Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- We will likely have near-superhuman mathematics AI by Q1 2027. Qualitatively, AI mathematics capabilities are developing significantly faster than automated AI R&D capabilities. Thus, we will likely have a period of time where the rate of our ability to rigorously & usefully verify and understand model behavior and model outputs outpaces the rate of capability development itself. Our...
- In the second week of QRI's Tepoztlán summer 2026 research retreat (https://heart.qri.org/tepoz/) we had the chance to interview Lama Justin von Bujdoss, a lineage-holder and teacher in the Karma Kagyu and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism, about some of the details of dark retreat phenomenology.
- Something has shifted. After decades of restoring sight – one surgery, one pair of glasses, one village at a time, Seva has crossed a threshold and I want you to be the first to understand what that means. The research coming out of Guatemala this year stopped me cold. When we gave coffee harvesters eyeglasses, ….
- Nine-year-old Sarun lives in Puok, a district in Siem Reap where the light is bright and unfiltered, and where childhood is stitched together from schoolbooks, cousins, and the long absence of parents working far away. He is a third grader, and has done some serious thinking about the world. Before his surgery, cataracts clouded his …. The post A Boat with an Oar. A Boy with Sight.
- The study has a name only an academic could love: Refractive error correction and harvest worker productivity in the Guatemalan coffee sector: A quasi-experimental analysis. It’s a mouthful. For this newsletter let’s call it Glasses for Guatemalan Harvesters. Seva worked with long-time partner Visualiza, Guatemala’s leading eye hospital, to send researchers to 12 coffee farms ….
- I am going to argue that we will likely eventually get AIs that are strongly power-seeking, much more so than current SOTA LLMs. TLDR: Right now SOTA LLMs are still largely in a simulator regime. This buffers against power-seeking. Long-horizon RL or similar methods (applied to LLMs or otherwise) will turn AIs into consequentialists, motivating power-seeking.
- For more than 25 years, Seva Foundation has been steadily changing the view in Cambodia. Since 1999, Seva’s long-term partnerships with national ministries, hospitals, and local nonprofits have helped reduce the country’s blindness rate from 1.2% to just 0.37%. In just the past year, Seva’s teams were everywhere at once: in government meetings helping shape ….
- When we picture sight being restored, we imagine the big moment: a bandage lifted, a face coming into focus. What we don’t picture is the “Air Puff” machine quietly doing its job without protest. In eye care, that’s its own kind of miracle. Modern ophthalmology depends on a fleet of highly specialized devices, each with …. The post The Unsung Heroes of Sight first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- The Nepal Ophthalmic Society Recognizes Dr. Chundak Tenzing’s Career From leading eye camps in Nepal’s mountainous villages to performing hundreds of corneal transplants to advancing research on the causes of blindness, the work of Seva’s Global Medical Director, Dr. Chundak Tenzing, has always been grounded in service. That service was recognized when Dr. Tenzing received …. The post Be Kind.
- 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...
- Eric Braun doesn’t talk about philanthropy as a transaction. For him, it’s a frequency. Eric’s connection to Seva began decades ago in New York, when he encountered Ram Dass and the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba. “A zing went through me,” he recalls, “a moment that felt like, bam! Recognition.” What drew him in wasn’t …. The post The Infinite Power of Love first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- We were saddened to learn of the passing of Bob Weir on January 10th. Bobby, as his friends knew him, was a co-founder of the Grateful Dead and one of the most generous spirits in American music. For more than 60 years, he took to the road, bringing people together through the sheer power of …. The post A Friend We’re Grateful For first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- As Wavy Gravy turns 90 in May, we’re not just marking the years; we’re celebrating a whole vibration. A co-founder of Seva and a true cosmic jester of compassion, Wavy has always shown us that service isn’t a duty, it’s a dance. He sparked a movement rooted in love, where healing and humor walk hand …. The post Still Wavy After All These Years first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- Everything you need to know about the upcoming encyclical on AI.
- Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal, Difan Jiao, Kartik Bali, Yiderigun Borjigin, Shaobo Cui, Stefan Krsteski, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West (equal contribution). These are early results, but we wanted to share them with the community now.
- Your farmed animal advocacy update for late May 2026
- There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about the benefits of technology is sensitive to the end of humanity - but this jumps over the transitions by starting from the assumption that “long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people’s lives longer, freer, and...
- How to write better
- The post Landmark new METR report: Can AIs already start ‘rogue deployments’ inside AI companies? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- In the first of two blogs, this explainer examines how Rethink Priorities compared welfare capacity across species, with results that may reshape how advocates think about impact. The post The Moral Weight Project Explained: Part 1 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- TL;DR: Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks. Key highlights from this post:
- But it doesn't have to be
- Better approximate your ideal self
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction.
- EA Forum Digest #292 Maximizing good without maximizing ourselves Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the Digest. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: AI safety is extremely bottlenecked on grantmakers (lukeprog, 3 min) Also, Talent Constraints in AI Safety: What We Know and What We Don’t (Weronika Żurek 🔸, 26 min).
- Inside GFI’s work to fund science and shape the bioeconomy.
- Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can: “We are much more powerful than we think.” See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- We’re good at solving problems, but not as good at seeing how other people solve theirs...
- There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws. They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, […]...
- maybe?
- TL;DR: Instead of labouriously computing, we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating. and this will be very close to the actual. This is useful for adding up sources of variance, or figuring out radiuses, or other such things. Background. The mathematical relationship is surprisingly common. It happens among other things in.
- This report was written by Christian de Weerd for Rethink Priorities. It was primarily meant to inform our own thinking about the merits of biological naturalism about consciousness. However, as Christian did such an excellent job on the report, we thought it might be worth sharing more broadly.
- We are excited to announce a new Request for Proposals (RFP) for effective giving organizations, defined as initiatives that raise funds for highly effective charities. Through this RFP, we aim to identify and support additional efforts in the effective giving space and streamline the application process for potential grantees. Motivation.
- Episode 17 is about carving a new sculpture tradition.
- MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon in conversation with Agents Of Tech explains why the deception and unintended behaviors we're seeing in current AI systems matter: not because GPT-5 or Claude is going to end the world, but because researchers predicted these emergent problems 10+ years ago, and we're still not on course to understand these systems deeply enough to solve them before we scale to...
- How does brain structure create different levels of intelligence? I was somewhat surprised to find that the leading researcher of the relationship between neurobiology and IQ, Richard Haier, is not mentioned anywhere on LessWrong, at least according to the search function.
- Expanding on Humans are not automatically strategic, I've noticed similar patterns for people who are working on improving their own and others' mental/emotional states. We do not automatically…. Wonder “Who like me has successfully solved this problem — and what did they do?”, then copy the most successful plans.
- I find that a lot of people have trouble with this concept of predicting the next token. And by trouble, I mean that they struggle to understand what it actually means to predict the next token. It seems simpler than it is.
- Thanks to @Jeremy Gillen for reading and commenting on the draft. This was written while I was was funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) through project code MSAI-SE01-P005. I have tried to achieve two goals in this post. The first is to provide a self-contained explanation of Natural Latents using lots of pictures of probability distributions.
- China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.
- The post Colorado led the way against farm animal cruelty. Now Congress will roll it back. appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- We all want to find a dream job, but what does they actually mean? Decades of research has found five key factors, and it's not as simple as "following your passion".
- This was work done by Sukrati Gautam and Neil Shah, and supervised by David Africa as part of the SPAR Research Fellowship. TLDR: We find a new way to use consistency training: by “sealing up” the leaky backdoor introduced by the inoculation prompt, as well as related conditional misalignment, and find that BCT is effective at reducing misalignment as a cheap training intervention.
- How a baby food seller may have caused more deaths than war across a number of years
- This review challenges “folklore husbandry” for reptiles, revealing how science, not tradition, must guide better welfare in captivity. The post From Folklore To Facts: Advancing Evidence-Based Care For Captive Reptiles appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Our current approach to fieldbuilding in the UK.
- Tldr;: (Longtermist) EAs seem more focused on non-extinction risks from AI than they used to be. I haven’t seen much discussion of why, making reference to the very longrun. Changes in the world this might be responding to are: alignment seeming more promising than it used to, the speed of AI progress, and concerns around US governance.
- The healthcare industry is ground zero for AI companies and the rollout of their products: Microsoft tells us that AI is better than doctors at diagnosing complex medical conditions. Nvidia claims that its chatbot, a partnership with the startup Hippocratic AI, can outperform nurses on detecting over the counter drug toxicities. AI firms suggest that […].
- "We are much more powerful than we think.". After finishing college in the Netherlands, Sjir Hoeijmakers knew he wanted to do something good with his career — but he didn't know what. At some point, he sat down and Googled "how can I make the world a happier place?".
- Evidence on the effect of income on health, education, crime, and child outcomes from lotteries and RCTs
- who, where, what
- [Subtitle.]. Automating R&D is not sufficient for superintelligence. This is a crosspost for The Goodhart Singularity by Tom Reed, which was originally published on Thomas's Substack on 7 May 2026. Buyer beware: bombastic claims advanced, often flippantly. AI systems are starting to build themselves.
- cart;horse: Most startups fail, this one did too. Tried too much with too little, with a little too much ego. Coordinal Research’s goal was to build an automated safety research platform. A researcher writes “Replicate X result from paper Y with tweak Z” and the system provisions a sandboxed compute environment, gathers context, writes code, runs experiments, and returns a research report...
- The post Strengthening Community Health Systems: Q1 2026 Impact Report appeared first on Living Goods.
- The post Renforcer les systèmes de santé communautaire : Rapport d’impact du T1 2026 appeared first on Living Goods.
- A new tool that let's you imagine different futures of where we might be headed
- Probably not the next global pandemic
- This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future.
- The post Our strategy at 80,000 Hours appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- This is a short summary of our new paper: arXiv, X thread, code. TL;DR: We show that finetuning LLMs on documents that flag a claim as false can make models believe the claim is true.
- Monitoring coding agents for dangerous behavior using language models requires classifying transcripts that often exceed 500K tokens, but prior agent monitoring benchmarks rarely contain transcripts longer than 100K tokens. We show that when used as classifiers, current frontier models fail to notice dangerous actions more often in longer transcripts.
- Executive summary
- Suppose we have a dangerous misaligned AI that can fool alignment audits, and distill it into a student model.
- At a conference about “AI control,” discussions and games explored ways to control untrustworthy AI...
- You--you!--can join an incredible group of people doing ridiculous amounts of good and saving hundreds of thousands of lives
- Researchers analyzed dozens of different nudges aimed at reducing meat consumption in foodservice settings and discovered that changing the default option presented to diners is the only nudge that works. The post Changing The Default Choice Should Be The Default Nudge appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Allergies are a big problem for a lot of people. If you're someone with pollen allergies, maybe you've wondered how people in the distant past dealt with them. After all, a thousand years ago people mostly worked outside all day, in areas where plants grow well. They had no air purifiers, no allergy medication, and no extra food for people who couldn't work when it was time to plant crops.
- Meet the winner of the Q4 2025 “Right!” said FRED Challenge Graham Kilvington, known as Kilvo29 on GJ Open, won the Q4 2025 “Right!” said FRED Challenge despite having no background in economics. He is a Physics graduate from the University of London and an operational research analyst in the UK civil service. In this interview, […].
- Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research.
- the latest updates on the welfare of future sentient beings
- Hello Effective Altruists!. I write to let you know that Legal Impact for Chickens is suing California’s largest poultry producer, Foster Farms, for animal cruelty. Foster Farms raises and slaughters approximately 290 million chickens per year. LIC's complaint accuses Foster Farms of crushing chickens with forklifts, forcing birds to live among the maggot-covered corpses of their dead flock...
- Purporting to give advice about how to be charitable to people you disagree with is always an act of hubris.
- Greetings from a world where…...
- some norms of conversation
- Ismail Harerimana grew up in Uganda not knowing why he was always sick. His childhood in the 1990s was a string of recurrent infections: malaria, diarrhea, headaches, and skin rashes. By 14, he was scarily thin, at which point doctors put him on a new medication that seemed to help. It was for kidney disease, […]...
- Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat. Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her […]...
- AI chips and servers reach China through distribution chains in which each seller vets only its direct customers, and no one is on the hook for what happens downstream.
- If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, we don’t have time to sleep, and we don’t have time for fun. We’re a uniquely overworked […]...
- The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact’s Slack workspace about GiveWell's decision to stop funding Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water program. The conversation surfaced themes that we felt were worth sharing more broadly.
- Plants, generative AI models and thermostats have preferences or goals, but they (probably) do not have conscious experiences. Their preferences are (probably) unconscious. But in my moral theory (called mild welfarism), only conscious preferences matter. A conscious preference is a … Lees verder →...
- They say exercise improves sleep quality. Is that true for me?. To test this hypothesis, I took my daily calorie expenditures from the Apple Health app and correlated them with that night’s sleep time. 1 I also included caffeine intake as a potential confounding variable. The hypothesis: when I exercise more, I’ll get better rest that night, and therefore wake up earlier.
- when technology panders to an existing weakness of human psychology
- How much would fertility rates, life expectancy, or migration rates need to change to stop the population from shrinking?
- We created an interactive tool that lets you test how changes in fertility rates, life expectancy, and migration rates will change future populations.
- I’m in Berkeley, California. It’s mid-May, with highs of 20ºC (68ºF for those of you using old money). And yet the peak UV index is 10! It’s not even that hot!. With this level of UV, people who are relatively fair-skinned burn in less than 15 minutes.
- Fill out my reader survey, contact your senator, and volunteer for the Alex Bores campaign
- Oration vs Dialogue, round one.
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