Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Where should you give if you care only about producing infinite value?
- In 2019, Faunalytics began holding Office Hours, providing one-on-one support for advocates and organizations. We've tracked our progress with this program for the past five years and we’re excited to share an update on how it’s been going, according to you. The post Five Years Of Faunalytics’ Office Hours: Feedback From Advocates appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Opinion: Geoff Ralston argues that the safety and security of AI doesn’t need to be at odds with profit and progress...
- "It's an interesting thought that you might offer retirement, you might offer payment, you might offer some assurances, some rights, just to not completely exclude their interests from society and thereby have a better relation with them as they get smarter and smarter." "Who are you loyal to? Like, are you loyal to us, the, you know, the rebellious AIs, or are you loyal to the humans?
- This eye-opening report reveals key disparities faced by socially disadvantaged, women, and limited resource farmers in the United States. The post A Look At Underserved Farmers In The United States appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Max Roser has a recent post arguing that progress against extreme poverty is likely to stall after 2030, with the number of extremely poor people projected to increase as stagnant economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) fail to keep pace with population growth.
- Here are novel ideas I think are good but that I won’t write because they require background knowledge I don’t have and I don’t care about them that much.
- With “high” reasoning, both GPT-5.1 and GPT-5 score 151 on the Epoch Capabilities Index, our tool for combining results across multiple benchmarks...
- What is the ECF?. Longview operates a public fund: the Emerging Challenges Fund. It is focused on global catastrophic risks from emerging technology such as AI. We recently released our 2025 ECF Annual Report, which provides a top-level overview of the fund and grants made in 2025.
- THL exists to end the abuse of animals raised for food. Through strategic corporate negotiations, policy change, and movement building, we meaningfully reduce the suffering of millions of animals on factory farms around the world each year. THL currently has a funding gap of $3.6M for 2025.
- EA Forum Digest #267 Hello!. You may notice that there are a lot of posts on the Forum right now. It’s Marginal Funding Week, and we have some great posts from a range of effective charities, outlining exactly what they could do with extra funds. I’ll send the best of these to you on Friday as a bonus digest. Until then, you can read them here:
- Giving people advice on how to get a job is a minefield, because the way that I get jobs is probably rather different from the way that you get jobs, and so “generic” advice (or even advice from my personal experience) isn’t likely to be that effective.
- Join Transformer and TxP at our very special event next month.
- Please help
- Summary: Amplify is an EA-aligned digital marketing agency that has supported 40+ EA and AI Safety fieldbuilding organisations with subsidised or pro bono marketing. We secured over 3000 counterfactual expressions of interest to join EA Intro & AIS programmes, helped multiple groups recruit highly engaged participants, and delivered other cost-effective results such as ~$570 per GWWC pledge...
- The grand challenges of global health and development, from feeding a warming world to defeating antibiotic resistance, require funding and effort and politics. But they also require breakthroughs. In the last hundred years, we’ve made incredible progress fighting malaria, invented game-changing vaccines, and developed new drugs that could change the course on heart disease. But […]...
- Global development is wobbling — funding slipping, crises multiplying — and the most reliable force we have isn’t a new pledge or a distant plan. It’s people on the ground. These local organizers, nurses, food innovators, and environmental defenders are meeting growing need with competence and courage, turning urgency into practical service. They show how […]...
- By the time the woman arrived at the hospital, she had nearly bled to death. She went into labor on a warm September day earlier this year, and made the trek from her rural village in the small West African country of Gambia to a nearby clinic. The baby was delivered successfully, but after the […]...
- When we launched Vox’s Future Perfect section in 2018, it began with a simple question: “What topics would we write about if our only instruction was to write about the most important stuff in the world, particularly the most important stuff that isn’t already widely covered?” In the years since, the “most important stuff” has […]...
- “It is the first time since 2017 that a famine has been declared anywhere on Earth,” I read earlier this year. The famine in question was in Sudan. Soon after, I read another headline: “Famine confirmed for first time in Gaza.” As images of emaciated children spread across social media, the question loomed over Western […]...
- In a year marked by devastating cuts to aid and horrible humanitarian crises, global health and development progress is at risk of backsliding. But then, there are those who refuse to cave in. Tackling global health from new perspectives, these leaders have channeled their expertise to create lasting impact. Their work spans high-stakes arenas, from […]...
- The phone rang just before midnight. It was early February in 2001 in Mumbai, and Yusuf Hamied, a seasoned chemist at the Indian multinational pharma company Cipla, was at a dinner party. He picked up the phone anyway. A New York Times reporter was on the line, calling to check a rumor: Was Hamied really […]...
- The roots of the world’s most stubborn global health problems don’t yield to vibes-based solutions. They surrender to data, rigor, and the surprisingly radical idea of actually trying to figure out what works. Governments and nonprofit organizations depend on the economists, activists, policymakers, and writers who are reshaping how we understand poverty, health, and progress. They’re […]...
- Summary: By identifying and promoting high-impact giving opportunities, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) aims to help people help more animals. We believe this approach to be particularly important for effective animal advocacy (EAA) because this cause area is not only deeply underfunded, the problem is growing (yet solvable!).
- "Private companies are extremely empowered and the government is just like left behind." "So if you've got some misaligned AI, well, giving it the ear of the president might be not such a great thing to do." "Nonetheless, at the moment, if I could push a button, I'd want more uptake in the government rather than less."
- AMF has had a busy 12 months distributing 25.4 million nets to protect 46 million people. In 2026 we will be distributing 69 million nets to protect 124 million people. Our immediate funding gap currently stands at US$462 million and is for distributions in 2027 to 2029. More information here.
- Open Phil’s Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) team is growing quickly. This year, we expect to make well over $500M in grants across our AI and biosecurity work (that’s more than a 60% increase over 2024) and we’re hoping to expand that significantly over the months and years to come.
- Job Blast 🚀 | Want to understand AI safety? Start here New roles at UK AI Security Institute, Humane League, and more. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- Context: Post #9 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. First, a disclaimer. Before you automate something, first see whether you can just not do the thing at all. Questioning the Requirements is a step that should always happen before you gleefully systematize a task. One reason for focusing on automation that bites harder at Lightcone than...
- Private Sector Invests USD 440 Million to Fight Hunger – Efforts Still Fall Short of SDG2 gloireri Wed, 11/19/2025 - 09:50 Geneva. Results from the latest accountability report brings pledge tally to nearly USD 800 million, with several companies exceeding their initial commitment.
- Hi Dorothy, Hi Chioma, Yes, this is possible. Just to clarify one thing — two of the farmer guidebooks are still marked as ‘coming soon’, so the visuals may not be fully ready for display on the GAIN site yet. For the ones that are live: we’ve linked the gloireri Wed, 11/19/2025 - 08:40 Community of Practice: Bringing together entrepreneurs for better food systems in Nigeria.
- Community of Practice: Bringing together entrepreneurs for better food systems in Nigeria gloireri Wed, 11/19/2025 - 08:40 Interview Piece: Community of Practice: Bringing together entrepreneurs for better food systems in Nigeria. 18th/Nov/2025, Nigeria. As the world marks Global Entrepreneurship Week 2025 under the theme “Together We Build,” the SUN Business Network (SBN) Nigeria...
- Regularly, I'll wind up reading some work and wind up surprised that it bears little resemblance to its portrayal on the internet. Usually, it's a lot more nuanced than I thought, but at times it frequently says the opposite to what everyone else claims. What's going on? Answer: almost no one who talks about this work has ever read it. Instead, they read about it.
- Episode Recap. In this series, I have been building up the argument that other people's internal psychology is much weirder and a lot more alien than it seems on the surface, and that this explains why most humans on this planet fail to make obvious and important inferences. They just don't think right. Supporting arguments so far:
- Earlier this year, we announced that we’re relaunching our one-on-one career advising program. We’re happy to share that we’ve since roughly doubled our advising capacity, and are excited to speak to even more people across cause areas and career stages. We’re also developing our adjacent programs, like our career impact workshops for groups. What this means for you in practice:
- A lot of psychological terms don’t mean what people think they mean (at least, not according to psychologists). There’s an increasing drift between how they get used colloquially in everyday language and the commonly accepted definitions among psychologists. There’s a sense in which the lay usage is “wrong” (in that it doesn’t match more scientific, […]...
- Vasco Grillo is a very interesting utilitarian. He thinks that the most important affects of our actions are those on wild animals, especially very simple ones. He goes, on this topic, even further than I do. I thought it would be fun to discuss our disagreements, so I had him on.
- We at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute’s Technical Governance Team have proposed an illustrative international agreement (blog post) to halt the development of superintelligence until it can be done safely. For those who haven’t read it already, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the agreement before reading this post.
- In honor of my dropping by Inkhaven at Lighthaven in Berkeley this week, I figured it was time for another writing roundup. You can find #1 here, from March 2025. I’ll be there from the 17th (the day I am publishing this) until the morning of Saturday the 22nd. I am happy to meet people, including for things not directly about writing. . Table of Contents.
- TLDR: We at the MIRI Technical Governance Team have released a report describing an example international agreement to halt the advancement towards artificial superintelligence. The agreement is centered around limiting the scale of AI training, and restricting certain AI research.
- A man more utilitarian than even me?? ?
- Short of time? Click here to read the key takeaways! A 71% increase can sound alarming, but without context, it can mislead. In the aspirin example, the relative increase is 71%, yet the absolute risk only rises from 0.18% to 0.31%. Both figures are correct, but they create very different impressions of the underlying risk. Relative and absolute percentages answer different questions.
- As part of the EA Forum’s 2025 Marginal Funding Week, we’d like to share with you Wild Animal Initiative’s needs for additional funding, what we would do with it, and how you can help us build a scientific field dedicated to understanding wild animal welfare. Summary: Wild Animal Initiative’s mission is to accelerate science that helps wild animals — a vast and neglected moral priority.
- TLDR: Rethink Priorities has room for more funding. With a core budget for 2026 of $7.5 million, we believe that we can productively use at least $9.3 million to scale high-leverage opportunities in our areas of global health and development, animal welfare, worldview investigations (including AI and digital minds), and surveys.
- The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) is a new policy advocacy organization, working to improve the lives of wild animals today and build support for wild animal welfare policy. We’re now fundraising for our first year, and the next $60,000 will be matched 1:1 by a generous supporter. We’ve already started engaging policymakers on wild animal-friendly urban infrastructure (e.g.
- In 2025, the Alignment Research Center (ARC) has been making conceptual and theoretical progress at the fastest pace that I've seen since I first interned in 2022. Most of this progress has come about because of a re-orientation around a more specific goal: outperforming random sampling when it comes to understanding neural network outputs.
- This post is written as a series of little thoughts and vignettes, all trying to gesture at the same idea. The hope is to convey the gestalt. Consider the game of middle management, of climbing the hierarchy at a big company.
- Since 2019, CLTC has provided the Cal Cybersecurity Research Fellowship, made possible through the generous support of Tim M. Mather, CLTC External Advisor and a Cal alumnus (Class…. The post Cal Cybersecurity Research Fellows Announced appeared first on CLTC.
- Why we shouldn't rewild land
- 📮EA Switzerland - November Updates View this email in your browser Summary: Hey <<First Name>>, Welcome to this month's update! The key points in brief: It's Giving Season! Read about donation opportunities to effective organizations, like HIP teaming up with Charity Navigator for Donation Matching.
- Big news from Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving today: Today, Open Philanthropy is becoming Coefficient Giving. Our mission remains the same, but our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact.
- TL;DR: Recently, an argument has circulated claiming that factory farming is net positive because of the effects on soil animals. While I do not personally agree with this argument, I believe nematodes and other soil animals are worth caring about and respect the spirit with which it has been presented.
- Keeping kids safe is a priority for legislators globally — and might increase attention on other risks, too...
- X has been dunking on a perfectly innocuous guy who created a date-me doc.
- Researchers explore how dog guardians respond when temperatures soar, revealing considerable knowledge about the risks to their animals but little change to their daily routines. The post Are U.S. Dog Guardians Ready For The Heat? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Summary: As part of Marginal Funding Week, I want to share how Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) would use additional resources beyond the support we expect to receive from major funders. We are deeply grateful for the support of everyone who has contributed to the substantial progress we’ve achieved over the years, going from a bold project idea to the creation of a new...
- This blog post is based on a webinar that explored how libraries and research communities collaborate on open science initiatives. View the recording here. Academic libraries increasingly play a key role in supporting open science, but what does that support look like in practice?
- Over the past decade, Open Philanthropy has been the rare philanthropic shop with both the resources and the rigor to make a dent in some of the world’s biggest problems. Working closely with Good Ventures — the foundation built by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna — Open Philanthropy has […]...
- Tehran is running out of water. Rationing has begun in Iran’s capital city, with some of the approximately 10 million residents experiencing “nightly pressure cuts” between midnight and 5 am. The entire country is in an unprecedented drought, facing its driest — and hottest — autumn in nearly 60 years. Tehran has received no rain […]...
- Context: Post #8 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. When you finish something, you learn something about how you did that thing. When you finish many things at the same time, you do not get to apply the lessons you learned from each of those things to the others.
- tl;dr: Sentinel is an open-source intelligence organization that rapidly identifies and reacts to global risks, particularly ones difficult to anticipate over longer time-horizons. We have filled $700K of our ~$1.6M budget and are looking to fill the rest to expand and sustain our large-scale open source monitoring for GCR. About Sentinel.
- In the spirit of “Marginal Funding Week” for the 2025 Giving Season on the EA Forum, we’d like to share with you The Humane League UK’s (THL UK’s) need for additional funding, what we would do with it, and how you can have a real impact on reducing the suffering of animals raised for food. We’re currently seeking funding for our 2025 match giving appeal.
- It's Marginal Funding Week! In order to help us all make better donation decisions this giving season, organisations will be sharing what they would be able to do with extra funding. If your project is fundraising, consider writing a full post tagged " Marginal Funding Week" or answering below.
- From summer 2024 up to summer 2025, I had been keeping track of these resources in a private Google Doc shared only with a couple of people. I realized others might benefit too, so here is the latest version, last-updated on August 7th, 2025.
- Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man. According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion. But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender. When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:
- It seems like a catastrophic civilizational failure that we don't have confident common knowledge of how colds spread. There have been a number of studies conducted over the years, but most of those were testing secondary endpoints, like how long viruses would survive on surfaces, or how likely they were to be transmitted to people's fingers after touching contaminated surfaces, etc.
- I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “ real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition.
- When we restore sight, we don’t just change how people see the world—we change what the world can be. In 2025, Seva reached more people than ever before—restoring sight, strengthening communities, and proving what’s possible when compassion drives action. Our new Impact Report captures this year’s milestones: Together, we opened a new eye hospital in ….
- The post Bungoma signs MOU to strengthen community health systems appeared first on Living Goods.
- The post Strengthening Health at the Doorstep: Bungoma County, Kenya and Living Goods Launch Transformative Partnership appeared first on Living Goods.
- Note: definitely true, especially my aesthetic preferences, and the speculative historical synthesis. There are some hedonic treadmills which, even after I've climbed them, let me enjoy the entry-level experience. In the case of tea, the entry-level experience is a cheap tea bag of black tea. Sadly, tea does not have one of the nicer treadmills.
- Politically, I am a tragedian: It is tragic that we need governments, that we can’t trust markets to deliver what everyone needs. It is tragic that we need markets, that we can’t just trust government to deliver what everyone wants and to not crush the Other.
- There has been a lot of talk about "p(doom)" over the last few years. This has always rubbed me the wrong way because "p(doom)" didn't feel like it mapped to any specific belief in my head. In private conversations I'd sometimes give my p(doom) as 12%, with the caveat that "doom" seemed nebulous and conflated between several different concepts.
- The post Hannaford faces backlash over eggs, food prices appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- There are a ton of false narratives that circulate widely in and about the US. To help combat that, here’s a list I’ve been compiling of facts that contradict common narratives related to the US that many people believe. In some cases, these facts contradict common beliefs that most Americans hold, whereas in other cases, […]...
- In pursuit of more affordable housing for young families and first-time homebuyers, cities across the US are legalizing “missing middle” housing. But the reforms passed in many cities often fail to produce new homes. A deep dive into a Memphis,…. The post Duplexes? Doable. <span class="dewidow">Triplexes? Trouble.</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- Lower-income Americans spend over 30% of their after-tax income on transportation, a burden driven by states prioritizing highways over transit. New research argues the high cost of transport reflects a policy failure, but one that can be reversed and lead…. The post The Affordability Agenda: Why <span class="dewidow">Mobility Matters</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- What causes bad things? It sounds like a huge question, but maybe it’s not as big as it seems. Here’s my updated/improved list of high-level causes of bad things in the world. Note that these are not mutually exclusive categories. I’ve also added some potential solutions for each cause. I’d be interested to know: what […]...
- I often read interpretability papers and I come away thinking “ok, but what’s the point? What problem does this help us solve?” So last winter, I organized a MATS/Pivotal stream to build examples of deceptive models (aka “model organisms”). The goal was to build a diverse ‘zoo’ of these model organisms and empirically test whether white-box methods could help us detect their deceptive reasoning.
- (content note: discussion of war and mass death; also a long aside about the philosophy of apologies). After 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian war, the three sides eventually met for mediation in the United States.
- Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground.". The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens.
- 🐣 The Humane League is looking for an experienced attorney to advise internal stakeholders on various legal risks and rights, to assume accountability for a number of legal practice areas within the organization, and to support the Legal department in ensuring THL’s legal compliance as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in all aspects of its operations!.
- The post These poultry farmers converted their land into an animal sanctuary and hemp business. Here’s how they did it appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- Executive summary
- THEM: Hello, this is CVS, pharmacist speaking. May I ask who’s calling?. ME: This is Scott Alexander. Scott Alexander is located at the desk in his bedroom. Scott Alexander’s waking hours are between 5 AM and 9 PM on weekdays, and between…. THEM: Excuse me, I don’t understand. ME: I’m playing a defect-defect equilibrium.
- And in defense of "debate bros"
- And implications for RLVR progress
- Context: Post #7 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame says: Every commitment unfinished is an “open loop”; and when it is tracked in your psyche, instead of your system, it will require energy and attention to track and maintain.
- A report compiles hundreds of welfare violations from U.S. laboratories, revealing widespread animal suffering and a lack of accountability. The post Audit Reveals Widespread Animal Suffering In U.S. Labs appeared first on Faunalytics.
- TL;DR: Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) is a nonprofit law firm fighting factory-farm cruelty. In our four years in existence, LIC has: proven in court that animal protection organizations like LIC have the power to enforce California’s animal cruelty law against agriculture companies,. prompted California’s largest poultry producer to announce it has made animal-welfare reforms, and.
- Lyman Stone writes about trans people:
- To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs. (Recalling, of course, that shrimps is bugs.). We don’t know much about their needs in current production systems. The Arthropoda Foundation is trying to fix that. If we want to help the most numerous farmed animals, we have to answer some basic empirical questions.
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