Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- If we can replace the factory farms that torture animals by the billions, we should!
- Transformer Weekly: The Obernolte-Trahan AI Act, Trump’s executive order, and Anthropic discusses a pause...
- When people mourn the loss of an animal, their grief often goes unrecognized and unsupported — even more so when those animals live on factory farms or in the wild. The post Animal Ethical Mourning: Why Animal Grief Is Disenfranchised appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.
- A1: Transforming Food Systems To Improve Diet Quality and Resilience For The Most Vulnerable A1 programme. Our focus in Africa. Six countries, each focused on priority value chains that improve access to affordable, safe and nutritious foods. Kenya. Vegetables. Mozambique. Fish & Poultry. Ethiopia. Dairy & Fortified Oil. Nigeria. Vegetables & Fortified Rice. Benin.
- Transforming Food Systems To Improve Diet Quality and Resilience For The Most Vulnerable (“A1”) Country programmes. Explore how A1 is working across six African countries to make nutritious foods more desirable, affordable, accessible, and sustainable for low-income consumers.
- This is a summary of the work I've done and work I plan to do, and the theories of change and AI progress that motivate my work. I've been working full-time on alignment for three years and change, and thinking about brainlike AGI and its alignment increasingly often since 2004.
- How can you identify high-impact, underrated policy opportunities before they become obvious?
- We, the Center on Long-Term Risk, are looking for Summer Research Fellows to explore strategies for reducing suffering in the long-term future (s-risks) and work on technical AI safety ideas related to that. For eight weeks, fellows will be part of our team while working on their own research project.
- GiveDirectly’s work is rooted in integrity and focused on safety. We deliver unconditional transfers to people in poverty while managing the risks this creates, including fraud, abuse, and safety threats. Our code of conduct and values, along with national laws, guide staff conduct and set clear standards. We continuously improve safeguards to protect both recipients […]...
- The post Overview appeared first on Center on Long-Term Risk.
- This page gives an overview of our research at the Center on Long-Term Risk. For published work, see our Publications page and Blog. Current focuses Our two primary research agendas are: Model Personas. This agenda studies and steers the emergence of malicious propensities in LLMs — traits like spitefulness, sadism, and punitiveness.
- possibly the most on-brand post I've ever written?
- There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which of these theories are correct (or which elements of them are) may matter a lot if we're seeking to change society for the better.
- a thing I don't exactly recommend but also still think about
- The arbitrariness detector is an online tool that helps you make choices that avoid problematic, irrational or unwanted types of arbitrariness. The tool is a quiz with 11 questions. Each question represents a case of a person who makes a … Lees verder →...
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29601. Thread: https://x.com/aksh_n0/status/2062568855814193497. TL;DR: Training small open-weight monitors provides a cost-effective alternative to prompted frontier monitors. Applying our training recipe to Qwen3.5-27B results in a monitor better at scheming detection than all smaller prompted monitors (Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, GPT-5.4 Nano, Claude Haiku 4.5)...
- FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately $200k for prizes.
- testing beliefs against reality
- About a year ago, in my article The Grisly Return of Holocaust Denial, I stated that Eric Hunt kidnapped Eli Wiesel.
- Rohin Shah recently had an interview on 80000 hours on his views on AGI Safety and his work at Google DeepMind. I'm posting the transcript below to encourage further discussion. I think the interview is interesting though I disagree on a bunch of topics, especially on alignment difficulty and CoT monitoring. Transcript. Who’s Rohin Shah? [00:00:00].
- Work done for our MATS 10.0 Sprint project - mentored by Neel Nanda and Adam Karvonen. Huggingface, Github. TL;DR: We have improved the original Activation Oracle (AO) training regime by training on on-policy rollouts, improving the conversational dataset, feeding more layers (following the approach by Niclas Luick) and making a small change to the injection formula.
- Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches.
- Star Trek futures >> Singularity futures
- FERC can accelerate interconnection and harden the grid
- In September 2025, we created a livelihoods research subteam to specifically focus on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. While we have evaluated and funded livelihoods programs throughout GiveWell’s history, we now have a dedicated program officer overseeing this portfolio, which has allowed us to build on and deepen that work.
- “One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”...
- On thought being a vehicle for language rather than language being a vehicle for thought
- Democrat Mallory McMorrow has released an unusually detailed AI agenda. Will it be a vote winner?
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: “There are a lot of problems in the world, and so figuring out where you can have the highest level of impact with the resources that you have is actually the smartest thing you can do.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- A study of koalas treated during Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfires identifies key clinical factors that predict survival, helping responders allocate limited resources more effectively. The post Bushfire Survivors: What Determines Whether A Koala Recovers appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Several U.S. states have banned cages for egg-laying chickens. How much would consumers have to save to be willing to reverse this policy?. The post Are Consumers Willing To Give Up Animal Welfare Regulations? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Meet the winner of the Q1 2026 “Right!” said FRED Challenge Marco Gerleit von Eynatten, known as MarcoGvE on GJ Open, won the Q1 2026 “Right!” said FRED Challenge. In this interview, he discusses how Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise drew him into forecasting a decade ago, how he approached our challenge, and why […].
- Editors’ Note: Andrew Fisher shines light on a lesser-known philanthropic titan of the turn of the last century, Nathan Straus. This post is adapted from the prologue of Fisher’s recently published book, Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian (Rutgers University Press, 2026). It is reprinted with the publisher’s kind permission. I came to … Continue reading →...
- A field guide for policymakers, founders, and funders
- CGD's David Evans speaks with Dipak Naker of the Coalition for Good Schools and CGD's Gabriela Smarreli on what the data shows about school violence (and what data is missing), how to conduct such research accurately and safely, and effective strategies for changing attitudes and practices around the world.
- In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off […]...
- everything / nothing, again
- Hartek Foundation partners with Punjab Police and J-PAL for gender-sensitivity training With a focus on skill building, the Foundation conducted statewide training programmes for over 2,000 Punjab Police officials on gender sensitivity and mainstreaming women in policing, in collaboration with Punjab Police and J-PAL. spriyabalasubr… Thu, 06/04/2026 - 04:23...
- This is a crosspost from the Forward Pass substack with the author's permission. What should you expect your life to look like in the future? Almost everybody is overconfident about what their life will look like in the next 30 years.
- Some UAE schools to get new Arabic programme: What parents need to know A new Arabic programme will be introduced across private schools in Ras Al Khaimah from September 2026. Called IQRA, the Arabic word for "read,” the programme was developed by the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research.
- World Bank: Morocco’s 'pioneer schools' program shows early gains in student performance According to the World Bank, students enrolled in Pioneer Schools scored 82% higher in learning outcomes than students in comparable public schools outside the program after just one year.
- Where international finance meets development: The role of currency risk Currency volatility in African markets shapes development outcomes by determining who can access capital and on what terms, with firms in shallow financial markets often forced to choose between expensive local-currency finance and exchange-rate risk from foreign-currency debt. spriyabalasubr… Thu, 06/04/2026 - 03:28...
- More than a monthly cycle: Why menstrual health is a human right In Madagascar, the KILONGA project worked with 250 schools to improve menstrual health through clean restrooms, locally produced reusable pads, and training for “Young Girl Leaders” who can help break down stigma among their peers.
- Mizoram records sharp increase in crimes against women: Minister Lalrinpuii Speaking at the launch of the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Solve Project at her office in Aizawl, Lalrinpuii said the problem has raised serious concern, necessitating an urgent mechanism to address it.
- AI companies face a tangle of competing considerations when deciding what goes into a model spec. Should the AI be completely honest in every circumstance? Take proactive prosocial actions? Engage in whistleblowing? And so on.
- Crosspost. (I think this is one of the most important things I’ve written, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it. And if you know what’s at stake, and just want to know what to do, skip to the end). What’s at stake. Sometimes, the operations of factory farms are so wicked that if they were described in a work of fiction, you’d think it was a cartoonish caricature of evil.
- "Just because you can't predict when something will happen doesn't mean it's far away.". Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom, on why uncertainty about AI timelines is not the same as having a lot of time. Two years before Enrico Fermi oversaw the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, he said it was 50 years off, if it was possible at all.
- Abundance would hit its limits pretty quick. When it comes to relating with other people, the Singularity would be same shit, different day.
- These days, I often run across whippersnappers excited to do something for AI safety — but aren’t quite sure what. One of the fun things about the Future Fund era were the big lists of project ideas; as we enter a new era of crazy money sloshing around, it might be time to bring back the lists!.
- Building homes near jobs, transit, and stores costs governments roughly $21,000 less per unit in upfront infrastructure than building at the suburban fringe — and that gap widens over time. America’s housing shortage is well-documented, but policymakers have rarely accounted….
- America’s most sprawling metro areas cost their residents thousands more per year in transportation and energy expenses, produce worse health outcomes, and leave young people cut off from economic opportunity, according to a sweeping new national study. Urban sprawl, the….
- Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s plenty of low hanging fruit for the fixing. Nobody wants to create flawed work.
- Please steal these ideas
- There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. These theories are often hard to understand - you may need to read an entire book (or dozens of articles) to feel like you get the key claims of a single theory.
- TLDR: The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) just launched a global cage-free campaign against the largest Korean food multinational, CJ Group. Thanks to a once-in-a-generation alignment of factors, any action you take to support this campaign is likely to have an unusually high expected value, easily as high as the recent Ahold Delhaize campaign. I'm the Data and Insights Lead at The Humane League.
- I used AI in this post. >30% is AI-generated text (everything that appears in quote blocks)... . Google's Debug Project has been releasing mosquitos infected with bacteria that stop them from breeding in the wild, as a way of reducing mosquito populations.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- The factory farms are trying to keep pigs in cages so they don't have to feed them as much. It's up to us to stop them.
- Grady Killeen explains that the most consequential takeaway from his working paper isn't just for the retailers — it's for the manufacturers.
- Grady Killeen explains his working paper, "Risk Aversion and Barriers to Firm Growth: Experimental Evidence from Small Retailers", for The World Bank.
- Air Filters for Infection. Air filters are often proposed as a simple, scalable way to reduce the spread of respiratory infections. The underlying logic is simple - respiratory pathogens can be transmitted through the air in aerosol form, and air filters are capable of removing these particles before they are inhaled and go on to cause infection.
- Episode 18 is about Victorian urbanism
- This month’s Faunalytics Index provides facts and stats about calves made to participate in rodeos, the effectiveness of plant-based nudges in foodservice settings, abnormal repetitive behaviors in rhesus macaques used for research, and more. The post Faunalytics Index – June 2026 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Don't let reality reject you
- In this newsletter:
- It seems to me accepted wisdom in the West that the US owned labs must “beat” the Chinese labs in the race for AGI/ASI. Even those who don’t think there will be a winner, that essentially the race is to see which country’s AI will kill/disempower us first, seem to believe that if there has to be a winner then better it be the US labs. (I haven't seen a survey, so I could be way off here.).
- EA Forum Digest #294 Bugs, bednets, and big disagreements Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the digest. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Burying ebola, and other emergent disease (Tom Stocker, 7 min). Philanthropy Needs Ambitious Projects Immediately (Bentham's Bulldog, 5 min).
- Sufficiently capable models force national security responses — turning even the most ardent opponents of regulation into begrudging regulators...
- The housing abundance movement has won more of the intellectual argument than anyone might have predicted a decade ago. Across much of American politics, even in Zohran Mamdani’s New York (listen, I love the guy), it is now at least possible to say out loud that we have too many pointless rules making it impossible […]...
- Recent fiction publications: four sex stories; I don’t love you in New York City.
- "This is an important step in the right direction... but voluntary frameworks are not enough"
- but also, maybe they're not
- “Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.” It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket […]...
- For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.
- And why we only talk about looming catastrophe
- Crosspost. Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it. Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic’s founders, and Anthropic employees. A...
- GAIN Marks World MSME Day 2026 gloireri Wed, 06/03/2026 - 06:38 Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises are essential to the food systems people rely on every day. They grow, process, transport, market, and sell nutritious foods helping make healthier diets more available, affordable, and accessible.
- For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and where it's likely to fall short. To that end, some have helpfully written depictions of utopian (or utopia-adjacent) worlds: The Adventure, Just another day in utopia, The End of Creative Scarcity,...
- Just sticking human and machine together will not align them.
- For health hackers, the risk is not experimenting.
- AI Safety veteran Holden Karnofsky thinks there’s a 49% chance his actions are making things worse. In 2025, Jesse Clifton even stepped down as the executive director of the Center on Long-Term risk because of similar reasons. Even top AI Safety strategists don’t know what will make things better, and what will make things worse. Why is it so hard to improve humanity’s odds?.
- Arguably the second most important election day of the year
- The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the future of humanity. All this in a post that I saw as relatively nerdy and anodyne, goring few oxen, when […]...
- Nevertheless, I shall take advantage of your kindness in assuming we agree that a science cannot be conditioned upon empiricism. — Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” . Freud developed the first modern theory of the unconscious.
- 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...
- 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.
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