Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- It’s hard to imagine modern life without glycols. They are used in cosmetics, fog machines, and food. As you read this, you’re almost certainly wearing or drinking from something they were used to produce — polyester fabric or plastic bottles, for example. If you brush your teeth with toothpaste or top your salad with bottled […]...
- So, what’s a guy got to do to become a billionaire around here? Greg Brockman scribbled the question in his diary, recently unsealed as trial evidence, just two years after co-founding OpenAI as a charity in 2015: “Financially, what will take me to $1B?” For Brockman, now OpenAI’s president, the answer was a yearslong restructuring […]...
- The post Strengthening County Financing for Sustainable Community Health Systems in Kenya appeared first on Living Goods.
- LGT Venture Philanthropy renews partnership with Living Goods to strengthen community health systemsThe post LGT Venture Philanthropy renews partnership with Living Goods to strengthen community health systems appeared first on Living Goods.
- A powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake devastated Northern Cebu On September 30, 2025, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Bogo City in Cebu Province, displacing approximately 90,000 people, damaging or destroying more than 195,000 homes and impacting~ 753,000 people. It was followed by 12,000 aftershocks. For families already living in damaged homes, the […]...
- Could we have human-level AI within the next few decades? For a long time, many people have dismissed this idea as armchair speculation. In their view, we shouldn’t ground our beliefs about transformative technologies in vague hunches and fragile multi-step arguments. We need more solid evidence, like clear empirical trends. We need to be epistemically conservative.
- This post covers joint work with Wilson Wu, George Robinson, Mike Winer, Victor Lecomte and Paul Christiano. Thanks to Geoffrey Irving and Jess Riedel for comments on the post. In ARC's latest paper, we study the following problem: given a randomly initialized multilayer perceptron (MLP), produce an estimate for the expected output of the model under Gaussian input.
- "it does sometimes feel like very light touch requirements, like SB-53, or like you're spitting into a wildfire or something." "But like, it's a start, right?" "Maybe now you have to have an outside organization verify that you followed your safety and security policy."
- "I think it's like very hard to pass AI legislation in the US right now at the federal level, but also even at the state level." "Leave the document that's currently on your website on your website." "And even this kind of has companies like, you know, screaming, wailing, and gnashing their teeth and running their clothes about how oppressed they are by overregulation, right?"
- "This is like the deep state problem, right?" "But if you have like loyal AI subordinates in every agency that kind of solves that problem, it's just like, oh, align it to whatever the president wants." "That's like a kind of scary prospect."
- The Farm Bill currently under consideration by the U.S.
- Abstract. We introduce Natural Language Autoencoders (NLAs), an unsupervised method for generating natural language explanations of LLM activations. An NLA consists of two LLM modules: an activation verbalizer (AV) that maps an activation to a text description and an activation reconstructor (AR) that maps the description back to an activation.
- Abstract. We introduce Natural Language Autoencoders (NLAs), an unsupervised method for generating natural language explanations of LLM activations. An NLA consists of two LLM modules: an activation verbalizer (AV) that maps an activation to a text description and an activation reconstructor (AR) that maps the description back to an activation.
- I think smart people try things less often than they should, because of a cached mental pattern where you think of what might go wrong, and you find a foolproof countermeasure on the part of some antag, and so we call it off. Stockfish, playing itself, might as well resign from the first move if you force it to give knight odds. Sensei(the Go AI), should do the same when it has to give 6 stones.
- Surviving an environment-to-human pathogen would require widespread protection from airborne exposure, indoors and out. We think this may be achievable using improvised bioshelters and PPE made from household materials, though this hypothesis still needs more testing.
- Pathogens that replicate in the environment and transmit to humans pose a uniquely direct existential risk, far more so than those that spread person-to-person or can't grow outside a host. Of the possible exposure routes, airborne transmission is by far the hardest to defend against.
- Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: The pork lobby is one farm bill away from gutting our strongest farm animal welfare laws.
- Last week, OpenAI staff shared an early draft of Investigating the consequences of accidentally grading CoT during RL with Redwood Research staff. To start with, I appreciate them publishing this post. I think it is valuable for AI companies to be transparent about problems like these when they arise.
- Last week, OpenAI staff shared an early draft of Investigating the consequences of accidentally grading CoT during RL with Redwood Research staff.
- Charlie Bullock is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law and AI. He joins the podcast to discuss radical optionality: how governments can prepare for very advanced AI without locking in premature rules. The conversation covers why law often trails technology, and how transparency, reporting, evaluations, cybersecurity standards, and expanded technical hiring could help.
- The post Yoshua Bengio thinks he knows how to build safe superintelligence appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Charlie Bullock is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law and AI. He joins the podcast to discuss radical optionality: how governments can prepare for very advanced AI without locking in premature rules. The conversation covers why law often trails technology, and how transparency, reporting, evaluations, cybersecurity standards, and expanded technical hiring could help.
- The pork lobby is one farm bill away from gutting our strongest farm animal welfare laws
- The post Expression of Interest: Chief of Staff (Operations Team) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- This post covers joint work with Wilson Wu, George Robinson, Mike Winer, Victor Lecomte and Paul Christiano. Thanks to Geoffrey Irving and Jess Riedel for comments on the post. In ARC's latest paper, we study the following problem: given a randomly initialized multilayer perceptron (MLP), produce an estimate for the expected output of the model under Gaussian input.
- Epistemic conservatism no longer favours long timelines
- The conditions for British farm animals are nightmarishly bad
- Traditional shelter length-of-stay calculations are misleading. Using a corrected statistical approach more accurately captures operational changes and resource needs. The post New Statistical Method Reveals Flaws In Shelter Length-Of-Stay Calculations appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Highlights from Tech Policy Press article “The EU AI Act is Not Ready for Agents,” examining how the EU AI Act applies to AI agents and governance challenges. The post EU AI Act meets AI Agents appeared first on The Future Society.
- Note: This is a longer and more technical report of our study into personality traits. If you want to see the shorter, more layperson-friendly version, click here. There's a debate that has raged in academic journals and among personality researchers about the nature of humans: how many dimensions does it take to best represent a person's personality?
- Short of time? Read the key takeaways. Some personality models are empirically derived. The Big Five personality model analyzes personality in terms of: Openness (to Experience), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (also known as ‘emotional instability’) This model emerged from the lexical hypothesis, which claimed if a personality difference matters, languages will...
- "We're talking about potential AI systems that don't just like substitute for some forms of work, but actually substitute for all forms of work, such that like a human couldn't necessarily find a different job because the AI would be able to do that job too." "And so this could potentially yield just incredibly high unemployment rates, like unsustainably high."...
- "I think the biggest thing for me is just the agency." "But when it comes to these AI systems, like they're not being built like typical software." "It's kind of like if you built a bigger toaster and then all of a sudden your toaster could like hack the internet in addition to making toast."
- "these trends are already so ginormously fast." "Like I think maybe I wasn't expecting that the current trend would result in like superhuman vulnerability discovery happening this early on." "And I think there's just like very clear and compelling evidence that this AI system is like indeed exceeding human professionals in vulnerability discovery."
- Thanks to the generosity of our donors, the Happier Lives Fund (HLF) is growing, and so is its impact. We have now completed our second round of disbursements to our recommended charities, covering donations received in Q1 2026. Here is what that looks like in practice. How much did the HLF raise in Q1 […] Source.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Kearney Capano always wanted to help others but nothing ever felt good enough. She would volunteer and work at nonprofits, but there were always more people to be helped, more suffering to address. In university, she joined a neuroscience lab studying people who donate one of their kidneys to a complete stranger — trying to understand what drives that kind of selflessness.
- A systematic account
- This policy does not apply to anything posted before this post's time of publication. New policy: You are welcome to use AI to help you write posts, but we ask that you disclose it when you do. Not disclosing that your post is AI-assisted could mean a rate-limit or a ban. We won’t enforce this policy for comments and quick takes, though we’d appreciate a norm of disclosure there as well. .
- It’s incredible how many consensus guidelines dissolve when you look closely at them. . If you listen to any authority on the subject of sunscreen, you will hear it endlessly repeated that you absolutely must reapply sunscreen every 2 hours while you are in the sun, and immediately after swimming, sweating, or exercising.
- I started 2 EA(ish) group houses now, so I figured there's an opportunity to share my experience and how you too can start one!. There's a whole substack dedicated to community living, so I'll stick to the EA lens of it. Note: My experiences are based in NYC and SF, which have a nice flow of travelers & concentration of like-minded folks.
- please explain me
- I'm Svetha Janumpalli, founder and CEO of New Incentives. We run a conditional cash transfer program in northern Nigeria that provides small incentives to caregivers to complete routine infant vaccination schedules. Today, we operate across more than 7,000 clinics and have enrolled 6.8 million infants.
- Target Malaria Uganda took part in the national commemoration of World Malaria Day in Iganga, held at Bulamagi Subcounty grounds under the theme: “Driven to End Malaria: Now We Can, Now We Must.” The event also combined the graduation of over 100 Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs). The function, held on April 24, 2026, was […].
- Target Malaria Uganda took part in the national commemoration of World Malaria Day in Iganga, held at Bulamagi Subcounty grounds under the theme: “Driven to End Malaria: Now We Can, Now We Must.” The event also combined the graduation of over 100 Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs). The function, held on April 24, 2026, was […].
- Why are we absent from frontier research?
- This post was cross-posted from Positive Sum by the Forum team. The author notes: I'm not saying every abundance goal meets this bar, e.g. high speed rail in America would not. This post is intended as a clarifying abundance's relation to EA, rather than a criticism of EA prioritization. Subtitle: Functional governance and democracy helps many EA cause areas.
- I was thinking about Habryka's article on Putin's CEV, but I am posting my response here, because the original article is already 3 weeks old. I am not sure how exactly a person's CEV is defined.
- A misaligned AI or human-AI group could attempt takeover by releasing a highly transmissible engineered pathogen. I discuss what a PPE strategy aimed at this threat model needs to get right.
- Your farmed animal advocacy update for early May 2026
- The "expanding moral circle" -- the idea that moral concern has (or, at least, should) widened over time from family, to community, to nation, to all humanity, and (arguably) outward to all sentient beings -- was developed by W.E.H. Lecky (1869) and popularized by Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle (1981).
- Sometimes, a friend who works around here, at an x-risk-themed organisation, will think about leaving their job. They’ll ask a group of people “what should I do instead?”. And everyone will chime in with ideas for other x-risk-themed orgs that they could join.
- Using the language of the oppressed to justify ignoring their interests
- This month’s Faunalytics Index provides facts and stats about the welfare of egg-laying ducks in Indonesia, a program to help unhoused people and their companion animals, misperceptions about honeybees, and more. The post Faunalytics Index – May 2026 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Palantir’s fiery rhetoric helps mystify its mostly mundane tech — propping up its share price and preserving its national security contracts...
- The EU's AI Gigafactory initiative is its largest planned compute investment to date. Our new memo identifies four imperatives that the initiative must address to deliver on Europe's frontier AI ambitions. The post Future-Proofing EU AI Gigafactories: Four Design Imperatives appeared first on The Future Society.
- Epistemic certainty: Obviously loads of uncertainty on mirror life risks and the degree to which we'd have to pressurize buildings or filter outdoor air. Moderately high certainty for the best hasty pathways for doing this in North American and a narrow subset of European buildings. Lower certainty as we move towards international buildings.
- Summary: LLMs are better at developing crystallized intelligence than fluid intelligence. That is: LLM training is good at building crystallized intelligence by learning patterns from training data, and this is sufficient to make them surprisingly skillful at lots of tasks.
- EA Forum Digest #290 Strategic AI debates, everyday impact, and what’s happening across EA Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the digest. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Open strategic questions for digital minds (Lucius Caviola, 15 min). AIM's new charity taxonomy (Aidan Alexander, Morgan Fairless, Ambitious Impact, 13 min).
- We are at a pivotal moment in the fight to shape the future of AI and its role in society. AI Now is scaling up our team to meet the moment, looking to make three hires to help us grow the organization as we enter our next phase: More information on each role can be […]. The post AI Now is Hiring! appeared first on AI Now Institute.
- We are looking for a high-touch, digitally savvy communications professional to support the organization’s external presence across a range of channels. The Communications Associate will be a primary point of contact for engagement with the public and press, working in close partnership with our Senior Director and wider team to execute our comms strategy. We […].
- We’re looking for a senior leader to support the organization through this next phase of growth. Experienced and results-driven, this individual will have a finger to the pulse of the organization, working in close partnership with our Senior Director to build the systems and processes necessary for our team to thrive. This role requires a […].
- We’re looking for a Program Associate to help execute our programs so they can be maximally impactful. With a bias to action and high degree of attention to detail, this individual will work at the frontline of executing AI Now’s flagship reports and events, providing support to the Senior Director across the range of projects […].
- Hey folks! We’ve recently done an internal impact assessment and thought it would be helpful to share its highlights. (Due to capacity constraints, we opted to share the current post rather than wait for a longer and more polished one, but we’re happy to answer questions.). For context, our goal at Probably Good is to help people build careers that are good for them and for the world.
- Hive Slack Threads: April
- Last week, in a video interview with Elle magazine, the pop star Billie Eilish was asked the following question: “What’s one hill you’d die on?” “Y’all not gonna like me for this one,” Eilish said. “Eating meat is inherently wrong.” She then added that it’s hypocritical to say you love all animals but also eat […]...
- what's the solution?
- How Cleaner Salt Production in Tanga Is Improving Nutrition Outcomes dwaweru Wed, 05/06/2026 - 10:09 When you ask families in Tanga what salt means to them, the answer is often simple: “It’s something we cook with every day.” Yet few realise that the quality of that salt; its purity, safety, and level of iodization; directly affects the health of households, particularly children and pregnant...
- In Germany, at least
- Europe (and the UK) have strong protections for flyers in the case of delayed or cancelled flights. However very few people are aware of these, and airlines will almost always try to wriggle out of paying up. Even travel agents are often unaware of these laws, or unwilling to fight the airline for you.
- If humans and advanced AI systems are going to cooperate—to make honest deals and avoid negative-sum conflict—AIs will need reasons to trust us. By default, they won't have many: humans routinely lie to AIs in evaluations, and developers control much of what models see and believe. We share a sample honesty policy that AI companies could adopt.
- Why do manure spreaders have life cycles?.
- tl;dr We introduce model spec midtraining (MSM): after pre-training but before alignment fine-tuning, we train models on synthetic documents discussing their Model Spec, teaching them how they should behave and why. This controls how models generalize from subsequent alignment training—for example, two models with identical fine-tuning can generalize to different values depending on how MSM...
- "A technology can be a bubble and still be real. The dot-com bubble was a bubble. The internet was real.". In 2021, experts predicted AI would win a Math Olympiad gold medal in 22 years. It happened last year. A few weeks ago, GPT 5.2 published a novel result in physics. Now the AI companies are openly working on AIs that build smarter AIs that build smarter AIs.
- If you have children, or have ever been around a one-year-old, you know they are into everything. It is the age of eager discovery; of reaching, crawling, and finally finding your feet. Sahil is no different. He has that same drive to explore, but for the first year of his life, he just couldn’t see …. The post May is Healthy Vision Month. May 10 is Mother’s Day.
- America can’t afford a lowest-common-denominator housing supply bill
- Give up at least one of: text only, short time horizon, easy to grade, and expert human superiority.
- While I was traveling Julia asked me: why is Anna saying her fiddle practice is only two minutes? In this case, two minutes was the right amount of time! . Anna (10y) and I had been fighting a lot about practice. She'd complain, slump, stop repeatedly to make adjustments, and generally be miserable.
- Claude really got me lately. I’d given it an elaborate prompt in an attempt to summon an AGI-level answer to my third-grade level question. Embarrassingly, it included the phrase, “this work might be reviewed by probability theorists, who are very pedantic”. Claude didn’t miss a beat.
- I hear that many people believe that the idea of advanced AI threatening human existence was invented by AI CEOs to hype their products. I’ve even been condescendingly informed of this, as if I am the one at risk of naively accepting AI companies’ preferred narratives. If you are reading this, you are probably familiar enough with the decades-old AI safety community to know this isn’t true.
- This is the latest work in our Parameter Decomposition agenda. We introduce a new parameter decomposition method, adVersarial Parameter Decomposition (VPD) and decompose the parameters of a small language model with it. VPD greatly improves on our previous techniques, Stochastic Parameter Decomposition (SPD) and Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition (APD).
- This is the latest work in our Parameter Decomposition agenda. We introduce a new parameter decomposition method, adVersarial Parameter Decomposition (VPD) and decompose the parameters of a small language model with it. VPD greatly improves on our previous techniques, Stochastic Parameter Decomposition (SPD) and Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition (APD).
- “How are we to live, in a world in which there is so much unnecessary suffering? Magnus Vinding looks unflinchingly at that question, and gives an answer that is realistic, and yet inspiring. Read this book. It may change your life.”. — Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. I have just published a book:
- Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias. - From Scott Alexander's review of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset.
- A cure for congenital deafness, recreating snake venom, antibodies, a legend in cardiovascular medicine, and a successful hair loss treatment?
- Pack it up deontologists!
- A study of blue whale watchers in Mexico finds that boat crowding more than whale numbers shapes what tourists are willing to pay, with implications for animal welfare, local economies, and conservation. The post What Tourists Will (And Won’t) Pay For Whale Watching appeared first on Faunalytics.
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