Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total prize pool of at least $100,000. We are very grateful to Sharada Mohanty, Sneha Nanavati, Dipam Chakraborty and everyone else at AIcrowd for working with us to host this...
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- Tens of billions of philanthropic dollars are coming, but we don’t know how to spend them well.
- The post Rohin Shah on what it’s really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with ‘doomers’) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Animal Welfare Act enforcement may be at its lowest point in years, driven by a Supreme Court ruling, presidential administration changes, and a shrinking federal inspection workforce. The post Trends In Animal Welfare Act Enforcement In The United States appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Michael Thatcher's career has been guided by a simple formula: "Follow your heart, use your head, and then go make a difference.". This has taken him from professional musician and dancer, to oceanographic researcher, to tech executive. Today, Michael is the President and CEO of Charity Navigator.
- FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026 gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 12:46 FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026. Innovation for Healthier Diets in Uganda. Apply Now. Date 02.06.2026 Image Thumb (540x337px) The FreshValue Uganda Challenge 2026 is an innovation challenge organized by GAIN Uganda in partnership with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives...
- life is not a spectacle
- The welfare impactor is an online tool that helps you make important decisions based on your reflections on the welfare of humans and animals. The tool is a survey with around ten questions, and takes only a few minutes to … Lees verder →...
- On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me […]...
- Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 09:41 Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs. Blog, 2nd June 2026. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, most SMEs producing nutritious foods are family-owned enterprises.
- I am thrilled to officially be joining the team at Target Malaria as a Communications Assistant Intern! I recently graduated from the University of Nottingham with an International Media and Communications B.A. (Hons) degree, where I developed a strong understanding of how powerful media can be in communicating with different audiences and driving meaningful change. I became […].
- I’m a fan of people trying things, even if they seem silly. Dismissing risky ideas misses the point of research. But thoughtful criticism can direct effort to more promising fields. To that end, I’m going to try to make my criticism as constructive as possible, with concrete reasons for my pessimism and closely related research areas which are promising (and stand to benefit even from...
- The answer is immortality and world domination, but not for you. If you think that's silly, then don't let a handful of billionaires and zealots kill us for it.
- Seeking out the worst parts. The post Spider shopping appeared first on Otherwise.
- As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back up, week after week. The discussions are fun, but also practical. We’ll test the waters, what would be a minimum viable scheme? What’s easy, what’s hard? Who could do the hard parts?
- I first encountered LessWrong a couple months ago, and since then I've been a regular reader of posts here, including parts of the Sequences. Bayesianism is a major topic in them, and I wanted to try it myself. An ideal candidate was the Flemish TV show ' The Mole' (Dutch: 'De Mol'). In this post, I want to share my methodology & results, but I also want to ask for advice.
- I am going to talk about my experience in the Jane Street LLM backdoor challenge. I am sharing partial results. I managed to crack some of the models using white-box methods, after the activation/prompting approach didn't pan out. Happy to discuss better or more promising approaches. Introduction. A few months ago a Dwarkesh Patel podcast episode advertised a Jane Street backdoor challenge:
- Around July last year I decided I was going to go all in on technical AI safety research. To do that I’d need to get into an AI safety fellowship, quit my job, and sell everything that was in my flat in South Africa (hopefully in that order). I applied to every fellowship that was open , and got rejected from several of them before being accepted into MATS on Team Shard around mid-November.
- I've been a toe-in rat and existed on the outskirts of the social scene for approaching a decade now, and I can confidently say (with love) that rationalist men rarely dress well. I am drowning in a sea of reasonably-attractive men diminishing themselves in skinny jeans and free t-shirts from random events three years ago. But you can do better. I believe in you.
- Thirty years in marketing, one conversation that changed everything: Helen’s story Helen Farrell had spent thirty years in marketing, communications, and PR. She was experienced, dedicated, and good at her craft, most recently as Senior Content Executive at a software company where she’d been for many years. She wasn’t desperate to leave. She just knew, […]...
- The post Digital Advisory Service Reaching 20,000 Northern Nigerian Farmers with funding from ACReSAL, to be embedded within the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. appeared first on Precision Development (PxD).
- This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here. This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the next few years.
- Debugging Florida
- Executive summary
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How far open models lag the frontier, hyperscaler capex growth, and whether a compute crunch is nearing
- New Zealand’s online news media consistently frames brushtail possums as villains deserving violence — and wraps that message in humor. An analysis reveals how this combination desensitizes the public and forecloses compassion. The post How Dark Humor Normalizes Cruelty To Possums In New Zealand Media appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The weaving of a beautiful thing
- Discuss...
- Updates from Active Site, Asia Center for Health Security, IBBIS and SecureBio
- Do you feel as though you are living in a revolution?
- 🚀 Las últimas novedades de la comunidad de AE...
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Reason sells, but who's buying?
- if no-one is around you, etc
- There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech. You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of […]...
- Depth-first plans lay out a path from here to aligned superintelligent AI. We need those kinds of plans. But depth-first plans depend on many assumptions: “We will make AI safe by doing step 1, then step 2, then step 3.” Step 1 only works under condition A, step 2 requires condition B, step 3 requires condition C. If A or B or C is false, the whole plan fails (and there’s a good chance we all...
- Roman Catholics can, and do, take AI welfare more seriously than the encyclical does
- Songwriters, shamans, Sabbateans, Samuel Johnson, the Singularity
- I recently read a rather unusual article, discussing the possibility that certain humans may be able to conceive and bear children completely on their own.
- There are many different activities that could be described as "third-party risk assessment". Here are some distinctions that I’ve found helpful thinking about the space over the last few weeks. (Thanks Ajeya Cotra and Paul Christiano for discussions that inspired most of this.). Throughout this, I refer to the actors as: Developers. Stakeholders.
- I’ve analyzed the near-term economic effects of an AI pause, out of concern for my investments, and a desire to predict how strong political opposition to a pause is likely to be. My median estimates: The S&P 500 will drop 27.8%. AI subsectors will drop 34-69%. Interest rates will rise at a much slower rate than would be the case without a pause.
- I. 80,000 Hours recently revised their career guide and published it as a book, also confusingly called 80,000 Hours.
- #AISafety #Superintelligence #Animation #IndieAnimation
- After the cataclysm
- Most evaluations of AI systems focus on their capabilities: how good they are at coding tasks, how effectively they can answer complex scientific questions, and so on. From a safety perspective, capability evaluations have a place: by understanding how close we are to different capabilities, and the rate of progress on them, we can forecast when different risks are likely to occur, as well as...
- Introduction. There are some very nice resources to understand the intuition of Singular Learning Theory. However, I am quite unsatisfied with the current resources online explaining or approaching the subject, as I find them quite concise and brief - skipping many concepts that actually serve to strengthen the intuition to do research in this field, thus being confusing to me.
- An odd aspect of discussing serious threats is the amount of concern people express about you causing other people to be concerned. This kind of makes sense for interlocutors who don’t believe in the threat itself, or think it is overblown (though in that case it is perhaps strange to focus on altruistic concern for potential frightened onlookers rather than the object-level disagreement).
- At SXSW 2026, FLI CEO Anthony Aguirre joined Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris for a conversation about the current state of AI development, and the need for a different, human-centered approach. Read A Better Path for AI: betterpathfor.ai The Pro-Human AI Declaration: https://humanstatement.org/ Read Anthony's proposal to Keep the Future Human:
- Authors: Reilly Haskins*, Bilal Chughtai**, Joshua Engels**. * primary contributor ** advice and mentorship. This is the updated version of our earlier preliminary results post, covering the final results from our paper. The paper extends our preliminary work to eight models, a harder agentic task, CoT controllability analysis, and RL experiments. TL;DR:
- Summary: Safe deployment of an AI system requires that we can make confident claims about its behaviour on out-of-distribution deployment inputs on the basis of only pre-deployment evaluations. One approach to making such claims is to take a cognitive perspective, in which we interpret the AIs behaviour in terms of latent cognitive constructs, such as motivations, intentions, and goals.
- This is a linkpost for my Harvard Crimson op-ed for its commencement issue. I will not reproduce the whole text here, but my advice to the class of 2026 is in the following parts: My advice for the Class of 2026 is to embrace AI as a technology, but treat it critically as citizens. … … Continue reading AI is a Meteor. Don’t be a Dinosaur.
- I. Prologue. "If I Can't Explain It to Said Achmiz, I Probably Don't Understand It". This post isn't really about him, but I'd like to begin with a tribute to my friend Said Achmiz, the wisest person I know. The choice of adjective is deliberately chosen as term of art. Achmiz is not the most quick-witted, nor the most knowledgable, nor the most creative, nor the most savvy.
- TL;DR: You should run a virtual summer Intro Program targeted at incoming freshmen. It's an easy way to boost an existing group or (re)start one. Most of the resources you need are already available, and I am here to help with planning or advice, even if you've never done any community building before!.
- #AISafety #Superintelligence #Animation #IndieAnimation
- The people being snarky on the internet are wrong
- I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals.
- At 16, Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to build a superintelligence as fast as possible. He assumed a systeAt 16, Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to build a superintelligence as fast as possible. He assumed a system smart enough would simply perceive the right thing to do and do it. How could something so capable fail to see what was good? Then he studied the problem, and the assumption fell apart.
- As AI models become increasingly capable and autonomous, keeping them safely aligned with human intentions is critical. Extending our previous work on evaluating scheming capabilities, we introduce complementary approaches to test whether AI models would sabotage their own safeguards, if given the opportunity. Our new papers focus on propensity for scheming: when models are deployed as coding...
- Several jurisdictions in California have passed poorly-designed tax measures that are hindering housing production while threatening to severely harm the state’s ability to fund vital services like housing, schools, public safety, and fire protection. The California legislature and Governor’s office….
- We’ve just released a new paper: Retrying vs Resampling in AI Control. We revisit the resampling protocols introduced in Ctrl-Z with an up-to-date setting and much stronger models, and compare them against “retrying” protocols similar to Claude Code auto mode or Codex Auto-review. Motivation. Roughly a year ago we released Ctrl-Z, the first paper to study control techniques for agents.
- By Max Tegmark & Meia Chita-Tegmark. Of course you have moral principles – but how often do you use them? . I, Meia, am a professor doing psychology research, and I can tell you that most bad outcomes are caused not by lack of moral principles, but by them not being activated.
- We’ve just released a new paper: Retrying vs Resampling in AI Control. We revisit the resampling protocols introduced in Ctrl-Z with an up-to-date setting and much stronger models, and compare them against “retrying” protocols similar to Claude Code auto mode or Codex Auto-review.
- TLDR: The persona-selection alignment approach — selecting a warm, caring persona from the pretraining distribution and reinforcing it — looks successful in the current regime, but probably won't extrapolate to more powerful, less constrained settings.
- Utilitarians are right about footbridge, transplant, etc
- Transformer Weekly: SB 315, Anthropic’s mega valuation, and the Pope talks AI...
- Industry-led dairy welfare programs in Canada and the U.S. have strengths, but serious gaps in representation, transparency, and accountability remain. The post Industry-Led Dairy Welfare Programs: How Legitimate Are They? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- This is an edited version of a LW shortform. Superintelligence will likely be developed by US companies; run on US data centres; and be under the jurisdiction of the US government. This will massively boost US military power and make the US economically dominant (e.g. US producing 99% of world GDP). By default, middle powers will be left in the dust. How can middle powers avoid this fate?
- In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.
- The post Open position: Marketer appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- My guess is that, among the men I know who lost their virginity after their mid-twenties, more than half deal with serious erectile dysfunction or delayed ejaculation.
- CLTC is pleased to announce that Nada Madkour, Ph.D., will serve as Director for our AI Security Initiative (AISI), a premier academic program dedicated to shaping standards and…. The post Dr. Nada Madkour to Serve as Director of CLTC’s AI Security Initiative (AISI) appeared first on CLTC.
- taking the reality out of reality tv
- At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot about Roman history. Emperors, internal politics, Caesar, etc. I was always learning some random bag of facts about Roman history.
- During Africa month, global leaders will gather at high-level platforms like the Africa CEO Forum and the World Health Assembly to discuss the continent’s economic future. Yet one of the most persistent barriers to that future remains underfunded – malaria. Despite decades of progress, malaria continues to place a heavy burden on African economies, health systems and families. It […].
- AI Philanthropy, AI Foundations and African Jobs
- Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines gloireri Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:35 Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines. A landmark four-day workshop in Nakuru brings 29 technical experts together to shape what Kenyans eat — for generations to come.
- The post How a Community Health Worker Helped Save a pregnant mother in Burkina Faso appeared first on Living Goods.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- Follow-up to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-knows-who-you-are after the release of Claude Opus 4.8. Claude Opus 4.8 refuses to do the stylometric identification task at a much higher rate than Claude Opus 4.7 did. More interestingly, when it does take a guess, it is consistently unable to identify me from my writing, from prompts as close as I could get to those 4.7...
- Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics: JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far rostral region of of the cerebrum, but after binding with a leukocynoid it takes a role in maintaining the blood-brain barrier – in particular guiding the movements of lipid molecules.
- How the first week has gone
- [Cross posted from my substack]. In their EA Forum post last year, CEA described their ‘principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community’. I'm a big fan of principles-first stewardship in principle. I think EA needs a steward, and I think that stewardship should be organised around EA's core principles.
- Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like...
- I have linked below my recent version of my research compilation on Profit for Good businesses and the Charitable Ownership Advantage thesis. I have spent several hundred, if not over a thousand hours, compiling the evidence supporting the thesis that, given our modern economy in which ownership is typically practically separate from business management and governance, Profit for Good...
- ☀️Join the Summer Impact Cohort 2026 - EA Switzerland Turn your ambitions into action! 🚀 View this email in your browser Sign Up Impact Cohort - Summer 2026 ☀️ From Ambition to Action Want to do good and act on it in 2026? Join the Effective Altruism Switzerland Impact Cohort 2026!
Loading...