends those completions to prompts that are more tolerant of misbehavior, and finally reinforces the model on the recontextualized instruction-completion data.
- About me and this review: I don’t identify as a member of the rationalist community, and I haven’t thought much about AI risk. I read AstralCodexTen and used to read Zvi Mowshowitz before he switched his blog to covering AI. Thus, I’ve long had a peripheral familiarity with LessWrong.
- The Institute for Humane Education is hosting a community call on how teachers in schools and educators running programs at animal shelters and sanctuaries can collaborate to bring humane education to more students. We’ll start with a casual panel discussion, and then we’ll open the floor for discussion. Here’s our stellar group of panelists: ✦ Mike Farley - Teacher at University of Toronto...
- Essere Animali is looking for a Partnerships and Development Manager who is motivated to support the organization’s growth. The selected candidate will be responsible for strengthening and expanding the association’s network of supporters, partners, and funders, as well as contributing to the development of strategies aimed at increasing the organization’s resources. Role Type: Full time.
- Our friends at Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade have secured a massive win against media conglomerate Condé Nast, parent company of Vogue magazine, which will no longer promote new animal fur across all of their publications, including Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Glamour.
- We’re excited to announce that applications are now open for the Futurekind Winter Fellowship 2025/6, launching this November 25, 2025. Apply now. The Futurekind Fellowship is a 12-week learning and professional development journey at the cutting edge of AI and animal protection, designed for people who want to build, research, or steer the future of AI for the benefit of all sentient beings.
- Are you passionate about pushing for a global halt to AGI development? An international treaty banning superintelligent AI? Pausing AI? Before it’s too late to prevent human extinction?. Would you like to live with a group of like-minded people pushing for the same?. Do you want to do much more, but don’t have the financial means to support yourself volunteering?.
- A proof only 15 experts understand is less valuable than one any undergraduate can verify using a computer.
- OpenAI spent ~$7 billion on compute last year — most of this went to RD...
- GPT-5 Pro set a new record (13%), edging out Gemini 2.5 Deep Think by a single problem (not statistically significant). Grok 4 Heavy lags.
- We recently wrote that GPT-5 is likely to be trained on less compute than its predecessor. How did we reach this conclusion, and what do we actually know about how GPT-5 was trained?
- AI capabilities have been steadily improving across a wide range of skills, and show no sign of slowing down in the near term.
- We evaluated Gemini 2.5 Deep Think manually on FrontierMath as there is no API. The results: a new record!
- The new dashboard makes it easier to compare trends in performance across multiple benchmarks
- Sora 2 can solve questions from LLM benchmarks, despite being a video model.
- This is my personal take, not an organizational one. Originally written May 2025, revived for Draft Amnesty Week... . When I discovered the beginnings of EA, it felt like coming home. I had finally found a group of people who cared as much as I did about saving lives. When I discovered rationality not long after, it felt new.
- This is a bonus episode to say that Forethought is hiring researchers. After an overview of the roles, we hear from Research Fellow Mia Taylor about working at Forethought. The application deadline has been extended to November 1st 2025. Apply here: forethought.org/careers/researcher. Chapters. (00:00:00) Forethought hiring overview and roles. (00:03:21) Interview with Mia begins.
- Executive summary
- His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas
- Content warning: Anthropics, Moral Philosophy, and Shrimp. This post isn't trying to be self contained, since I have so many disparate thoughts about this. Instead, I'm trying to put a representative set of ideas forward, and I hope that if people are interested we can discuss this more in the comments. I also plan to turn this into a (probably small) sequence at some point.
- On some level, calories in calories out has to be true. But these variables are not independent. Bodies respond to exercise by getting hungry and to calorie deficit by getting tired. Even absent that, bodies know how much food they want, and if you don’t give it to them they will tell you at increasing … Continue reading "The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Actually Work"...
- Against hiddenness, the argument from abstract objects, foreknowledge problems, and divine property paradoxes
- Stronger gene-synthesis screening is vital to closing off AI’s ability to enable man-made pandemics...
- This study looks at how equestrians explain their horse’s care, justify tough practices, and define what horse welfare means in their world. The post How Equestrian Culture Cultivates Horse Welfare Beliefs appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Incidental conspiracy theorizing
- What do we do if AI progress keeps happening?
- Transforming Kenya’s Food Future: Insights from the National Food and Nutrition Security Policy Review gloireri Mon, 10/13/2025 - 08:19 . . Why This Policy Review Matters. In mid-September, 2025, stakeholders from across Kenya’s food, health, trade, and development sectors gathered at Sawela Lodges in Naivasha to review and revise the Draft National Food and Nutrition Security Policy...
- Pathological narcissism is a fortress built against unbearable pain. Some fortresses are sculpted from glass, some hewn from granite. My six-tier spectrum elucidates these architectures. Pathological narcissism can take countless shapes depending on the relative strengths of all the stabilizing and destabilizing factors: My previous article in this sequence lists these factors.
- About half a year ago, I decided to try stop insulting myself for two weeks. No more self-deprecating humour, calling myself a fool, or thinking I'm pathetic. Why? Because it felt vaguely corrosive. Let me tell you how it went. Spoiler: it went well. The first thing I noticed was how often I caught myself about to insult myself. It happened like multiple times an hour.
- Highlights
- Apollo Quiboloy — according to his followers — is the appointed son of God. He’s also at the center of a criminal empire, an explosive rift in the government of the Philippines, and a shift in the makeup of global Christianity.
- It’s an open secret that essentially all major AI companies are burning cash and running at massive losses. If progress is slow enough such that it requires X years of continued funding to achieve AI capabilities at least useful enough to produce a net ROI, at what value of X will the economics collapse, resulting in a major downscaling or total collapse of these companies?. Discuss...
- Here's my blog https://benthams.substack.com/ Here's Both Sides Brigade's https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/ 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/6425383223689216
- Why the filter isn't super early or late
- 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 […]...
- I’m a journalist covering animal suffering in agriculture. Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story from "Chicks on Speed: Big Chicken's Push for Faster Birds, But Slower Reform", a cross-border investigation I’ve been working on with five other European journalists: Julia Dauksza, Tracy Keeling, Wojciech Oleksiak, Andrei Petre and Paul Tullis.
- How I make sense of group of people
- The travels of Emil the Moose since he entered Czechia in mid-June.Moose became extinct in most of Germany around 1000 CE, and in Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, most of southern Poland, and Hungary by the XV. century. It’s not clear where exactly Emil comes from, but most likely from Poland, which has a large moose population in the northeast.
- I have been having fun writing fiction, and plan to spend whatever time I have left being better than LLMs doing it. I thought I had maybe a year. My initial experiments with Sonnet 4.5 didn't give me a good opinion of its writing ability. This morning, I put everything I have written into its context window and then gave it this prompt:
- I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now.
- Today, I became vegan. Just 24 hours ago, I couldn’t have imagined this would be the case — at least not so soon. Reading Óscar Horta’s Making A Stand For Animals (MASFA, from now on) hit me like a freight train as I turned page after page, chapter after chapter.
- Hello FAST!. October brings very good news, new cage-free announcements in Peru!. 1- Tentaciones by Ale Melly. A fine pastry shop, one of Lima's most important, it has four locations and a strong presence in several districts, as well as event catering. They are mission is focused on producing high-quality pastry products.
- Hola FAST members. . Since Peruvian regulations governing the land transport of farm animals do not contemplate or require animal welfare, a few weeks ago, ARBA submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Agriculture, MIDAGRI and SENASA to fill this legal gap, incorporating animal welfare parameters as a condition for the land transport of such animals.
- The factory farm is infinitely crueler than shocking a dog
- In college once, I had a disagreement with an anthropology professor about whether crime pays.
- #ai #aisafety #aialignment #animation #existentialrisk #artificialintelligence #anthropic #anthropicai
- If you ever find yourself in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, turn down Vesey Street toward North End Avenue. You’ll arrive at something unusual: a collection of stones, soil and moss, artfully arranged to look over the Hudson River. It’s the Irish Hunger Memorial, a piece of public artwork that commemorates the devastating Irish […]...
- How we used a novel analysis to understand what causes people to quit the widely adopted content-moderation system
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- TLDR: Through the end of October, we are giving $3 (Up to $5k total) to The Humane League for each new person who tries out Tab for Ending Animal Suffering. It is a free browser extension that uses a few ads on your new tab page to raise money for non-profits.
- That’s why you can never trust a good person, for he will freely do evil - purely for justice’s sake, so that everyone may be the same [miserable]. – AH Tammsaare (1926) . A black shadow behind the pane across the ceiling. The kettle hums and strains. The pan won’t be appealing. Wind rattles these squares, branches from the avenue. My body pale for years. The rain speaks Latin too.
- Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to the Hive team and the many community builders who have shared their wisdom with us over the years. This post is an attempt to synthesize those lessons. Special thanks to Therese Veith, Gergő Gáspár, Sam Chapman, Sarah Tegeler, and John Salter for reviewing this post. All mistakes and oversights are our own. TL;DR:
- In a previous post, we discussed prospects for studying scheming using natural examples. In this post, we'll describe a more detailed proposal for iteratively constructing scheming models, techniques for detecting scheming, and techniques for preventing scheming. We'll call this strategy Iterated Development and Study of Schemers (IDSS).
- About AIM. Ambitious Impact (AIM), formerly Charity Entrepreneurship, launches organizations that cost-effectively improve human and animal lives at scale. Since 2018, we’ve incubated over 50 charities, now estimated to improve the lives of more than 75 million people and 1 billion animals worldwide.
- In a previous post, we discussed prospects for studying scheming using natural examples. In this post, we'll describe a more detailed proposal for iteratively constructing scheming models, techniques for detecting scheming, and techniques for preventing scheming. We'll call this strategy Iterated Development and Study of Schemers (IDSS).
- A conversation with Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, who joins us to talk about. how AI’s superhuman command and control abilities will change the battlefield. why offense/defense balance isn’t a well-defined concept. “race to the bottom” dynamics for autonomous weapons. how a US/taiwan conlict in the age of drones might play out.
- Local Abuse of Historic Preservation Rules Leads to Reform “We can build more homes and also preserve historic neighborhoods” SACRAMENTO – Today, California took a major step toward ending the abuse of historic preservation laws to block urgently-needed new housing,….
- Law signed by Gov. Newsom Will Speed California Families Into New Homes “Californians need housing now – not when inspectors get around to it“ SACRAMENTO – California families will soon be able to move into new homes faster, thanks to…. The post California Gets “Shot Clock” for <span class="dewidow">Housing Inspections</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- New Law Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Removes Barriers, Imposes Standards “It’s now easier than ever to build a home inside your home” SACRAMENTO – Californians will find it faster, cheaper, and easier to add small accessory dwelling units (“ADUs”)…. The post California Law Makes it Easier to Build Small, <span class="dewidow">In-Home ADUs</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- Bill Signed by Gov. Newsom Reflects Diverse, Multilingual Populace “California is for everyone – our housing guidelines should be translated to reflect our diversity” SACRAMENTO – Californians who speak a language other than English at home will have an easier….
- Local Permitting Delays Often Took Months; “Shot Clock” Sets a Time Limit “We’re reducing permitting times from many months to four weeks” SACRAMENTO – California home builders will be guaranteed faster permitting processes for new homes, thanks to new legislation…. The post New California Law to Issue Housing Permits in <span class="dewidow">30 Days</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- “Final Boss” Bill Voids Local Regulations Designed to Ban Accessory Dwelling Units “Californians want to build ADUs. Now, local jurisdictions have to let them.” SACRAMENTO – Homeowners who seek to build accessory dwelling units (“ADUs”) will now have the full…. The post New Law Ends NIMBY Abuse of <span class="dewidow">ADU Permitting</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- SB 79 Culminates Eight-Year Fight to Legalize Homes Near Transit “This Governor has cemented his legacy as a pro-housing leader” SACRAMENTO — Today California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 79, a bill that will make it legal…. The post Governor Newsom Signs Historic <span class="dewidow">Housing Legislation</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- While recent AI systems achieve strong performance through human-readable reasoning that should be simple to monitor (OpenAI, 2024, Anthropic, 2025), we investigate whether models can learn to reason about malicious side tasks while making that reasoning appear benign.
- Life is continuous with Earth’s geochemistry...
- The arc of history bends towards Glennism
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