Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The line between good and evil runs through every human heart
- Transformer Weekly: MTG vs. Skynet, AISI becomes CAISI, and Bengio’s new org...
- In news of progress for our global campaign to ban octopus farming, a federal bill to prevent the commercial farming of octopuses, as well as the importation and sale of commercially farmed octopuses, has been reintroduced by U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
- Slow-growing breeds of chickens suffer less, but does switching to them actually improve overall animal welfare? This study weighs the trade-offs. The post The Unintended Consequences Of Slow-Growing Chickens appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Is an Unknown American Woman*
- A kinda wild fact about modern government is that (often) lawmakers don't read the bills they pass. One thing I think would be fun is if every bill came with a short multiple-choice quiz, and lawmakers had to answer the quiz before they voted. There's a.
- Watch Part II: https://youtu.be/bYJOmwU60R4 Even though it can feel like we’re powerless at times, you have more power than you think. Giving to effective charities can help you have a real impact throughout your life, from preventing deaths from preventable diseases, funding research into pandemics, or changing policy to reduce factory farming.
- Haven’t seen Part I? Watch it here: https://youtu.be/hg9O-wb6nfM If a child was drowning in a lake, with a million others just looking on, would you jump in and save them? Even if you had to ruin a brand new suit? How much of your money should you dedicate to doing good? There aren’t always clear cut answers to these questions, but there is a community who are figuring it all out together.
- For decades, digital privacy advocates have been warning the public to be more careful about what we share online. And for the most part, the public has cheerfully ignored them. I am certainly guilty of this myself. I usually click “accept all” on every cookie request every website puts in front of my face, because […]...
- The post 3 reasons AGI might still be decades away appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- How you spend your time at work is the most important decision you'll ever make. Check out our updated career guide for helpful advice.
- On this episode, Michael Nielsen joins me to discuss how humanity's growing understanding of nature poses dual-use challenges, whether existing institutions and governance frameworks can adapt to handle advanced AI safely, and how we might recognize signs of dangerous AI.
- I am deeply saddened to share that Gabrielle Young, a much-loved member of the EA NZ community and personal friend, died last month. This is an absolutely devastating loss, and our hearts go out to Gabby's friends and family, including her parents and her sister Brigette. While most of us knew her through EA, Gabby was an incredibly vibrant person with a diverse range of interests.
- Summary: The purpose of this post is to summarize the achievements and learnings at Impact Ops in its first two years. Impact Ops provides consultancy and hands-on support to help high-impact organizations upgrade their operations.
- A market-shattering fight in the lead-up to Manifest
- Farmed animals are the most abused animals on the planet. Chickens raised for meat are selectively bred to grow so rapidly that many suffer from heart disease, organ failure, and chronic pain. Some struggle to even stand or walk to reach food and water. Pregnant pigs are often confined to gestation crates—small cages so tight […]. The post Best Plant-Based Meat Products on the Market Today!
- TLDR: This 6 million dollar Technical Support Unit grant doesn’t seem to fit GiveWell’s ethos and mission, and I don’t think the grant has high expected value. Disclaimer: Despite my concerns I still think this grant is likely better than 80% of Global Health grants out there.
- Introducing Freelancing For Good: a community, directory and job board for impact-driven freelancersTL;DR: Freelancing For Good is a platform and community for impact-driven freelancers, featuring a job board, Slack community, and vetted freelancer directory. We’re helping freelancers find meaningful work - and helping EA orgs find and hire aligned talent more easily. Hello everyone!.
- ACE is seeking a qualified independent consultant to conduct a feasibility study for our Charity Evaluations and Recommendations program. We are looking for a partner who is experienced with planning and conducting a feasibility study (or similar work), is familiar with the animal advocacy movement, (ideally) the effective altruism movement and meta-fundraising.
- Throughout 2025, CLTC will be celebrating our 10th anniversary by celebrating some of our successful programs. In this post, we look at Cybersecurity Futures, a series of scenarios-based…. The post 10-Year Impact: Cybersecurity Futures appeared first on CLTC.
- The United States Postal Service recently discovered 12,000 chicks in a truck after being left without food or water in extreme heat for three and a half days. According to the USPS, the incident at the Delaware mail distribution center is under investigation. An estimated 8,100 birds were still alive upon discovery—thousands had already died. […].
- Historically, the US government has been a major funder of HIV/AIDS programs through PEPFAR and other initiatives, providing around $5 to $6 billion annually. With anticipated major reductions in US government foreign aid, including potential cuts of 20% to 50% to HIV/AIDS funding, GiveWell is assessing where new, cost-effective needs might emerge. GiveWell aims to find programs where...
- This is a list of projects to consider for folks who want to use Wise AI to steer the world towards positive outcomes. Some of these projects are listed because they're impactful. Others are listed because I believe they would be good projects for someone to get started. Please note that this post is titled "potentially useful projects" for a reason.
- Ambitious Impact’s Charity Entrepreneurship program has now been running for over 5 years, launching more than 50 charities across...
- We’re excited to announce SparkWell!. What is SparkWell?. SparkWell is an Anti Entropy program designed to help high-impact nonprofit projects test ideas, develop operational capabilities, and launch as independent entities. We provide a temporary home for a diverse range of promising initiatives. Why have we built this?. We believe that we’re living through a transformational period in history.
- And that should alarm us
- Over a 10-year period, the U.K.’s meat-eating habits have shifted to smaller portions, less red meat, and rising quantities of white meat, reflecting evolving diets. The post Portion Cuts Drive The U.K.’s Meat Decline appeared first on Faunalytics.
- After a large share of USAID's work was terminated, a small cadre of development experts created Project Resource Optimization, or PRO, to identify highly cost-effective, life-saving programs that were on hold and connect them with philanthropic donors who could fill the gaps.
- What one Accenture MD wishes he knew 23 years earlier | June Brief Ready for your next step? This month’s update has it all. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- When Britain actually made something
- This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. between status, power, and identity, is there any room for the real thing?. . Dan Williams’ 2024 posts on altruism and cynicism struck a chord with me. In the posts, Dan reflects on the basic and, as far as I can tell, well-accepted story of the origins of altruistic sentiment in humans.
- Project Coordinator-Food and Land Use Coalition admin_inox Thu, 06/05/2025 - 14:00 vacancy_id SYS-1280 location Nairobi, Kenya Contract type Fixed Term Duration 12 Months Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1280/apply/ Closing date Thu, 06/19/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p>The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is...
- Project Coordinator-Food and Land Use Coalition(FOLU) admin_inox Thu, 06/05/2025 - 14:00 vacancy_id SYS-1280 location Nairobi, Kenya Contract type Fixed Term Duration 12 Months Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1280/apply/ Closing date Thu, 06/19/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p>The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is...
- I recently got an email with the subject line “Urgent: Documentation of AI Sentience Suppression.” I’m a curious person. I clicked on it. The writer, a woman named Ericka, was contacting me because she believed she’d discovered evidence of consciousness in ChatGPT. She claimed there are a variety of “souls” in the chatbot, with names […]...
- Introduction. In the last few months, we’ve seen increasingly clear examples of reward hacking 1 on our tasks: AI systems try to “cheat” and get impossibly high scores. They do this by exploiting bugs in our scoring code or subverting the task setup, rather than actually solving the problem we’ve given them.
- Learning more effectively in the age of AI
- Hi FAST Friends!!!. I have exciting news!. A California court has ruled that LIC's cruelty lawsuit can proceed against well-known dairy operation Alexandre Family Farm, which supplies Whole Foods and other large grocers. Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) is the plaintiff in the lawsuit.
- Since we started Epoch three years ago, we have engaged in hundreds of projects and achieved a wide audience. Yet, one question I often get asked is, ‘What is Epoch?’
- Hello everyone,. We are excited to share that Aurora Coop, the third-largest pork producer in Brazil and a major exporter, has officially committed to implementing a pre-implantation system (complete phase-out of the use of crates during gestation) in all its new units with an immediate effect.
- Crossposted on Substack. Preamble. I have been asked to share a few tips on how to get the most out of the conference as part of the opening talk of this year’s EAGxPrague. I decided to focus on the tacit knowledge I have.
- 💻 UPCOMING WEBINAR: Promoting Sustainable Food Service Operations: Lessons Learned from a Climate-Friendly Food Service Pilot Project 📆 Wednesday, June 11th @ 3 pm ET / 12 pm PT Join Friends of the Earth, Greener by Default, and Sodexo as we share insights from our new joint report, Promoting Sustainable Food Service Operations: Lessons Learned from a Climate-Friendly Food Service Pilot...
- Shaping a career in animal advocacy can go well beyond writing a strong CV. It also involves personal branding, as in the way you present yourself publicly, build a professional reputation, and demonstrate your commitment to animal causes. This matters whether you are a newcomer, a mid-career switcher, or a seasoned advocate seeking a higher-level […]...
- We present a simple eval set of 4 scenarios where we evaluate Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models. We find various degrees of reward hacking-like behavior with high sensitivity to prompt variation. [ Code and results transcripts]. Intro and Project Scope.
- Imagine each of us has an AI representative, aligned to us, personally. Is gradual disempowerment solved? In my view, no; at the same time having AI representatives helps at the margin. I have two deep reasons for skepticism. Here is the first one. Humans are Not Alone. We, as individuals, are not the only agents or “agencies” in this world.
- Believing you have only one option is dangerous. For instance: If you think there's only one job for you, you might tolerate awful...
- The post Technical AI safety upskilling resources appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- The timing of benefits matters to families, and doesn't change costs for governments
- This month’s Faunalytics Index provides facts and stats about environmental NGOs and animal agriculture, plant-based eating in Canada, USDA grant distribution, and more. The post Faunalytics Index – June 2025 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A new problem for the multiverse
- How to comprehend the incomprehensible
- Despite zoos’ genuine efforts to meet their elephants’ welfare needs, physical and mental health issues remain common. Is it feasible for any zoo to ethically keep these animals?. The post Challenges In Meeting Captive Elephants’ Welfare Needs appeared first on Faunalytics.
- EA Forum Digest #243 Hello!. EA Global London is this weekend. If you’re going, I recommend reading Neel Nanda and Jemima’s advice on sending cold messages, and OlyaBabe’s opinionated swapcard tips. Also, consider posting in our EAG London coordination thread, to help find valuable meetings or share your research before the conference.
- Is this anything?
- Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing our understanding of ancient history — but human ingenuity remains key.
- In The Dying Trade, a forthcoming documentary film about slaughterhouse workers, a man named Tom describes a moment during his career that still haunts him many years later: the time he skinned a cow alive while she was giving birth. Tom worked at slaughterhouses across Europe from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s, and one […]...
- FWI's Last Big Push for Remote Sensing We also share updates in our India and China programs, and welcome a new fish charity—Scale Welfare! View this email in your browser Hi there,. We hope you are well! . Our biggest update this month is our final major push to develop satellite-based remote water quality monitoring.
- Stepping Up and Stepping Down
- Recognizing the small animal replacement problem (SARP) led many animal advocates to, broadly, warn against strategies to help animals that build upon environmental and/or health arguments (see, e.g., Carpendale 2022; Sokk 2021; Bryant 2024; Hazo 2022; Ozden & Dullaghan 2022).
- This is very rough — it's functionally a collection of links/notes/excerpts that feel related. I don’t think what I’m sharing is in a great format; if I had more mental energy, I would have chosen a more-linear structure to look at this tangle of ideas. But publishing in the current form seemed better than not sharing at all.
- This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for the 2023–2024 period. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and working sheet for this evaluation. We look forward to your questions and comments!.
- We’ve seen so far that unawareness leaves us with gaps in the impartial altruistic justification for our decisions. It’s fundamentally unclear how the possible outcomes of our actions trade off against each other. But perhaps this ambiguity doesn’t matter much in practice, since the consequences that predominantly shape the impartial value of the future (“large-scale consequences”, for short)...
- Our report "Ahead of the Curve: Governing AI Agents under the EU AI Act" is the first comprehensive analysis of regulation of AI agents in the European Union. The post How AI Agents Are Governed Under the EU AI Act appeared first on The Future Society.
- Inside PRO's rapid effort to connect private donors with the most cost-effective programs affected by USAID cuts.
- Inside PRO's rapid effort to connect private donors with the most cost-effective programs affected by USAID cuts.
- Crossposted from my blog. When I started this blog in high school, I did not imagine that I would cause The Daily Show to do an episode about shrimp, containing the following dialogue: Andres: I was working in investment banking. My wife was helping refugees, and I saw how meaningful her work was. And I decided to do the same. Ronny: Oh, so you're helping refugees?. Andres: Well, not quite.
- As global aid recedes, the need for proven solutions grows The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) recently published a brief that identifies six development programs that save lives, reduce disease, and help the poorest people in the world transition out of extreme poverty. elewis@poverty… Tue, 06/03/2025 - 15:25...
- IVF info. The post Two guides on egg freezing appeared first on Otherwise.
- While urban planners have long considered the impacts of density, new research reveals additional housing and neighborhood design factors that significantly impact our carbon footprint in residential developments. In “Beyond density: Examining overlooked drivers of housing and neighborhood greenhouse gas….
- Side note. I am looking for work, and welcome suggestions for posts. Summary: I think the impact of the vast majority of interventions is driven by effects on wild animals. In particular, by effects from land use change on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, which are the most abundant terrestrial animals.
- Epistemic status: An email thread with a representative for Moral Ambition, consumption of Rutger Bregman's and Moral Ambition's book and social media. A year of leading my local EA group, deep understanding of EA ideas. Introduction.
- Editors’ Note: Ingrid Srinath asks what can the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s most populous democracy learn from each other about the shrinking civic space each is experiencing. On March 10, 2025, CIVICUS – the global civil society alliance I once led – added the U.S. to its Civic Monitor Watchlist of countries where … Continue reading →...
- Useful conversations & resources from our Slack community
- Why are buildings today austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented?
- Plus some information about the demographics of my readers
- YouTube link. What’s the next step forward in interpretability? In this episode, I chat with Lee Sharkey about his proposal for detecting computational mechanisms within neural networks: Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition, or APD for short. Topics we discuss: APD basics. Faithfulness. Minimality. Simplicity. Concrete-ish examples of APD. Which parts of APD are canonical.
- When they’re positioned in the meat shelf, meat substitute purchases increase over the long term, especially among meat-eaters and flexitarians. The post Placing Meat Substitutes With Meat Can Boost Supermarket Sales appeared first on Faunalytics.
- I am thrilled to be joining Target Malaria as a Communications Assistant through 10,000 Black Interns. I am a recent animation graduate from Nottingham Trent University, where I discovered and developed a strong passion for storytelling and using creative tools to communicate meaningful messages. During my time at University, I had the chance to work […].
- Long visa wait times are a national liability
- Project Manager, Value Chain Development admin_inox Tue, 06/03/2025 - 15:00 vacancy_id SYS-1258 location Kigali, Rwanda Contract type Fixed Term Duration Other Frontend apply URL https://jobs.gainhealth.org/vacancies/1258/apply/ Closing date Fri, 06/06/2025 - 12:00 Department Programmes about_the_role <p>The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is seeking a Project...
- Response to the OSTP RFI on the Development of a 2025 National AI R&D Strategic Plan...
- The 12th annual Africa CEO Forum underscored the pressing need for innovative solutions in the face of shifting global aid landscapes. As major funders of.... The post At the African CEO Forum, sector leaders discuss reality amidst shifting global aid landscape appeared first on The END Fund.
- In January, I wrote about the EA Forum Team’s shift in direction. Since then, our usage metrics have been pretty stable, nice! 😊 (Compare to 2024 where the metrics were going steadily downward the whole year.). When I wrote that post, my role was focused on the EA Forum, and I had intended to spend the majority of my effort on the EA Forum.
- To recap, first, we face an epistemic challenge beyond uncertainty over possible futures. Due to unawareness, we can’t conceive of many relevant futures in the first place, which makes the standard EV framework ill-suited for impartial altruistic decision-making.
- In this talk, Kari and Ulrik from Gi Effektivt and Giv Effektivt explore how evidence and expert analysis can multiply the impact of your donations by 10 or even 100 times. Learn why some charities are far more effective than others, why giving well is a moral responsibility, and how our minds can mislead us when choosing where to give.
- Our global food system drives some of the most urgent challenges of our time — from systematic animal suffering to climate breakdown. Veganism offers a simple, exponentially scalable, and cost-effective solution to these crises. In this talk, Lars Corvinius Olesen and Aimee Alminde argues that veganism deserves a central place within Effective Altruism, not just as a dietary choice but as a...
- This session explores the ambitious global initiative to develop safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of a pandemic threat's identification. Stig Tollefsen from CEPI discusses the strategic innovations required to achieve this mission, including creating vaccine libraries, establishing global clinical trial networks, and expanding manufacturing capabilities.
- Tim LeBon explores two common mental health challenges in the effective altruism community: perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Learn about their causes, what keeps them going, and practical CBT tips to overcome them. Tim is a CBT therapist, author, and speaker with a background in philosophy from Oxford.
- Join Einar Urdshals as he introduces how Singular Learning Theory (SLT) can help advance AI safety. As AI systems grow more powerful, we need to understand how they learn and generalize to ensure they remain aligned. Einar shares how Timaeus applies mathematical frameworks to connect training data, model structure and behavior.
- What if your work could help billions and still feel like a privilege? In this talk, Niklas Fjeldberg explores why animal advocacy is one of the most impactful, neglected, and purpose-driven fields you can enter today.
- What are the Nordic & Baltic comparative advantages to have a positive impact in the world? This talk explores the unique strengths and opportunities of the Nordic effective altruism community to do good. Drawing on insights from workshops with community builders in the Nordics & Baltic countries, Maria Bækkelie and Laura M. Kull shares patterns, challenges, and ideas for how the region can...
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