Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The post OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to die (with Tyler Whitmer) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- On the unseriousness of the discipline
- There’s more to AI safety than the AGI debate...
- Although Singapore was the first country to approve cultivated meat for human consumption, public acceptance remains a challenge. Researchers investigated whether education and taste-testing could help change this. The post Education And Taste-Testing Show Promise For Promoting Cultivated Meat appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Focus has shifted away from evaluation of general cause areas or cross-cause comparisons, with the vast majority of research now comparing interventions within particular cause areas. Artificial Intelligence does not comfortably fit into any of the traditional cause buckets of Global Health, Animal Welfare, and Existential Risk.
- Mizoram minister launches project to tackle violence against women Mizoram social welfare, women, and child development minister inaugurated the Gender Based Violence Solve project, jointly taken up with J-PAL South Asia. spriyabalasubr… Tue, 11/11/2025 - 10:40...
- I am presenting you with my recipe for Heartbreak Pie.
- Corporate governance, phenomenal consciousness, and stinky stuff
- The carnage in the Sudanese city of El Fasher has become so severe that the blood stains can be seen from space. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — which attacked the capital of Khartoum two years ago, kicking off a brutal civil war — finally took over El Fasher last week. The RSF’s capture […]...
- How large of a breakthrough is necessary for dangerous AI?. In order to cause a catastrophe, an AI system would need to be very competent at agentic tasks . The best metric of general agentic capabilities is METR’s time horizon.
- GAIN’S Strategy For Harnessing Artificial Intelligence In Programmes GAIN 🇰🇪 on Socials: . . . . gloireri Tue, 11/11/2025 - 09:33 GAIN’S Strategy For Harnessing Artificial Intelligence In Programmes . Introduction and Overview. Billions of people worldwide are malnourished. Food systems transformation is essential to address this challenge, yet it is not happening fast enough.
- This post contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy. At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, Groot—a sapient tree with a three-word vocabulary—dies. They take a splinter from his…trunk, I guess?…and put it in a pot, from which springs Baby Groot. There was a debate among fans as to whether Baby Groot is Groot regenerated, or if Baby Groot is an entirely new person.
- This is a brief update about what’s been happening on the 80k podcast team over the last 6 months, because we’ve undergone quite a few changes. We’re also hiring (more details below). As background: The podcast has been running for 8(!) years, run and predominantly hosted by Rob Wiblin.
- GAIN’S Strategy For Harnessing Artificial Intelligence In Programmes GAIN’S Strategy For Harnessing Artificial Intelligence In Programmes . gloireri Tue, 11/11/2025 - 06:34 Image Thumb (540x337px) Share on...
- Excerpt from Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Andrej Karpathy that I think is valuable for LessWrong-ers to read. I think he's basically correct. Emphasis in bold is mine. Andrej Karpathy 00:29:53. I guess I built the repository over a period of a bit more than a month. I would say there are three major classes of how people interact with code right now.
- I basically fully endorse the full article. I like the concluding bit too. This brings me to my own contribution to the already-full genre of recommendations for people who want to contribute to AI safety: Don't work for a company that's making frontier fully-autonomous AI capabilities progress even faster. Don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cheers, Gabe. Discuss...
- Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!. If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here. Read More.
- 🐓About the role 🐓. As Corporate Relations Lead at The Humane League, you will play an integral role in our organizational strategy to engage with corporations and advance protections for animals in the food supply chain. You’re motivated to make a difference in the lives of animals and have the passion needed to encourage and inspire corporate decision makers to do the same.
- Policy shapes the rules and systems that affect how societies function—from climate regulations to public health programs to economic reforms. Because policy decisions often impact millions or even billions of people, careers in this field can be one of the most powerful ways to create positive change in the world. ... Read more...
- Manifest X DC was this weekend, hopefully the first of many local spin-offs of Manifest. Despite a late prediction market surge, there were no fires. An attendee wrote a nice post of observations, though he left the afterparty before the lights dimmed and the duels began. I gave an opening talk, which ended up being more personal and emotional than I'd set out to write.
- Why does a water bottle seem like a natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”, while the left half of the water bottle seems like a less natural chunk of physical stuff to think of as “A Thing”? More abstractly: why do real-world agents favor some ontologies over others?.
- It’s been eight months since I released my last story, so you could be forgiven for thinking that I’d given up on writing fiction. In fact, it’s the opposite. I’m excited to announce that I’m releasing my first fiction collection— The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity—with Encour Press in mid-December!. (Cover design by Barış Şehri).
- TL;DR: If you already have clear concepts for memes, cyber memeplexes, egregores, the mutualism-parasitism spectrum and possession, skip. Otherwise, read on. I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this: written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful. Prerequisite: Dennett three stances (physical, design, intentional). Meme is a replicator of cultural evolution.
- TL;DR: If you already have clear concepts for memes, cyber memeplexes, egregores, the mutualism-parasitism spectrum and possession, skip. Otherwise, read on. I haven't found concepts useful for thinking about this: written in one place, so here is an ontology which I find useful. Prerequisite: Dennett three stances (physical, design, intentional). Meme is a replicator of cultural evolution.
- Every month, the Forecasting Research Institute asks top computer scientists, economists, industry leaders, policy experts and superforecasters for their AI predictions. Here’s what we learned from the first three months of forecasts: AI is already reshaping labor markets, culture, science, and the economy—yet experts debate its value, risks, and how fast it will integrate into everyday life.
- Executive summary
- Hyperscalers are coming in hot with the next generation of AI datacenters
- In the past decade or so, Disney/Pixar movies have undergone a really interesting change.
- Why Joe Carlsmith should join ISIS, or, barring that, Anthropic
- A study reveals how civets suffer for the world’s “most luxurious” coffee. The post Crappy Cappuccinos: A Welfare Assessment Of Kopi Luwak Production appeared first on Faunalytics.
- We’re looking for an all-star reporter to cover the full spectrum of US frontier AI policy and politics, including the White House, Congress, key states, and industry efforts to shape legislation.
- This work is my own, written in my spare time, and doesn’t reflect the views of my employer. Less than ~3% of the text is AI-generated. Thank you to Laila Kassam, Haven King-Nobles, Lincoln Quirk, Tom Billington and Harley McDonald-Eckersall for their feedback, which doesn’t imply their endorsement of the ideas presented. Summary:
- To give someone moral consideration means to avoid harming them and to seek their benefit. The criterion of sentience holds that we should give moral consideration to all beings capable of having experiences. Read more...
- The future is biomechanical computation
- Status quo harms should motivate reform
- I got what you need
- If Good News had a patron saint, it would be the Swedish professor of global health Hans Rosling. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a wizard at using data and storytelling to challenge misconceptions around global development and progress. With statistics in hand, Rosling could convince the most determined pessimist that the world was, on […]...
- It's been a while since I wrote about myopia!. My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program. This post will be "more crazy". The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum. "Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all".
- Greetings from a world where…...
- After I wrote my post about things you should know, a commenter suggested writing a list specifically about London, which I thought was a rather good idea.
- This essay contains an examination of handling information which is unpleasant to learn. Also, more references to spiders than most people want. CW: Pictures of spiders. I. Litanies and Aspirations. If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me...
- Climate Change Does Not Only Threaten Food Production but Also Crop Nutrition gloireri Mon, 11/10/2025 - 08:31 Climate Change Does Not Only Threaten Food Production But Also Crop Nutrition. Authors: Michelle Nova Lauwrhetta, Ibnu Budiman. Indonesia: 7th/Nov/2025. .
- EA has always had a coolness crisis. The name itself is clunky and overly precise. The logo is fine-but-not-great, and the visual branding has never excited anybody. EA orgs have spent over a decade struggling to tell exciting stories or get serious numbers of social media followers. In short: It’s never been sexy; it’s never been cool. Maybe you don’t think being cool matters.
- Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI...
- Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI...
- I recently spent six days at Viable Paradise, the yearly science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop.
- It’s been eight months since I released my last story, so you could be forgiven for thinking that I’d given up on writing fiction.
- Anxiety affects at least hundreds of millions of people every year. What treatments are available, and how have they changed over time?
- We cannot only do the most good with our money by donating to top charities and with our professional time by pursuing high impact ethical careers, but also with our moments of spare time, simply by signing online petitions or … Lees verder →...
- It's been a while since I wrote about myopia!. My previous posts about myopia were "a little crazy", because it's not this solid well-defined thing; it's a cluster of things which we're trying to form into a research program. This post will be "more crazy". The Good/Evil/Good Spectrum. "Good" means something along the lines of "helpful to all".
- Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/ natural latents research. Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!".
- Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstractions/ natural latents research. Both theories seek to provide a clear picture of how to posit latent variables, such that once someone has understood the theory, they'll say "yep, I see now, that's how latent variables work!".
- * by which I mean "it works pretty okay for songs of up-to-medium-high difficulty, see below". . When I seek out advice about making people more singalongable, there's a cluster of advice I get from folksinger people that... seems totally "correct", but, feels... insufficiently ambitious or something.
- When I put on my LLM skeptic hat, sometimes I think things like “LLMs don’t really understand what they’re saying”. What do I even mean by that? What’s my mental model for what is and isn’t going on inside LLMs minds?. First and foremost: the phenomenon precedes the model.
- Looking back, it appears that much of my intellectual output could be described as legibilizing work, or trying to make certain problems in AI risk more legible to myself and others. I've organized the relevant posts and comments into the following list, which can also serve as a partial guide to problems that may need to be further legibilized, especially beyond LW/rationalists, to AI...
- What did I learn by giving the right-wing activist my ears for 90 minutes?
- When my oldest friend, a baseball historian, visited last summer, we spent a pleasant afternoon at Nationals Park watching my beloved Washington Nationals lose to the Miami Marlins. Pleasant, that is, until we left the ballpark on a packed escalator. Halfway down, a young man threw up on my friend’s leg. He laughed uproariously and, without a hint of an apology, walked away.
- And why that fact matters
- For the first time in history, we have an opportunity to stop the next pandemic. From the earliest thinking of the Greek physician and philosopher Claudius Galen to the 19th-century British “father of epidemiology” John Snow to the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, recurring, widespread, and uncontrollable illness has been beyond the grasp of the […]...
- Investors often say that standard deviation is a bad way to measure investment risk because it penalizes upside volatility as well as downside. I agree that standard deviation isn’t a great measure of risk, but that’s not the reason.
- Bostrom (2014) defined the AI value loading problem as. how could we get some value into an artificial agent, so as to make it pursue that value as its final goal?. 1. JD Pressman thinks this is obviously solved in current LLM systems:
- Some people have all the luck.
- In this post, I describe a mindset that is flawed, and yet helpful for choosing impactful technical AI safety research projects. The mindset is this: future AI might look very different than AI today, but good ideas are universal. If you want to develop a method that will scale up to powerful future AI systems, your method should also scale down to MNIST.
- Löb's Theorem: If ⊢□x→x, then ⊢x. Or, as one formula: □(□x→x)→□x. Payor's Lemma: If ⊢□(□x→x)→x, then ⊢x. Or, as one formula: □(□(□x→x)→x)→□x. In the following discussion, I'll say "reality" to mean x, "belief" to mean □x, "reliability" to mean □x→x (ie, belief is reliable when belief implies reality), and "trust" to mean □(□x→x) (belief-in-reliability).
- The barriers between us and what we want are often entirely imagined. It is true: you can learn how to paint, change careers, write a paper or run a marathon. These things are hard, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are impossible. You can just do them. But this mindset has a dangerous edge case: it can make you skip asking for permission precisely when you should ask.
- Löb's Theorem: If ⊢□x→x, then ⊢x. Or, as one formula: □(□x→x)→□x. Payor's Lemma: If ⊢□(□x→x)→x, then ⊢x. Or, as one formula: □(□(□x→x)→x)→□x. In the following discussion, I'll say "reality" to mean x, "belief" to mean □x, "reliability" to mean □x→x (ie, belief is reliable when belief implies reality), and "trust" to mean □(□x→x) (belief-in-reliability).
- [CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy]. Alternate format: Talk to this post and its sources. Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He wrote that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy...
- Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it probably won’t last more than a decade, and I live in a pretty warm area. I. AGI is likely in the next decade. It has basically become consensus within the AI research community that AI will surpass human capabilities sometime in the next few decades.
- Crosspost from my blog. Introduction. Conflict pervades the world. Conflict can come from mere mistkes, but many conflicts are not mere mistakes. We don't understand conflict. We doubly don't understand conflict because some conflicts masquerade as mistakes, and we wish that they were mere mistakes, so we are happy to buy in to that masquerade. This is a mistake on our part, haha.
- Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/. It’s widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding. But there are other, less well known non-human entities that have also been accorded the rank of person.
- Moral offsetting is the practice of making up for a bad or prima facie wrongful action by doing something else that is good enough to outweigh the bad act.
- You're going to have to abandon some obvious principle--twice
- In March, I visited the Lowell Observatory — the astronomical research site where Pluto was first discovered — in Flagstaff, Arizona. I stood in line to squint through telescopes at Jupiter and the surface of the moon before the night turned cloudy and drove me inside the Astronomy Discovery Center museum. And like all museum […]...
- Is it a good use of time to call or write your representatives to advocate for issues you care about? I did some research, and my current (weakly-to-moderately-held) belief is that messaging campaigns are very cost-effective. In this post: I look at evidence from randomized experiments, surveys of legislators’ opinions, and observational evidence.
- A lot of people straightforwardly believe that minds are magic: that our decision making is not simply the result of electricity and biochemistry in neurons and synapses in the brain, but at the core is the product of an immortal soul. This, of course, I reject. But it seems to me that a lot of Continue reading "Why “Minds Aren’t Magic”?"...
- (Originally a twitter thread) When @fermatslibrary brought up this 1940 paper about why we have nothing to worry about from nuclear chain reactions, I first checked that it was real and not a modern forgery. Because it seems almost too good to be true in the light of current AI safety talk. Yes, the paper was real: Harrington, […]...
- Over the past year, I have talked to several people about whether they expect frontier AI companies to transition away from the current paradigm of transformer LLMs toward models that reason in neuralese within the next few years. This post summarizes 13 common arguments I’ve heard, six in favor and seven against a transition to neuralese AIs. The following table provides a summary:
- Plasticosis (free pdf available here) is a novel by Ikse Mennen about a postapocalyptic future in which it turns out that microplastics make people very, very sick with “plasticosis.” The resulting political disruption caused the United States to fracture into thousands of city-states.
- Epistemic status: I'm pretty sure AI will alarm the public enough to change the alignment challenge substantially. I offer my mainline scenario as an intuition pump, but I expect it to be wrong in many ways, some important. Abstract arguments are in the Race Conditions and concluding sections... . Nora has a friend in her phone. Her mom complains about her new AI "colleagues.".
- Op-ed by Michael Freeman published in The Sacramento Bee on October 30, 2025. The post Jane Goodall’s legacy is about animal rights — and the choices on our plates appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- On October 23rd, the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and Wisconsin Emergency Management were proud to host a packed room of cyber defenders across academia, state government,…. The post Cyber Volunteers Convene in Madison, Wisconsin appeared first on CLTC.
- Interpreting our new capabilities index
- Imagine using an ML-like training process to design two simple electronic components, in series. The parameters θ1 control the function performed by the first component, and the parameters θ2 control the function performed by the second component.
- A lot of people are daunted by the idea of doing a full digital declutter. Those people ask me all the time, “isn’t there something easier I can do that will still give me some of those sweet sweet benefits you were talking about?”. The answer is: sort of.
- Thanks to Inkhaven for making me write this, and Justis Mills, Abram Demski, Markus Strasser, Vaniver and Gwern for comments. None of them endorse this piece. The safety community has previously worried about an AI hijacking the training process to change itself in ways that it endorses, but the developers don’t.
- Urgent Call for Accelerated Action on Climate-Nutrition Integration – Latest Assessment gloireri Fri, 11/07/2025 - 19:22 London/Geneva. . For Immediate Release. Urgent Call for Accelerated Action on Climate-Nutrition Integration – Latest Assessment. Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are leading the way.
- Write for us.
- The time for dairy industry deception is ending. The post Unmasking Dairy Deception: 37,000+ Voices Demand Transparency appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- Improving research works best when efforts are coordinated, not fragmented. The Metascience Alliance is a coalition for coordination and collaboration, connecting stakeholders, identifying and advancing shared priorities, and accelerating collective progress. Since we first introduced the Metascience Alliance at the 2025 Metascience Conference, 39 organizations have signed the Letter of...
- If there are incomparable goods then nothing we do matters
- Transformer Weekly: No B30A chips for China, Altman’s ‘pattern of lying’ and a watered down EU AI Act...
- Extreme weather is killing millions of farmed animals and destroying farms worldwide, creating a cycle of suffering and loss. The post Factory Farming Fuels A Climate “Doom Loop” appeared first on Faunalytics.
- You may have noticed that Open Philanthropy is hiring for several roles in our GCR division: senior generalists across our global catastrophic risks team, and grantmakers for our technical AI safety team.
- What Happens When The Centre Cannot Hold (and isn't trying)
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