Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- 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.
- The Goal. The Coefficient Giving Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team works to mitigate existential risks from engineered pathogens. A big part of why we're worried about this is that AI could make these risks much worse on short timelines. One motivating concern is that a misaligned AI or.
- 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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- A new guidebook released by CLTC’s Public Interest Cybersecurity Program highlights the benefits of “community cyber defense programs” — including cybersecurity clinics, regional security operation centers (RSOCs), and state cyber corps — as a resource for defending organizations like nonprofits, rural hospitals, schools, local utilities, counties, municipalities, and small businesses from...
- “Why is it that we set lines in these seemingly arbitrary places based on what people believe or what they look like or how close they are to us?". Zach Robinson couldn't answer that question growing up in Omaha, where he had a different race, religion, and sexual orientation than most of his community.
- The more I have been working with grantmakers the more I have come to value the impact they can have outside of their direct grantmaking.
- if so, what for?
- “Read this book. It may change your life.”— Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation What if the point of self-improvement were not just to feel better or get ahead, but to become more capable of helping in a hurting world? In Compassionate Purpose, Magnus Vinding bridges self-help and ethics with a framework for personal development... Continue Reading →...
- It is with great pleasure that I announce that my colleague Krystal Birungi of Target Malaria Uganda at the Uganda Virus Research Institute has been awarded the 2026 Global Citizen Prize. The Global Citizen Prize seeks to identify and celebrate grassroots activists in local communities who are fighting for social justice, championing the most vulnerable, […].
- The post Open position: Advisor appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- What share of electricity is consumed by data centres? What's the energy footprint of ChatGPT and other chatbots?
- (Skip if you aren’t interested in Inkhaven chatter). Watteau, The Embarkation for Cythera (1717) Inkhaven is over. I am sad. Surprisingly: I didn’t actually find hitting the writing that hard. Lots of people, maybe the majority of the cohort, were working right up to midnight, and didn’t have and extra posts in the bank for days when they didn’t want to write. It’s quite possible that...
- (Crosspost). If you’re young and online, you’re probably maxxing something. Maybe you’re looksmaxxing: trying to maximize your hotness (e.g. by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer). Maybe, like Clavicular, you do it just to mog other people—to look better than they do. But good looks reach diminishing marginal returns.
- In Battambang, Cambodia, three generations of women run a family car wash. It’s a life built on grit, love, and long days, but for 20 years, there was a missing piece at the center of their home. At 74, Phen Mao lived in a blur. After she lost her sight, her daughter, Lorb, carried the …. The post May is Healthy Vision Month. This is how sight united three generations of women.
- I have two shameful secrets that I probably shouldn't talk about online: I love my family. I enjoy my hobbies. "What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job interview, HR will probably use an AI that can match his online writing based on a short sample of written text, and when they ask 'hey AI, is this guy really 100% devoted to his job, and does he spend...
- Example 1: The Viking 1 lander. In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions. Total cost of $1B (1970), equivalent to about $7B (2025). The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's surface for six years, before its battery began to seriously degrade. One might have thought a battery problem like that would spell the irrevocable end of the mission.
- 0. I don't work at AIM. why care about this?. This taxonomy is written from AIM's perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly: If you're starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea needs.
- There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary. The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how farmed animals are raised and...
- How fast could an AI-driven economy grow? Most economists expect a few percentage points at best, comparable to previous general-purpose technologies (Acemoglu (2024)). Those closer to AI development tend to imagine something much more radical (Shulman (2023); Davidson and Hadshar (2025)). This series aims to ground growth rates in how physical production works.
- A letter to Gen Alpha
- How fast can an AI-driven economy grow? Economists expect a few percentage points; at best those closer to AI development imagine Dyson spheres within years. Who is correct?
- Editors’ Note: Carmen Rojas continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund (Simon & Schuster, 2025). John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America is one of the best books I’ve read about the perils and promises of philanthropy in the United States. It … Continue reading →...
- I think that a lot of “woo” - a broad term that includes things like chakras, energy healing, Tarot, various Eastern religions and neopagan practices, etc. - consists of things that have real effects and uses, even if many (though not all) of their practitioners are mistaken about the exact mechanisms and make unwarranted metaphysical claims. Now, a woo practitioner might explain what’s...
- The first step towards recursive self improvement
- Effective Altruism
- just show you care
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Podcast | How will falling fertility rates hurt the economy? With Melissa Kearney Typically, a society’s population remains stable if women have about 2.1 children each. By that metric, the word has a big problem. In developed countries the total fertility rate is well below that figure. So what are the economic consequences of that shortfall?
- Can putting a price tag on ending poverty unlock billions in giving? New research from J-PAL affiliate Paul Niehaus, cofounder of GiveDirectly, reveals ending extreme poverty may be more achievable than many assume. The question now is whether that kind of clarity can mobilize philanthropic money sitting on the sidelines... . spriyabalasubr… Mon, 05/04/2026 - 07:26...
- Podcast | Boosting farmers' profits In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Craig McIntosh discusses a recent J-PAL policy insight that takes stock of the evidence from randomised controlled trials on credit, subsidies, and cash transfers for smallholder farmers, arriving at conclusions that challenge some of agriculture's most persistent development assumptions. spriyabalasubr… Mon, 05/04/2026 -...
- Opiniestuk in De Standaard (04-05-2026) Eén geredde bultrug toont hoe onbetrouwbaar onze morele radar is Het was ontroerend mooi om te zien: bultrugwalvis Timmy die na een reddingsoperatie terug vrij rondzwom in de open zee, nadat hij eind maart in … Lees verder →...
- TLDR: I basically don’t. Contents. Contents. Ethical concerns. Thoughts on how to avoid becoming corrupted. Future worlds What happens in the lead-up to ASI?. Predictions are hard, especially about markets. Trend-following. The EA portfolio. Leaning my investments in the right direction. Appendix: Some specific predictions. Notes. Ethical concerns.
- One time my friends and I made a fire on the beach.
- How much do cows suffer in the production of milk? I can’t answer that; understanding animal experience is hard. But I can at least provide some facts about the conditions dairy cows live in, which might be useful to you in making your own assessment. My biggest conclusion is that cows made better choices than chickens by making their misery financially costly to farmers. Life Cycle.
- We empirically investigate exploration hacking (EH) — where models strategically alter their exploration to resist RL training — by creating model organisms that resist capability elicitation, evaluating countermeasures, and auditing frontier models for their propensity.
- Plus other madness
- Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
- Most public commentary is debating whether AI has hit a plateau.
- Engagement, bridging, and the design of digital platforms which don't pander to our weaknesses.
- Soon, if not already, established authors of mass-market fiction will publish AI-assisted writing.
- Sentience is hot these days. Partly because of the development of impressive new AI systems, everyone seems to be asking: How do we know if something is sentient? While consciousness means simply having a subjective point of view on the world — a feeling of what it’s like to be you — sentience is the […]...
- We measure the ability of Opus 4.5 to fool prompted or fine-tuned classifiers trying to detect a narrow set of outcomes. We find that: The Opus 4.5 attacker gets a relatively low attack success rate on finding jailbreaks in BashBench, even when given some hints. Performance is especially low against a prompt Opus 4.5 classifier with a CoT and a fine-tuned Haiku 4.5 classifier.
- I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference. It’s hard to convey in words.
- I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach.
- TL;DR. OpenAI's "Critical" threshold for AI self-improvement in the Preparedness Framework v2 has three structural problems: It fires too late. The lagging indicator, 5× generational acceleration sustained for several months, lets ~3 years of effective progress accumulate before triggering. Anthropic used a 2x threshold instead of a 5x. It's self-certified.
- I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist/evidence oriented approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach.
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