Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- 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
- 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) . Estonia. A dark, tiny, angry, improbably stylish place where Tarkovsky filmed his undying masterpiece ‘Stalker’ and Nolan also tried to do something with ‘Tenet’. – Robert Kurvitz .
- 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
- A sweeping Cabinet reshuffle has brought new leadership to key departments responsible for decapod welfare. Crustacean Compassion welcomes these new Ministers and urges swift action to protect decapod crustaceans.
- Transformer Weekly: GAIN AI Act, China’s rare earth crackdown, and AI bubble talk...
- Poem A War of Words: Probably my favorite poem qua poem this year.
- Editors’ Note: Nicole P. Marwell and Jennifer E. Mosley discuss their new book, Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector (Stanford University Press, 2025). Recent scholarship has offered varying interpretations of what the appropriate function of foundations should be within a democracy.
- What we know and what we don’t
- Archaeological finds hundreds of thousands of years old have shown human settlement of many of the world’s remote islands, challenging our assumptions of a primitive prehistory. The post Mariners at the Dawn of History appeared first on Palladium.
- With research by us at the Happier Lives Institute, Bloom Wellbeing Fund has recently released a new report providing an up to date overview of the problem of mental illness, and the best ways to solve it. Here are our top takeaways from the report, which are an edited version of the summary shown in the report.
- This post is based on a memo I wrote for this year's Meta Coordination Forum. See also Arden Koehler's recent post, which hits a lot of similar notes. Summary. The EA movement stands at a crossroads.
- It could revolutionize human health — or it could spell our doom. It really depends on who you ask. I’m not talking about potentially risky biodefense lab research, but something that doesn’t yet exist: mirror life. Here’s a refresher on normal biology: The cells in our bodies are composed of the building blocks of life. […]...
- A strategy for handling scheming
- Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that "Yes Requires the Possibility of No". We can understand the principle in terms of information theory. Consider the answer to a yes-or-no question as a binary random variable.
- We think there are many impactful roles out there that aren’t sufficiently on people’s radar, to the detriment of both people looking to get hired and orgs looking to hire them. Because of that, we’ve been working to significantly scale and improve our job board, especially in the context of underrepresented opportunities (across cause areas, regions, and orgs that we think are currently not...
- Vision Weekend USA 2025 | Dec 5-7
- Summary: This is a research update from the Science of Evaluation team at the UK AI Security Institute. In this update, we share preliminary results from analysing transcripts of agent activity that may be of interest to researchers working in the field. AISI generates thousands of transcripts when running its automated safety evaluations, e.g.
- Notes on some interesting factoids I learnt from Anders Sandberg's draft book, Grand Futures. "Starlight is heavier than worlds" - Anders Sandberg. . Looking at the energy density of stuff in the universe, we find a few surprising, and not so surprising, facts. First, the obvious: baryonic matter itself is a rounding error, contributing 4.5% of the energy of the universe.
- I tried training Qwen2.5-1.5B with RL on math to both get correct answers and have a CoT that doesn’t look like human-understandable math reasoning. RL sometimes succeeds at hacking my monitor, and when I strengthen my monitor, it fails at finding CoT that are both illegible and helpful, even after training for roughly 4000 steps (~1B generated tokens).
- I woke up Friday morning w/ a very sore left shoulder. I tried stretching it, but my left chest hurt too. Isn't pain on one side a sign of a heart attack?. Chest pain, arm/shoulder pain, and my breathing is pretty shallow now that I think about it, but I don't think I'm having a heart attack because that'd be terribly inconvenient.
- Last week, Thinking Machines announced Tinker. It’s an API for running fine-tuning and inference on open-source LLMs that works in a unique way. I think it has some immediate practical implications for AI safety research: I suspect that it will make RL experiments substantially easier, and increase the number of safety papers that involve RL on big models.
- Last week, Thinking Machines announced Tinker. It’s an API for running fine-tuning and inference on open-source LLMs that works in a unique way. I think it has some immediate practical implications for AI safety research: I suspect that it will make RL experiments substantially easier, and increase the number of safety papers that involve RL on big models.
- TL;DR: I made a dataset of realistic harmless reward hacks and fine-tuned GPT-4.1 on it. The resulting models don't show emergent misalignment on the standard evals, but they do alignment fake (unlike models trained on toy reward hacks), seem more competently misaligned, are highly evaluation-aware, and the effects persist when mixing in normal data.
- It’s amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there’s nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else’s, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people.
- Intro. LLMs being trained with RLVR (Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards) start off with a 'chain-of-thought' (CoT) in whatever language the LLM was originally trained on. But after a long period of training, the CoT sometimes starts to look very weird; to resemble no human language; or even to grow completely unintelligible. Why might this happen?.
- Above the Fold plays the waiting game
- Could desalination make them irrelevant?
- Listen now | A conversation with Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence joins us to talk about
- Beginning in 2027, all vegetarian MREs will be replaced with vegan options WASHINGTON — In a groundbreaking move recently announced by Pentagon News, the U.S. military will replace its four vegetarian MREs (meals ready to eat) with fully plant-based versions in 2027. The change comes after years of advocacy by Mercy For Animals and its […].
- We would aim for heaven if we knew what it was like
- It's a promising design for reducing model access inside AI companies.
- New York State's AI bill is more ambitious than California’s SB 53 — and is facing opposition from Andreessen Horowitz and other tech groups...
- Opinion: Assembly Member Alex Bores argues that regulation can prevent market pressure from encouraging the release of dangerous AI models, without harming innovation.
- COS’s 2026–2028 Strategic Planning Process. As the global research system evolves—technologically, politically, and culturally—so must the organizations that support it. At the Center for Open Science (COS), we’re developing a bold and focused strategy for 2026–2028 to meet the moment and our shared future with clarity, collaboration, and impact. This planning process comes at a pivotal time.
- Greta Panova wrote a math problem so difficult that today’s most advanced AI models don’t know where to begin.
- Abdulai has been recognised at this year’s Presidential National Best Teachers Awards in Sierra Leone for his work to make education systems more inclusive of children with disabilities.
- The post If we can’t control MechaHitler, how will we steer AGI? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Sometimes things are boring
- When will artificial intelligence (AI) match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent podcast episode, Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who’s more likely to be right?.
- Cori Jackson — a single mom living in Indiana — took in her two young nieces to keep them out of foster care this summer. It hasn’t been easy. The youngest still isn’t potty-trained. The oldest isn’t used to having food in the fridge so, sometimes, she eats so much it makes her sick. The […]...
- (Context: I’m not an expert in animal welfare. My aim is to sketch a potentially neglected perspective on prioritization, not to give highly reliable object-level advice.). Summary: We seem to be clueless about our long-term impact. We might therefore consider it more robust to focus on neartermist causes, in particular animal welfare.
- Disclaimers: I am a computational physicist, not a machine learning expert: set your expectations of accuracy accordingly. All my text in this post is 100% human-written without AI assistance. Introduction: The threat of human destruction by AI is generally regarded by longtermists as the most important cause facing humanity.
- gui2de is hiring student RAs at Georgetown University for the academic year 2025-2026.
- Safeway employees across Alberta are sounding the alarm about Sobeys, their parent label owned by Empire Company Limited. Through its “Truck You, Sobeys” campaign, the United Food and Commercial Workers union accuses Sobeys of cutting delivery routes and reducing full-time jobs to protect profit margins — moves that hurt both workers and customers. This public […].
- The post Vegan Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) Coming to US Military Rations by 2027 appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- TLDR: We found that models can coordinate without communication by reasoning that their reasoning is similar across all instances, a behavior known as superrationality. Superrationality is observed in recent powerful models and outperforms classic rationality in strategic games. Current superrational models cooperate more often with AI than with humans, even when both are said to be rational.
- tl;dr: In terms of financial interests of an AI company, bankruptcy and the world ending are both equally bad. If a company acted in line with its financial interests , it would happily accept significant extinction risk for increased revenue. There are plausible mechanisms which would allow a company to act like this even if virtually every employee would prefer the opposite.
- A pandemic that's substantially worse than COVID-19 is a serious possibility. If one happens, having a good mask could save your life. A high quality reusable mask is only $30 to $60, and I think it's well worth it to buy one for yourself. Worth it enough that I think you should order one now if you don't have one already. But if you're not convinced, let's do some rough estimation.
- This is a link post for two papers that came out today: Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time (Tan et al.). Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment (Wichers et al.).
- This is a link post for two papers that came out today: Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time (Tan et al.). Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment (Wichers et al.).
- In Malawi, we’re answering a new question: can cash not only transform individual lives but entire communities, accelerating the end of extreme poverty? The evidence is clear that large, unconditional cash transfers help people escape extreme poverty. Now we’re testing how it works at scale and learning how to make it even more effective along the […]...
- A math and engineering friendly tour of how networks “choose” to vibrate. At the Ekkolapto Polymath Salon @ Frontier Tower in San Francisco, Andrés Gómez Emilsson (QRI Director of Research) presents our program combining bottom-up oscillator simulations with top-down spectral graph theory to reveal a graph’s resonant modes and symmetries.
- EA Forum Digest #261 Hello!. Draft Amnesty Week starts on Monday! Check out the “What posts would you like someone to write?” thread if you’d like some inspiration. Two weeks left to enter the ‘Essays on Longtermism’ Competition — the top prize is $1000. Also, the application deadline for EAGxSingapore is coming up on October 20. Enjoy the posts! :) .
- It’s amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there’s nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else’s, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are … Continue reading "I take antidepressants. You’re welcome"...
- Different plans for different levels of political will
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