Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- “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.
- 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 Culture, The Gentle...
- 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.
- The post Rohin Shah on what it’s really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with ‘doomers’) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Animal Welfare Act enforcement may be at its lowest point in years, driven by a Supreme Court ruling, presidential administration changes, and a shrinking federal inspection workforce. The post Trends In Animal Welfare Act Enforcement In The United States appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Michael Thatcher's career has been guided by a simple formula: "Follow your heart, use your head, and then go make a difference.". This has taken him from professional musician and dancer, to oceanographic researcher, to tech executive. Today, Michael is the President and CEO of Charity Navigator.
- FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026 gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 12:46 FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026. Innovation for Healthier Diets in Uganda. Apply Now. Date 02.06.2026 Image Thumb (540x337px) The FreshValue Uganda Challenge 2026 is an innovation challenge organized by GAIN Uganda in partnership with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives...
- life is not a spectacle
- The welfare impactor is an online tool that helps you make important decisions based on your reflections on the welfare of humans and animals. The tool is a survey with around ten questions, and takes only a few minutes to … Lees verder →...
- On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me […]...
- Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 09:41 Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs. Blog, 2nd June 2026. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, most SMEs producing nutritious foods are family-owned enterprises.
- I am thrilled to officially be joining the team at Target Malaria as a Communications Assistant Intern! I recently graduated from the University of Nottingham with an International Media and Communications B.A. (Hons) degree, where I developed a strong understanding of how powerful media can be in communicating with different audiences and driving meaningful change. I became […].
- I’m a fan of people trying things, even if they seem silly. Dismissing risky ideas misses the point of research. But thoughtful criticism can direct effort to more promising fields. To that end, I’m going to try to make my criticism as constructive as possible, with concrete reasons for my pessimism and closely related research areas which are promising (and stand to benefit even from...
- The answer is immortality and world domination, but not for you. If you think that's silly, then don't let a handful of billionaires and zealots kill us for it.
- Seeking out the worst parts. The post Spider shopping appeared first on Otherwise.
- As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back up, week after week. The discussions are fun, but also practical. We’ll test the waters, what would be a minimum viable scheme? What’s easy, what’s hard? Who could do the hard parts?
- I first encountered LessWrong a couple months ago, and since then I've been a regular reader of posts here, including parts of the Sequences. Bayesianism is a major topic in them, and I wanted to try it myself. An ideal candidate was the Flemish TV show ' The Mole' (Dutch: 'De Mol'). In this post, I want to share my methodology & results, but I also want to ask for advice.
- I am going to talk about my experience in the Jane Street LLM backdoor challenge. I am sharing partial results. I managed to crack some of the models using white-box methods, after the activation/prompting approach didn't pan out. Happy to discuss better or more promising approaches. Introduction. A few months ago a Dwarkesh Patel podcast episode advertised a Jane Street backdoor challenge:
- Around July last year I decided I was going to go all in on technical AI safety research. To do that I’d need to get into an AI safety fellowship, quit my job, and sell everything that was in my flat in South Africa (hopefully in that order). I applied to every fellowship that was open , and got rejected from several of them before being accepted into MATS on Team Shard around mid-November.
- I've been a toe-in rat and existed on the outskirts of the social scene for approaching a decade now, and I can confidently say (with love) that rationalist men rarely dress well. I am drowning in a sea of reasonably-attractive men diminishing themselves in skinny jeans and free t-shirts from random events three years ago. But you can do better. I believe in you.
- Thirty years in marketing, one conversation that changed everything: Helen’s story Helen Farrell had spent thirty years in marketing, communications, and PR. She was experienced, dedicated, and good at her craft, most recently as Senior Content Executive at a software company where she’d been for many years. She wasn’t desperate to leave. She just knew, […]...
- The post Digital Advisory Service Reaching 20,000 Northern Nigerian Farmers with funding from ACReSAL, to be embedded within the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. appeared first on Precision Development (PxD).
- This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here. This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the next few years.
- Debugging Florida
- Executive summary
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How far open models lag the frontier, hyperscaler capex growth, and whether a compute crunch is nearing
- New Zealand’s online news media consistently frames brushtail possums as villains deserving violence — and wraps that message in humor. An analysis reveals how this combination desensitizes the public and forecloses compassion. The post How Dark Humor Normalizes Cruelty To Possums In New Zealand Media appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The weaving of a beautiful thing
- Discuss...
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