Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- I think AI takeover is plausible. But Eliezer’s argument that it’s more than 98% likely to happen does not stand up to scrutiny, and I’m worried that MIRI’s overconfidence has reduced the credibility of the issue. Here is why I think the core argument in "if anyone builds it, everyone dies" is much weaker than the authors claim. This post was written in a personal capacity.
- "We're already seeing that these AIs have drives that nobody asked for, that nobody wanted." "You're gonna have a world where AIs invent things that are to doing good what Oreos are to eating healthy." "That's the default thing that happens when you sort of grow a mind around a training target."
- According to a new commentary paper in the journal Nature Food, some of the worst animal suffering in the world can be prevented at a rate of just a couple of pennies per hour: the extreme pain experienced by chickens raised for meat. Over the last 75 years, chickens have been bred to grow incredibly […]...
- On October 4, 2025, the Open Science Framework (OSF) will launch a refreshed design that makes the platform easier to navigate and use. The update modernizes the interface and improves performance, while preserving the familiar workflows that users are accustomed to. All OSF projects, registrations, and preprints will remain accessible after the new interface launches.
- "All that's standing between us and this going really poorly is the AIs getting smarter and the AI companies are rushing to make them smarter." "If anyone builds it anywhere, everyone everywhere dies." "This race towards super intelligence, there are no winners and it needs to stop."
- A parody
- A curated collection of intellectual jokes that actually teach interesting ideas and make you think, not just rely on insider-jargon and smart-people stereotypes
- Most adults express a deep concern for animals, but also continue to eat them. This “meat paradox” begins to take shape in adolescence, when young people’s values towards farmed and companion animals start to shift. The post Adolescents Are More Speciesist Than Adults appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The following blog is based on a recent webinar with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. You can watch the full recording here. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) is advancing open science by building coordinated support for their research community through an integrated model that connects infrastructure, training, and policy development.
- AGI could lead to growth of 30% — and double digit unemployment. It’s not clear that democratic institutions would be able to survive...
- If you're not at least a little doomy about AI, you're not paying attention
- Plus: How to make antibodies, why rivers are now battlefields, and a clinical trial for cooling the plant
- Nate Soares is president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He joins the podcast to discuss his new book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies," co-authored with Eliezer Yudkowsky. We explore why current AI systems are "grown not crafted," making them unpredictable and difficult to control.
- The accessibility toolkit, which helps people to create user-friendly communications, has been shortlisted for a global disability inclusion award.
- A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers...
- Twitter | Microsite | Apollo Blog | OpenAI Blog | Full paper. Before we observe scheming, where models covertly pursue long-term misaligned goals, models might inconsistently engage in various covert behaviors such as lying, sabotage, or sandbagging.
- One potentially powerful way to change the properties of AI models is to change their training data. For example, Anthropic has explored filtering training data to mitigate bio misuse risk. What data, if any, should be filtered to reduce misalignment risk? In this post, I argue that the highest ROI data to filter is information about safety measures, and strategies for subverting them.
- This post accompanies Crisp Supra-Decision Processes and contains the proof of the following proposition. Proposition 1 [Alexander Appel (@Diffractor), Vanessa Kosoy (@Vanessa Kosoy)]: Let M=(S,s0,A,O,T,B,L,γ) be a crisp supra-MDP with geometric time discount such that S and A are finite. Then there exists a stationary optimal policy. Proof: We first recall some notation.
- Introduction. In this post, we describe a generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) called crisp supra-MDPs and supra-POMDPs. The new feature of these decision processes is that the stochastic transition dynamics are multivalued, i.e. specified by credal sets.
- From 2019 to 2022, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX stole 8-10 billion dollars from customers. In summer 2022, FTX’s charitable arm gave me two grants totaling $33,000. By the time the theft was revealed in November 2022, I’d spent all but 20% of it. The remaining money isn’t mine, and I don’t want it. I would … Continue reading "FTX, Golden Geese, and The Widow’s Mite"...
- H5N1 avian influenza has been confirmed in a Nebraska dairy herd—marking the state’s first case in cattle and underscoring the virus’s continuing spread beyond poultry. Avian influenza continues to circulate among wild birds, cattle, and other mammals, making outbreaks like this persistent and increasingly threatening to animal welfare, food security, and public health. The following […].
- The post AI-enhanced decision making appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- The post AI-enhanced decision making appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- AI rules in California, finance to shrimp, and more View this email in your browser Hello! Our favourite links this month include: Lewis Bollard’s TED talk on why you should speak up about farmed animal welfare. An update on the progress of AI regulation in California.
- An initial narrow proposal
- Summary: this year the Survival and Flourishing Fund allocated $34.33 million to organizations working to secure humanity’s future, with the vast majority going to AI (~$29MM), followed by biosecurity (~$2.5MM), and the rest going to various other causes as diverse as fertility, longevity, forecasting, memetics, math research, EA community building, and non-AI/bio global catastrophic risk...
- The post Pioneering AI-Powered Weather Forecasting for 38 Million Indian Farmers appeared first on Precision Development (PxD).
- Ideas worth building the future around.
- What cannot be said
- In Fall 2023, EA Purdue barely existed. In fall 2024, EA Purdue had 35 people attend its intro meeting. In Fall 2025, EA Purdue had 33 new members attend its intro meeting despite doing dramatically more outreach. Below, outreach method and scale is specified. It is followed by a discussion of the implications for university group organizers, community builders, and a request for help.
- In this deep dive, we use research and visual guides to walk you through the process of encouraging new people to go veg, and strategies for helping them stay veg. The post Tactics In Practice: The Science Of Making And Keeping Veg*ns appeared first on Faunalytics.
- TL;DR: After our spring pilot with 4 local communities, 35 participants, and valuable learnings, we're launching an improved version of Scaling Altruism for Fall 2025. We're seeking representatives of local communities who want to run introductory courses with reduced operational burden through centralized coordination. What is Scaling Altruism?.
- A magazine worthy of our readers
- A Guaranteed Income Won’t Stop People From Wanting to Work Economists worry that a ‘universal basic income’ would make recipients lazier. Data from programs around the world suggests the opposite is true. spriyabalasubr… Wed, 09/17/2025 - 10:32...
- Opinion: Bengüsu Özcan, Alex Petropoulos and Max Reddel argue that technical safeguards, societal preparedness, and new standards could make open-weight models safer...
- EA Forum Digest #258 Hello!. Joey Savoie, co-founder and CEO of Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) will be answering questions on his AMA this Saturday. Get your questions in now. Also, applications for EA Connect 2025 — CEA’s virtual conference offering — are open.
- You’ve probably seen this one before: first it looks like a rabbit. You’re totally sure: yes, that’s a rabbit! But then — wait, no — it’s a duck. Definitely, absolutely a duck. A few seconds later, it’s flipped again, and all you can see is rabbit. The feeling of looking at that classic optical illusion is […]...
- At Vox’s climate desk, we’ve spent the past few months digging into a threat that’s easy to swat away in the moment — but increasingly harder to escape: the rise of mosquito and other vector-borne diseases in the United States. Most of us think of mosquitoes as little more than a summer nuisance. But climate […]...
- Austin, Texas — Under a microscope, a mosquito can look stunning. Their blue-green iridescent scales, purple bands, and attractive spotted wings shimmer — dazzling enough to forget, for a moment, the insect lives to take a sip of your blood. Mosquitoes range in size, from smaller than your pinky fingernail to a commanding presence in […]...
- This is a narration of ‘AI Tools for Existential Security’ by Lizka Vaintrob and Owen Cotton-Barratt; published 14th March 2025. Narration by Perrin Walker (@perrinjwalker).
- This is a linkpost for Positive Wild Animal Welfare by Heather Browning and Walter Veit, which was originally published on Biology & Philosophy on 12 March 2023. The abstract and last paragraph of the introduction are below. I am still guessing soil animals have negative lives, but I have been very uncertain. Abstract.
- I listened to "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" today. I think the first two parts of the book are the best available explanation of the basic case for AI misalignment risk for a general audience. I thought the last part was pretty bad, and probably recommend skipping it.
- The 2025 Results Report captures a pivotal moment in the Global Fund partnership’s fight against HIV, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. After decades of progress, global health is in crisis. Declining international funding is jeopardizing the fight against AIDS, TB and malaria – and with it, global health security. Since Global Fund’s inception in 2002, health […].
- My write-up as of September 2025 - feel free to ask me for a more updated Source of Truth if you're interested in this space - and please let me know what I’m missing!. Key Players Making Video: Organization. Palisade Research:Does research on AI for policymakers and communicators. Has started its own video program - check out their videos!
- With nearly $1 billion delivered to people in poverty, GiveDirectly is entering a bold new phase: scaling our programs while innovating faster to meet our goal of delivering $5 billion by 2035. At this inflection point, we’re proud to welcome Oyin Solebo to GiveDirectly’s Board of Directors. Solebo brings unmatched experience at the intersection of […]...
- H5N1 avian influenza at a South Dakota turkey operation—resulting in the killing of more than 55,000 birds—has been confirmed. Avian influenza continues to circulate among wild birds, cattle and other mammals, making outbreaks like this both persistent and increasingly threatening to animal welfare, food security and public health. The following statement on South Dakota’s avian […].
- There are two things we know with absolute certainty. First, more than one million women are needlessly suffering from childbirth injuries such as fistula. Second, with a simple surgery, it is possible to restore a woman’s health and give her a new chance at life. To bring more surgeries to more women around the world, … Continued.
- We’re excited to share that the first AVA Academy in Europe is in the works! . The first AVA Academy in Europe, organized by AVA International, will take place in Berlin, Germany set for late March 2026. This program will be designed specifically for animal advocates across the region—to help you grow your skills, build powerful networks, and strengthen the future of the movement.
- A few days ago, Austin Chen and Marcus Abramovitch published How cost-effective are AI safety YouTubers?, an "Early work on "GiveWell for AI Safety"", ranking different interventions in the AI Safety Video space, using a framework that measured impact by basically multiplying watchtime by three quality factors (Quality of Audience, Fidelity of Message and Alignment of Message).
- And the need for more AIS advocacy work. Executive Summary. The Center for AI Policy (CAIP) is no more. CAIP was an advocacy organization that worked to raise policymakers’ awareness of the catastrophic risks from AI and to promote ambitious legislative solutions.
- Episode three of Hard Drugs is about how our need to produce insulin kickstarted the modern biotech industry
- An inaugural report from Mercy For Animals reveals the urgent need for Japanese companies to take action and join the global cage-free movement. The post Japan’s Biggest Food Companies Are Falling Behind on Animal Welfare. Here Is Who’s Leading and Who’s Not appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- What will AI look like by 2030 if current trends hold? What does it mean for AI capabilities in scientific R&D?
- [This is a guest blog post from a writer who wishes to remain anonymous about her experience selling sex in the Bay Area.]
- As China rethinks its approach to animal welfare, egg producers are weighing the switch to cage-free systems. This research gives us insight into what’s working, what’s holding them back, and how advocates can help. The post Hope For Hens: Can Cage-Free Eggs Take Off In China? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ new book should be an AI wakeup call — shame it’s such a chore to read...
- Gene therapy, narcolepsy drugs, parasite removal, protein nanoparticles, the 3D structure of genomes, and more.
- From burning old sunshine to using it in real-time.
- Epistemic status: These questions seem useful to me, but I'm biased. I'm interested in your thoughts on any portion you read. If our first AGI is based on current LLMs and alignment strategies, is it likely to be adequately aligned? Opinions and intuitions vary widely. As a lens to analyze this question, let's consider such a proto-AGI reasoning about its goals.
- Work done as part of my work with FAR AI, back in February 2023. It's a small result but I want to get it out of my drafts folder. It was the start of the research that led to interpreting the Sokoban planning RNN. I was trying to study neural networks that plan, in order to have examples of mesa-optimizers. I trained the recurrent maze CNN from Bansal et al.
- We scraped all EA forum posts & comments from 2024 and 2025 to use as a test bed for sense making, analysis, and AI-powered epistemic grading as a part of the Future of Life Foundation’s Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning. (We’re happy to share all code and all datasets, etc. to interested parties. Just reach out!).
- We’ve released our review of our programmes for the years 2023 to mid-2025. The full review is available on our website, and we’re sharing the summary below. You can find our previous reviews here. Summary: Key updates since 2022:
- This report was commissioned by Google DeepMind. All points of views and conclusions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or endorsement of Google DeepMind.
- New cage-free egg report reveals major opportunity to improve animal welfare in Japan’s food industry TOKYO — On September 15, Mercy For Animals released Animal Welfare Report 2025: Japan, its inaugural animal welfare report for Japan. The first of its kind, this report examines and evaluates cage-free egg initiatives at Japanese food companies, revealing that […].
- Consider which direction of change would be an improvement
- OpenAI and Oracle signed a $300B deal, which would lead to Oracle displacing Microsoft to become OpenAI’s largest compute provider; the deal lifted Oracle’s stock price.
- The post Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- A thing that bothers me
- A recording from Linch's live video
- Researchers conducted analyses of over 200 studies on rats and mice in laboratories and concluded that “enriched” housing leads to reduced stress and improved health. The post Stress Reduction For Rodents In Laboratories: Better, But Not Great appeared first on Faunalytics.
- GakuNin RDM is a research data management (RDM) service provided by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and designed to promote open science across universities and research institutions in Japan. Developed with sustained support from the Japanese government and funding agencies, the platform builds on the Open Science Framework (OSF)’s architecture, leveraging its features and...
- What if you could generate a detailed PDF snapshot of your entire OSF project—including metadata, wikis, files, contributors, components, and logs? A new project led by Ramiro Bravo from the University of Manchester (UoM) is working to make this feature a reality.
- Researchers generate vast amounts of data, but making that information easy to find, understand, and use is still a challenge. Accessible Content Optimization for Research Needs (ACORN) is a command-line multitool designed to streamline and improve the accessibility and usability of research activity data (RAD).
- DataPipe is a tool that enables researchers to save data from a behavioral experiment directly to the Open Science Framework (OSF). Developed by Joshua R. de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at Vassar College, DataPipe aims to simplify the process of implementing born-open data for behavioral researchers.
- Key leadership roles, including a head of the AI Office safety unit, have yet to be hired
- Voici l’histoire de cinq femmes de Touba : Amy, Nar, Ndiatté, Aminata et Ndack. Chacune d’entre elles est atteinte d’un trachome avancé et elles ont toutes bénéficié d’une opération chirurgicale leur ayant sauvé la vue dans le cadre des efforts déployés par le Sénégal pour éliminer cette maladie.
- Greetings from a world where…...
- The Incident. It was 11 PM on a rainy August evening when my partner and I were walking back from a coffee shop in London, and I accidentally stepped on a snail. Its shell shattered completely under my weight, although it was still moving.
- America's largest non-profit had a broken distribution system. University of Chicago economists fixed it.
- Opinion | Ideas for smarter growth: India’s bet for an inclusive future In a new op-ed for The Hindu, Saptarishi Dutta, Sharanya Chandran, and Vijayalakshmi Iyer of J-PAL South Asia argue that India’s path to becoming a high-income country must be rooted in evidence.
- This is the story of five women from Touba, Senegal. Each of them had advanced trachoma, and they all received sight-saving operations as part of Senegal’s journey to eliminate the disease.
- Introduction. The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives is rapidly accelerating. Take ChatGPT: released less than three years ago, it now has over a billion weekly users, and is already vastly more capable than the original version. The same goes for other popular AI models, like Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude.
- Something striking just happened in global nutrition: As of 2025, children worldwide are now more likely to be obese than underweight. According to UNICEF’s new Child Nutrition Report, about 9.4 percent of school-age kids (ages 5–19) are living with obesity, compared to 9.2 percent who are underweight. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was much wider: […]...
- I'm presenting a talk at EAG NYC next month on the topic of indirect effects. Not to spoil the talk too much, but the broad theme is that wild animal welfare and longtermism are in similar epistemic positions with regard to (different types of) indirect effects, and that it could be instructive to compare how the two different communities approach uncertainty about these effects.
- A century ago, a deluge of automobiles swept across the United States, upending city life in its wake. Pedestrian deaths surged. Streetcars, unable to navigate the choking traffic, collapsed. Car owners infuriated residents with their klaxons’ ear-splitting awooogah! Scrambling to accommodate the swarm of motor vehicles, local officials paved over green space, whittled down sidewalks […]...
- The post 80,000 Hours review: 2023 to mid-2025 appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
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