Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Donald Trump’s return to Washington might seem like a terrifying moment for the fight against climate change. The incoming administration is not just hostile to the energy transition; it’s also expected to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, roll back a wide range of pollution regulations and promote domestic fossil fuel production — decisions likely to worsen global...
- This seems like an important piece of work - an RCT on the use of AI capabilities for developers. The TL;DR of the paper is. The devil is in the details of course. This post by Steve Newman does a good job of working through some of them. I have highlighted some considerations from it: The methodology was as follows:
- A $50,000 first place prize for essays exploring consciousness
- Hi all!. We’re happy to share that Super Festval, a supermarket brand part of Grupo Beal (former “Companhia Beal de Alimentos’), has officially published a commitment to exclusively source pork from group housing systems during gestation in Brazil by 2028, considering preferably preimplantation systems where sows are housed in stalls for no longer than 7 days. You can read the announcement in...
- Thank you to @Jacintha Baas, @Judith Rensing, and the @CE team for your help in editing and improving this post. Introductory Context. Hi, I’m Trish. This is my first post on the EA forum.
- Finalist #3 in the Review Contest
- Transformer Weekly: SB 53’s revamp, Peter Kyle on AGI, and a movie about Ilya Sutskever...
- Just talk like a person!
- It is a truth universally acknowledged that a rationalist, in possession of a vague understanding of Bayes’ Theorem, must be in want of some woo.
- The welfare needs of Japanese quails are understudied compared to other farmed birds. What do we know, and what more can we learn?. The post Cage-Free Housing For Japanese Quails appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Check Your Dialectical Privilege
- no attempts
- Anders Sandberg joins me to discuss superintelligence and its profound implications for human psychology, markets, and governance. We talk about physical bottlenecks, tensions between the technosphere and the biosphere, and the long-term cultural and physical forces shaping civilization.
- From the beginning, Elon Musk has marketed Grok, the chatbot integrated into X, as the unwoke AI that would give it to you straight, unlike the competitors. But on X over the last year, Musk’s supporters have repeatedly complained of a problem: Grok is still left-leaning. Ask it if transgender women are women, and it […]...
- 7 charts about AI deployment
- Episode two of The Works in Progress Podcast is out now
- When it comes to helping animals, not all charitable donations are created equal. While every act of giving comes from a place of compassion, the reality is that some animal charities can accomplish dramatically more good with the same dollar amount than others. Understanding how to identify these high-impact opportunities can transform your giving from […]...
- When it comes to helping animals, not all charitable donations are created equal. While every act of giving comes from a place of compassion, the reality is that some animal charities can accomplish dramatically more good with the same dollar amount than others. Understanding how to identify these high-impact opportunities can transform your giving from […]...
- The post Kisumu County and Living Goods Launch Bold New Chapter in Community Health appeared first on Living Goods.
- Today marks a historic win for animal advocacy in Brazil, thanks to the combined efforts of Humane World for Animals, Te Protejo,, Fórum Animal and Change.org. On July 9, 2025, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies approved the Senate substitute for PL 6602/13 (now PL 3062/22), banning federal animal testing for cosmetics, personal hygiene products, and perfumes. Why this is huge: • 1.6 million+...
- I think the 2003 invasion of Iraq has some interesting lessons for the future of AI policy. (Epistemic status: I’ve read a bit about this, talked to AIs about it, and talked to one natsec professional about it who agreed with my analysis (and suggested some ideas that I included here), but I’m not an expert.). For context, the story is:
- GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?.
- Utilizing local food and preventing food waste in Indonesia’s School Meal Program gloireri Thu, 07/10/2025 - 21:34 Representatives from the National Nutrition Agency, National Food Agency, GAIN, I-PLAN, and invitees of the seminar on Environmental Perspectives of the school meal Program, 27 May 2025 hosted by the National Food Agency, I-PLAN and GAIN.
- When writing about accountability in the NGO space I ended up concluding that funds are a more accountable mechanism than foundations.
- TLDR: July 21-27 will be a themed week on the EA Forum for posting career-related quick takes and posts. We'll also have career advisors available throughout the week to answer questions. Last time we ran a career conversations week, it led to some great posts, including: Mistakes, flukes, and good calls I made in my multiple careers - Catherine Low.
- Introduction. Joseph Bloom, Alan Cooney. This is a research update from the White Box Control team at UK AISI. In this update, we share preliminary results on the topic of sandbagging that may be of interest to researchers working in the field.
- As AI models become more sophisticated, a key concern is the potential for “deceptive alignment” or “scheming”. This is the risk of an AI system becoming aware that its goals do not align with human instructions, and deliberately trying to bypass the safety measures put in place by humans to prevent it from taking misaligned action.
- I wrote a reading list for people to get up to speed on Redwood’s research: Section 1 is a quick guide to the key ideas in AI control, aimed at someone who wants to get up to speed as quickly as possible.
- I wrote a guide to Redwood’s writing: Section 1 is a quick guide to the key ideas in AI control, aimed at someone who wants to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Section 2 is an extensive guide to almost all of our writing related to AI control, aimed at someone who wants to gain a deep understanding of Redwood’s thinking about AI risk. Reading Redwood’s blog posts has been formative...
- TL;DR: We wanted to benchmark supervision systems available on the market—they performed poorly. Out of curiosity, we naively asked a frontier LLM to monitor the inputs; this approach performed significantly better. However, beware: even when an LLM flags a question as harmful, it will often still answer it. Full paper is available here. Abstract.
- Hi all! We are hiring a Development Manager at the Nonhuman Rights Project. Sharing some information below with additional information available on our website. Happy to answer questions - please help us spread the word! Thank you!. About the Nonhuman Rights Project.
- The most consequential figure of the 20th century
- Imagine, for a moment, that you’re seated and ready to dine at one of Switzerland’s many celebrated high-end eateries, where a prix fixe meal can run around $400. On the menu, the slow-cooked Schweinsfilet, or pork tenderloin, comes with a bizarre and disturbing disclosure: The pigs raised to make that meal were castrated without pain […]...
- Comprehensively rebutting Defending Feminism, Key, and the other fish pain skeptics
- Focus groups with Singapore families reveal that children are more curious about alternative proteins than their parents, who worry about naturalness. The post Kids And Parents Have Mixed Views On Alternative Proteins appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Updates from CEPI, Brown Pandemic Center, CHS, Sentinel Bio, Blueprint Biosecurity, 1DaySooner, CSR, Asia CHS, Harvard CCDD, SecureBio, CLTR and IBBIS
- Should we pivot from our current ToC? Thats one of the big questions we ask ourselves in our self-impact assessment View this email in your browser Should we pivot from our current ToC?. Hello readers, welcome to the Animal Ask newsletter, which is sent out every other month.
- Read our response to the Safety and Security chapter of the final Code of Practice for governing general-purpose AI, published by the European AI Office after a nine-month process involving more than 1,400 stakeholders. The post The Future Society’s Response to the EU’s Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI appeared first on The Future Society.
- Why Italy is less woke than Germany and other observations
- We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
- This week, Medecines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and pharmaceutical company Novartis announced a new breakthrough in malaria. Novartis has received approval for the first malaria medicine for newborn babies and young infants. The positive decision from Swissmedic under a special global health initiative is now expected to lead to rapid approvals across eight African countries. […].
- Living in New Zealand can sometimes feel like an obstacle to doing good effectively. We’re far from the EA hubs in the UK/US, and from opportunities for direct work on global health & development. But are there any areas where we might have an advantage? Here are some possibilities that the community has been discussing recently: As a low-risk environment for AI training.
- This isn’t about feeling guilty — it’s about using the lottery of birth to make the world a bit fairer. Giving effectively is how we turn luck into justice. Link in bio.
- This is a crosspost of a recent post by Hannah Yang, FP Research's comms lead, on Founders Pledge's website. I thought it was important to post this on the Forum because it's unclear to me what people know about FP, and because I often encounter various misconceptions — the three most common being that we focus only on climate (we don't), that we're driven primarily by member interests (we're...
- This is a rough explanation of relative ranges, a heuristic that I've found very helpful for quickly comparing two options that trade off between two dimensions. Consider the following examples of tradeoffs: Should we prioritize helping small animals or large animals?
- Dr. Deonandan’s recent op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen (“Cancelled funding for mRNA flu vaccine a global mistake,” June 2) rightly underscores the urgency of preparing for H5N1, but we also need to confront the root cause of this growing threat: industrial animal agriculture. High-density factory farms — especially egg and poultry facilities — create an […].
- We need to see this as a canary in the coal mine
- We are releasing a public registry of Docker images for SWE-bench, to help the community run more efficient and reproducible SWE-bench evaluations. By making better use of layer caching, we reduced the total size of the registry to 67 GiB for all 2290 SWE-bench images (10x reduction), and to 30 GiB for 500 SWE-bench Verified images (6x reduction).
- We’re thrilled to share a victory for animals and truth in advertising! Thanks to Animal Outlook’s lawsuit, filed with the incredible support of Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC), the nearly 100-year-old DC butcher shop, Harvey’s Market, has agreed to stop selling foie gras forever.
- Some new American AI models and a new America Party
- At GiveWell, we're committed to understanding the impact of our grantmaking and improving our decisions over time. That's why we've begun conducting "lookbacks"—reviews of past grants, typically two to three years after making them, that assess how well they've met our initial expectations and what we can learn from them. We conduct lookbacks for two main reasons: accountability and learning.
- Peter Salib is an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston, and Simon Goldstein is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. We discuss their paper ‘AI Rights for Human Safety’. To see all our published research, visit forethought.org/research.
- About the program. Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program. For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world’s most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts. But today’s world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program , and we’re so excited to tell you about it!.
- Most discussion about AI and the IMO focuses on gold medals, but that's not the thing to pay most attention to.
- Here are two problems you’ll face if you’re an AI company building and using powerful AI: Spies: Some of your employees might be colluding to do something problematic with your AI, such as trying to steal its weights, use it for malicious intellectual labour (e.g.
- How close, actually, is superintelligence? Will we make the right choices as it arrives? Let me take you through AI 2027, the rigorous month-by-month forecast that sent shockwaves from D.C. to Silicon Valley.
- A conversation with Astera Resident Edwin Kite on applied planetary science, applied astrobiology, and what it would take to terraform Mars
- Could you start a successful company? Years ago, we wanted to help people answer this question about themselves. So, we extensively...
- AI 2027 depicts a possible future where artificial intelligence radically transforms the world in just a few intense years. It’s based on detailed expert forecasts — but how much of it will actually happen? Are we really racing towards a choice between a planet controlled by the elite, or one where humans have lost control entirely? My takeaway?
- And what if you have both at once?
- Morality doesn't have special carveouts for countries in Europe and North America
- Your farmed animal advocacy update for early July 2025
- This collection of resources offers valuable insights to inform media strategies for animal advocacy writers, communications managers, journalists, op-ed writers, editors, and more. The post Research Round-Up: A Guide On Engaging The Media For Writers And Communicators appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Winners take shortcuts
- Millions of companion animals in the U.S. aren’t receiving the care they need — and the consequences can be devastating. The post Half Of U.S. Companion Animal Guardians Face Barriers To Veterinary Care appeared first on Faunalytics.
- “What if you could diagnose stroke, treat cancer, and cure depression with a smartphone‑sized device that costs $1,000 instead of millions?”...
- Opinion | Esther Duflo, Nobel laureate: 'Development aid is not a waste of public money' As international solidarity wanes, the 2018 winner of the Nobel in Economics points out that development aid is not a mere crutch, but an investment: Increasingly strong research networks, including in struggling countries, know how to assess needs and identify solutions for overcoming hardship.
- It's nicer to let them know
- EA Forum Digest #248 Hello!. We’re running a themed week, career conversations week, from July 21–27. It’s a time to post about your job, your thoughts on impactful careers, and share any advice that’s helped you in your career. Use this link to add this and future events to your Google Calendar. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend:
- The first gonorrhea vaccination program, contact lenses that see infrared light, the protein behind sweet tastes, a baby cured with gene therapy, and more
- I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under.
- Managing digital and analog continuity
- The post The AI 2027 scenario and what it means: a video tour appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- AI moves fast. Let's get up to speed.
- A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers.
- Learn more about different options for embedding our interactive charts.
- No matter how significant a problem may be, an ineffective method will do little to solve it. And if you’re dedicating so much of your time, energy, talents and attention to improving the world, we want it to count. Method efficacy is how well a solution actually works. Finding a... Read more...
- Building an impactful career isn’t just about chasing roles that sound impactful on paper—it’s about finding where you can do your best work. Your own unique skills, experiences, and motivations mean that an impactful career for you could look very different to someone else’s. Finding a role where you have... Read more...
- The world is full of problems–and they can differ enormously in how important they are. Looking at problem significance lets us consider just how big a problem is, and whether it’s something we want to spend our career trying to solve. Making a meaningful impact A lot of jobs sound... Read more...
- When thinking through career options, we’re faced with dilemmas like: should we focus on helping people or animals? Should we work at a charity or earn more money in order to donate? Should we try to help people who live now or people in the future? Reflecting on our values... Read more...
- We’ve covered a lot of ground in this guide, from matching your motivations to good opportunities, to mapping your career options, finding and landing impactful roles, navigating obstacles, and more. But, the core idea running through the entire guide is simple: your career can be good both for you and... Read more...
- Once you know what kinds of roles you’re aiming for, the next step is applying, interviewing, and navigating job offers. That might sound straightforward, but it’s often where people get stuck. You might send out application after application and hear nothing back. Or you might start to get traction, only... Read more...
- By now, you’ve likely identified a few directions you’re excited to pursue—roles or fields where you could imagine doing meaningful work. The next step is turning those ideas into concrete opportunities. This stage can feel like a leap. Moving from “possible paths” to actual job searches often brings new questions:... Read more...
- By now, you’ve probably started noticing patterns about what motivates you, what you care about, and how you might want to contribute. The next step is turning those early insights into something more concrete. That doesn’t mean figuring out your whole career in one go, but starting to sketch out... Read more...
- In the previous chapter, we explored the idea that your career can be one of the best ways to make a difference—and that it’s possible to find work that’s both meaningful to you and valuable to the world. If that idea resonated, you might be wondering how to begin narrowing... Read more...
- Your career is one of the biggest forces shaping your life. It affects how you spend your time, what you learn, who you meet, and what kinds of pressures and opportunities show up in your day-to-day life. It also extends beyond work, impacting your finances, your relationships, and even your... Read more...
- Last year, Redwood and Anthropic found a setting where Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet fake alignment to preserve their harmlessness values. We reproduce the same analysis for 25 frontier LLMs to see how widespread this behavior is, and the story looks more complex. As we described in a previous post, only 5 of 25 models show higher compliance when being trained, and of those 5, only Claude 3...
- Abstract. In this paper, LLMs are tasked with completing an impossible quiz, while they are in a sandbox, monitored, told about these measures and instructed not to cheat. Some frontier LLMs cheat consistently and attempt to circumvent restrictions despite everything. The results reveal a fundamental tension between goal-directed behavior and alignment in current LLMs.
- Here's the article https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/do-fish-and-shrimp-suffer-agonizing Here's Avi's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@AviMD/videos Here's my blog https://benthams.substack.com/
- 1 I watched this video by Simon Clark called ‘Should I feel guilty about using AI?’ and found the opening pretty interesting:
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