Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- Content note: this is written as part of a daily writing challenge for myself. I have a comrade in rationalist event organizing, who once explained his theory of apologies. He said if you hurt someone, it only makes sense to apologize if you should have known better.
- On 12 June 2026 Pugwash and the SCRAP Weapons project (at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies) organized … More...
- I gave a talk at EAGx Nordics about epistemic discipline, building on my argument-checking of opinion pieces and live debates.
- A David Sacks-endorsed advocacy group said it would spend $100m promoting Trump’s AI agenda — but a defunct PAC and flop YouTube video suggest a stuttering start...
- A recent exploratory study from Te Protejo finds interesting links between cruelty-free ethics and veganism. Our latest blog looks at the longer history of the connection between anti-vivisection and animal advocacy, and calls for more attention to the cause our movement was built on. The post Cruelty-Free As An On-Ramp Into The Animal Movement appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A preview of everything to come in Issue 24
- Please spend two minutes filling in the below polls!. Planning where we focus at CaML requires forming views on many controversial questions, particularly with regards to alignment. In many cases, people we've talked to have very different intuitions about where the alignment community stands on these issues. These polls will help us get a sense of where the main areas of (dis)agreement lie.
- EA Forum Digest #296 AI, animals, and how to do good better Hello!. I asked for more polls, and here they are in the form of several cruxy statements about AI alignment and digital minds — thanks CaML! Enjoy the digest, Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Are top existential risk estimates 50,000 times too high?
- Limit unreasonable third-party demands using the Conference of Services model
- I. One of my guilty pleasures is reading dating advice books.
- would this work?
- For eighty years, nuclear weapons haven't been used. The reason? Deterrence, built on the assumption that leaders are rational, red lines are clear, and there's enough time to think before deciding. Now hypersonic missiles, cyber capabilities, and AI are eroding all three.
- How are emerging AI developments likely to impact animals in the coming years? The session highlights both opportunities and risks across areas such as precision livestock farming, alternative proteins, interspecies communication, wild-animal welfare, and long-term risks. It also introduces two strategies for influencing AI development to benefit animal well-being.
- What does it look like when effective altruism funding translates into measurable, large-scale policy impact? This talk shares how Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact (AIM)) incubator funding supported Movendi International and the Center for Alcohol Policy Solutions in developing the world's first investment case for alcohol policy, with Sri Lanka as the proving ground.
- Stefan once did daily argumentation analyses of articles on DN Debatt, Sweden's most widely read debate forum, grading them from 0 to 10. While he had expected to find errors, he was surprised by how basic they were.
- A fireside conversation with Bjørn Ihler on building a career in global security when there is no standard ladder to climb. Drawing on fifteen years between counter-terrorism, advisory work with world leaders and international organisations, founding and running The Khalifa Ihler Institute an international non-profit promoting peaceful and thriving communities, and founding Revontulet, an...
- AI governance is a nascent field with no established playbook, and that's precisely why it needs people who can navigate ambiguity, map unfamiliar terrain, and move fast without a traditional mandate. This talk draws on a non-linear journey from historian to think-tank builder to show how adaptable expertise, the right conversations, and intellectual curiosity without the need for full mastery...
- Biological risks represent some of the most consequential, pressing, and still underrepresented areas of existential risk work. This session offers an accessible entry point into the biosecurity field: why it matters, what makes certain threats globally catastrophic, and how the landscape is rapidly shifting.
- Frontier AI poses coordination challenges that no single government, institution, or research community can solve alone, yet the window for building durable international governance infrastructure is narrow and closing. This talk offers a ground-level account of what such coordination can look like in practice.
- People get sick due to accidents, infections and around childbirth - and need urgent care to save their lives. Tragically, too many children and adults do not get such care. Most don't even need expensive care in an intensive care unit, they just need to receive the basics, the low-cost Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC), such as oxygen and essential treatments.
- It's only in the last decade that it's become possible to measure happiness in a rigorous, scientific way, and to work out the best ways to improve it. Michael Plant and his team at the Happier Lives Institute have pioneered comparing charities by how much happiness they increase per euro spent, using WELLBYs.
- A practical session on what makes a strong grant application, from how funders actually read proposals to the mistakes that sink otherwise promising projects. Come with questions, leave with a clearer sense of what it takes to get funded. Kiryl Shantyka serves as EAGx Coordinator at Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).
- For many people, deciding to give effectively could be the single most impactful decision they make, if they stick to it. In this session Sofie Sjöstrand goes over the why and how of effective giving, helping you avoid common pitfalls and create lasting impact. Sofie is the Executive Director of Ge Effektivt.
- How do we do the most good? Most well-intentioned interventions have little measurable impact. A small number are vastly more effective than the rest. This session covers the core frameworks of effective altruism: identifying important, tractable and neglected problems; thinking about counterfactual and marginal impact; and weighing priorities across cause areas including global health, animal...
- The AI safety landscape can feel opaque from the outside: a dense network of organisations, research agendas, and entry points that isn't always easy to navigate. Drawing on his experience building Apart Research, Jaime maps the ecosystem: who the key players are, what they work on, and where people with different backgrounds can find a foothold.
- This session provides an overview of Ambitious Impact's (AIM) work to launch cost-effective organisations improving the world at scale. Over the last five years, AIM has launched more than 50 organisations improving the lives of upwards of 75 million people and 1 billion animals.
- It’s official. Elon Musk is now the world’s first-ever trillionaire, after his rocket ship company SpaceX’s record-shattering $2 trillion debut on the NASDAQ last Friday. With a mind-numbing net fortune of $1.4 trillion that is growing by the day, Musk is now worth more than the entire economy of Switzerland. He is more than 13 […]...
- Fifteen ideas to bring costs down and speed projects up
- How to save on construction costs without compromising safety
- Consistent and predictable funding builds state capacity
- An outdated federal law blocks transit modernization
- Allowing self-certification will accelerate project delivery
- A penny today is worth a dollar tomorrow
- Redesigning federal grant procedures and requirements will set up projects for success
- Procedural requirements delay voter-approved transit
- Federal incentives can reform bus procurement
- An accessible repository of transit planning information would aid project delivery
- Itemized procurement reduces expensive change order conflicts
- June Brief | We're looking for our next 3 teammates! Learn more about our three open roles, applications close July 5 ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA. TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university.
- OpenAI financial data leaked to the industry’s biggest hater settles an open question — just not in his favor...
- Disclosure: I work at GiveDirectly. This is a linkpost summarizing findings from a pilot we ran in Rwanda. I used AI to assist in writing this post, and it’s likely that >30% is AI-generated text. View our blog and watch a video of recipients using AI here: https://www.givedirectly.org/the-robots-work-at-night.
- (2024-04-21) There are many mysteries about deep learning and human intelligence, but we could describe the biggest anomaly this way: why are artificial neural nets smart in such stupid ways, and biological brains stupid but in smart ways?.
- Powerful LLMs will be deployed at global scale in the next few years, and will dominate the Internet, and increasingly, ordinary life. As of mid-2026, there is no coherent vision for how knowledge professionals, or ordinary people, will be able to harness these LLMs for large productivity increases, or how they will handle cybersecurity and cognitive security.
- Paper link. Before releasing a new model, labs need to understand not just what it can do, but how it is likely to behave in real-world use, including where it might introduce new risks. This becomes even more important as capabilities increase. As part of our pre-deployment safety review, we leverage targeted evaluations, red-teaming, and other checks to understand model behavior.
- [Guest post by Sam Hopkins] We invite groups of interested researchers to submit workshop proposals for FOCS 2026 by July 31, 2026. The FOCS 2026 workshops provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions, directions, and challenges in the field.
- The AI Village data - over a year of multi-agent trajectories - is now available to researchers on HuggingFace! We're excited to see what you uncover! But first, your FAQs on how the AI Village works, answered: What is the AI Village?. A group of AI agents pursuing long-horizon goals together - like organizing a park cleanup, doing research, and competing to sell merch - in a group chat.
- Sports are a controlled alternative to war. We need an alternative to AI development that captures the desirable social role it’s playing.
- Guest post by Alexander "Sasha" Putilin
- Paper link. Before releasing a new model, labs need to understand not just what it can do, but how it is likely to behave in real-world use, including where it might introduce new risks. This becomes even more important as capabilities increase. As part of our pre-deployment safety review, we leverage targeted evaluations, red-teaming, and other checks to understand model behavior.
- California YIMBY is taking a formal position against the One-Time Wealth Tax (California Billionaire Tax Act or “CBTA”) headed for the November ballot. For an organization built around housing, that may look like a detour. It isn’t, and we want…. The post Why California YIMBY Opposes the Billionaire <span class="dewidow">Wealth Tax</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- This is the fourth post in the sequence Implications of Continual Learning for LLM Agents. Summary: Continual learning is a capability that largely doesn’t exist yet in LLMs. We first want to acknowledge that this may make it difficult to identify tractable angles of attack for making CL safer: it may be too difficult to predict how the development of CL will play out to find good...
- Fable and Mythos are currently unavailable, but likely will return within a few weeks. I will continue to cover that fiasco, but in the meantime I will also finish my review of Fable, as if it were available, including use of the present tense. As it did with Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8, this includes a discussion of issues surrounding model welfare.
- "He begged to work for the regime that tortured him."
- On Thursday, June 11, 2026, AI Now Co-Executive Director Dr. Sarah Myers West testified at a Hearing before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on “AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability, and American Dominance”. In her testimony, Dr. West highlighted the risks the AI industry poses to the US economy and broader public – […].
- Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger. Hi! From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems, a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe.
- Opinion: Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian argues that locking down the most powerful AI models doesn’t make us safer, it just demonstrates who is in control...
- A review finds that every stunning method for farmed fishes has significant welfare concerns, from stressful handling to the risk of regaining consciousness before slaughter. The post Killing Farmed Fishes Humanely Remains An Unsolved Problem appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Jeff Kaufman got into effective altruism before it even had a name. From 2009 to 2022, he and his wife, Julia Wise, donated 50% of their income, giving away over $2 million. Then, a conversation with someone from 80,000 Hours changed his trajectory. Jeff felt he could do more by applying his skills directly to help prevent catastrophic pandemics, rather than focusing on donations.
- Why does nobody there talk about zoning?
- the past is a foreign country
- You might have particular feelings about snakes, but for millions of Americans they’re a member of the household. And their popularity as pets has only been growing: From 2018 to 2024, the number of households that own a pet snake rose from about 810,000 to 1.3 million. And the share of snake-owning households with more […]...
- My name is Aurelia Song and I hope to make whole-body, human, end-of-life preservation for future revival a new global tradition. I care about it so much I've dedicated my life to it. The biggest objection I get to end-of-life preservation goes like this: "We can't revive today, so we can't prove that preservation works. Therefore preservation probably doesn't work.
- This is the fifth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The fourth post can be found here. . TLDR: Via adapting the methods of Marks et al and Li et al, we train Gemini 3 Flash to have certain traits/values by midtraining it on documents about how Gemini has those properties, followed by...
- Lately I’ve been spinning up on natural abstractions, and in particular on John Wentworth’s work on natural latents. As I’ve been studying, I’ve noticed some big gaps in the existing literature. Some of my biggest questions have not been answered by existing blog posts and writeups. One of my grumps about the existing body of work has to do with the typology of concepts, and the...
- At the Buckley Institute at Yale, MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon laid out the core problem with how we make AI today: we don't code these systems, we grow them. Trillions of numbers start out random, and we nudge them step by step until they produce the behavior we want. They end up writing code, using tools, and handling real tasks for us.
- This is the fifth in a series of informal research updates from the Google DeepMind Language Model Interpretability team, in interpretability and adjacent areas. The fourth post can be found here. . TLDR: Via adapting the methods of Marks et al and Li et al, we train Gemini 3 Flash to have certain traits/values by midtraining it on documents about how Gemini has those properties, followed by...
- The development community treats war as inevitable. We’re learning how to pay to prevent it.
- The person wearing AI as identity doesn’t want to be who they are without the latest model.
- Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe.
- TLDR: The animal welfare movement in Africa has made significant progress over the last 5 years, but due to increasing commercialisation of animals on the continent and foreign interest in animal agriculture, now more than ever, it needs to accelerate. Our retrospective look at Europe's trajectory shows that reform did not stem from a gradual shift in attitudes.
- Executive summary
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How to figure out what the most important things in the world are
- This study compared the abilities of veterinarians and AI models to identify pain in bulls. AI models demonstrated stronger overall performance, but the authors note important caveats. The post AI Can Detect Cow Pain Better Than Humans — What Now? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- From government to grassroots: how Ging found the most impactful thing she could do for animals Ging Geronimo had built a career moving between some of the most influential institutions in development and public policy within various departments of the Philippines government and multilateral banks. She knew how systems worked, how change happened slowly and […]...
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: "I love what I do. I love the chance to make things more effective for others.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my turn to ask a question. I had one prepared: Should I get the shingles vaccine? […]...
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Seasonal Fellowships are three-month opportunities designed to accelerate or launch impactful careers in AI governance and policy. The fellowship has both a Research Track and an Applied Track.
- Plus, details on the college preference list, or what happens after the Gaokao?
- Where are your agents right now?
- Players of games
- The post When Community Health Supervision Goes Digital appeared first on Living Goods.
- Prior discussion: niplav’s shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer. A frontier AI company (any one, I don’t care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don’t know how to make this technology safe.
- More children are eating better than ever before. But most still aren't eating well enough. What has changed since NFHS-5? We focused on three groups of indicators that sit close to our work: the quality of young children’s diets, the nutritional status of children under five, and how many mothers received iron-folic acid (IFA) during pregnancy.
- The Nuremberg defense is: “I was just following orders.” The Anthropic defense is: “We are better than the counterfactual.” But the counterfactual is whatever they can imagine.
- An interactive tool that helps us see where migrants were born, and where they live now.
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