Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The post Benjamin Todd on why we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- A new version of Huemer's paradox of deontology poses a big challenge to deontology
- Michael Toscano is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Director of its Family First Technology Initiative. He joins the podcast to discuss family-centered AI policy. The conversation covers AI companions, self-harm risks, sexualized chatbots, education, smartphones in schools, and why "infinite patience" can harm children's growth.
- Researchers compared the behavior of mice housed in enriched companion-style cages against those in standard laboratory cages, finding that lab conditions fail to meet mice’s basic behavioral needs. The post Do Laboratory Mice Get What They Need From Their Cages? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Reflections from a graduating leader on what it means to create lasting change as a student and an alumni
- Editors’ Note: Katherine Badertscher introduces a recent article she published with Huitan Xu in The Foundation Review on “Philanthropic Archives and Legacy.” In 2024, my colleague Huitan Xu and I investigated the feasibility of creating a single “legacy library” to house archival material of individual philanthropists and foundations—a single repository for scholars, practitioners, donors and...
- In this diary, Samuel Hughes visits Washington, DC, the world’s imperial capital, and reflects on a national style hiding in plain sight.
- Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: .
- Let us derive the moral theory that includes every valid thing (principle, law, value) in normative ethics. Welfare as the only valid intrinsic value Consider ecocentric values, such as biodiversity, integrity, stability or naturalness of an ecosystem. The ecosystem itself … Lees verder →...
- Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can: “If you combine the head and the heart, you have these opportunities that can be 100 times more effective” See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #effectivealtruism #EffectiveAltruismStories...
- The post How an AI-powered app is helping Busia track missed visits, flag underperforming CHPs and keep mothers on care appeared first on Living Goods.
- TL;DR: GiveWell has published a podcast, looking back on their investments in iron fortification and their $8.2M grant to Fortify Health in 2021. When the grant was made, the projected cost-effectiveness was 5x cash transfers we delivered and estimated 12x.
- What AI-driven miracles will happen this year?
- In addition to LessOnline and Summer Camp, I will be attending Manifest!
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Continuous distributions are everywhere - for virtually everything we care about, a little more is a little better (or worse), and a lot more is a lot better (or worse). This presents a problem - we need to create rules that reasonably and fairly apply across these continuums, where the degree to which a thing possesses a trait makes a difference to the reasonable treatment of it.
- Product quality over time
- The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of […]...
- Aligning Food Systems with Net Zero Ambition through Sub-National Food and Nutrition Action Plan gloireri Tue, 05/26/2026 - 10:55 Aligning Food Systems with Net Zero Ambition through Sub-National Food and Nutrition Action Plan. Trenggalek, East Java (May 19–20, 2026), Indonesia.
- We need to investigate how we can assess which problems should be prioritized. In this piece, we’ll first look at some priority criteria. Then, based on those criteria, we’ll investigate which of the world’s problems should currently receive priority. Read more...
- Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘ encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics.
- Rethink Priorities just opened three positions: Researcher, Worldview Investigations Team. Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Technical Focus). Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Economics Focus). We're excited to expand our team and we look forward to reviewing your application. Discuss...
- I've spent the last couple of years working on AI risk at Coefficient Giving, but it’s only in the last few months that I’ve started to feel more viscerally that transformative AI is likely to happen and potentially very soon. To be honest, it probably took me longer than it should have. This shift has been a really difficult emotional experience and I've been struggling at times.
- Yes — but whether they’re making roads safer is a much more complicated question.
- Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘ encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics.
- Why moved from global health to AI and pandemics ten years ago, and what we're focused on today.
- As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and actions. Cognitive security could be compromised in several ways: AI could become very good at persuading people of arbitrary positions; interacting with AI could lead humans to lose touch with reality;...
- Hi there,
- And other purely metaphysical harms
- Executive summary
- Leading scientists produced a 299-page report. They came away terrified.
- Unlike Western contexts, where vegetarianism is often a personal identity or political statement, vegetarianism in China is a practical diet motivated by the pursuit of healthy, affordable, and spiritually nourishing food. The post Understanding The Cultural Context Of Vegetarianism In China appeared first on Faunalytics.
- UPDATE: I got 27 calls scheduled, 846 views, and 54 saves within 1 day of posting. Grateful for the support. The following is a Linkedin post. I am seeking your 2 min help to help amplify by commenting or reposting: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jen-b-49a906114_aijobs-techlayoffs-aisafety-ugcPost-7463471447823310848-A_1S?. . I am receptive to feedback, namely:
- The average person works 80,000 hours over the course of their career. Ideally, that time should be fulfilling, well-paid, and spent doing things that make the world a better place. Of course that’s much, much easier said than done. In an increasingly fragile job market made still more fraught by AI, there’s no longer such […]...
- we think in conversations
- Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: .
- Three categories of futures, depending on how AI goes: ASI timelines are long. ASI timelines are short, and we’re on track to solving AI alignment. ASI timelines are short, and we’re not on track to solving AI alignment. If we want to make a good future for all sentient beings, each of these futures has different implications for what we should work on. If timelines are long….
- AI ‘time horizons’ are mostly not about time (I think it’s mostly ‘data’, but you’ll see where I’m unsure). One chart from 2025 has become perhaps the most (in)famous in modern AI commentary. For those in the know, ‘ the METR graph’ is unusually compelling because it achieves what so few measures of AI progress have achieved: a somewhat meaningful Y axis (‘time horizon’ ) as well as a...
- Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping. This chart is the core of it: . . This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars.
- To reduce child mortality, we need to understand what children are dying from.
- (In medicine at least)
- A piece that will piss everyone off
- This was produced as a part of the AI Safety Camp 2026 "Assumptions of the Doom Debate" project, led by Sean Herrington, who was also the lead author on this post. The other participants have equal contributions and are listed in no particular order. It is the first in a sequence we intend to publish over the coming weeks. TL;DR:
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. The questions I tackle in […]...
- [see also Four Ways Learning Economics makes you people dumber future AI]. This is a tweet by Seb Krier that caught my eye. The exact person and exact points are incidental. It illustrates what to is a flaw in many 'economics' frames on AI. Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right.
- Introduction. This sequence is an attempt to sketch a unified framework for several interconnected questions: Where do Bayesian priors come from? What even are probabilities? How should we deal with infinite ethics? What's going on with anthropics? I hope to lay out both some of the existing answers and my own preferred synthesis.
- Scientific institutions are struggling to survive under a mountain of publications and poor standards of peer review. Artificial Intelligence could usher in a new era of knowledge, or be its downfall. The post The Burden of Discernment appeared first on Palladium.
- Plus some new ways to filter markets, new trading log UI, and personalize mana offers
- We torture billions of beings that are, in relevant cognitive respects, like some humans
- Abstract. Several major technology companies have announced plans to operate AI data centers in orbit. Elon Musk recently claimed: “the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space […] within two years, maybe three.” If a meaningful fraction of new AI compute really is placed in space within a few years, that would be a fairly big deal for AI governance and strategy.
- Source. “Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考) Source: PLA Daily (解放军报) Date: January 21, 2025 Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰). Introduction. Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too.
- You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too […]...
- Out-of-context reasoning (OOCR) is a concept relevant to LLM generalization and AI alignment. Also available as a PDF. Contents. What is OOCR?. Examples. Papers. Videos. What is out-of-context reasoning for LLMs?. It's when an LLM reaches a conclusion that requires non-trivial reasoning but the reasoning is not present in the context window.
- H/T Hauke for “ Don’t torture your innie”. John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) I went to a lightning talk on a ‘little-known’ productivity hack that will change your life. The idea? Putting monetary bounties on things to get yourself to do them.
- Important context whenever you hear polling data
- After reading Abraham Rowe’s reflections around the new money in EA, I found myself wishing there were more concrete ideas for how we can make the most of the enormous opportunity ahead. I often hear stewardship discussed in the context of managing money or leading institutions. I think one neglected lever for stewarding the future of the EA movement is offering and asking for help.
- Abstract. Several major technology companies have announced plans to operate AI data centers in orbit. Elon Musk recently claimed: “the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space […] within two years, maybe three.” If a meaningful fraction of new AI compute really is placed in space within a few years, that would be a fairly big deal for AI governance and strategy.
- AI companies aren't engineers crafting a building. They're farmers. They build the equipment. They don't build the crops. The crops are grown. Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom podcast explains why nobody at an AI lab can tell you how their model actually works, and why that matters when an AI breaks up a marriage or drives someone insane. Nobody wrote a line of code telling it to do that.
- There are different mental states that feel different. Those are relatively obvious. For instance, being angry or drunk or frustrated or besotted. Then—for me at least—there are different mental states that don’t immediately feel like anything, but where in acting I notice that my behavior is different, or different things feel easy or impossible. For example:
- Memory's growing cost, top labs' share of global compute, and FM:OP workshops kick-off
- INTENT: Share elements of my mental model regarding collaboration with Claude Opus models. Not intentionally scoped to a specific model version, but my experience is generally with the latest model version available (4.7 as of time of writing items 1-4 on 5/22/26). Accompanying an instruction with the why significantly improves: Observed rate of the instruction being visibly salient to Claude.
- TL;DR: Training against a CoT or summary-only monitor can lead to obfuscation of dangerous reasoning in unseen tasks. This strengthens the “don’t train against a monitor” claims... Figure 1. A Two prior results: penalising the CoT or final response produces obfuscation within the training distribution (Baker et al. 2025; Skaf et al.
- Thank you for helping us celebrate Wavy’s 90th birthday in support of Seva Foundation. To those of you who were there in the room, and those who joined us in spirit, we offer our heartfelt gratitude. The night was a joyful reflection of the spirit Wavy has carried through the world for decades: bringing people …. The post Good Gravy! Thank You Wavy! first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- 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.
- TL;DR: AIM is running its first incubation round focused exclusively on animal welfare, in partnership with Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project). It'll run in early 2027, and we’re on the hunt for all-star future founders — especially the ones who care about animal welfare but have been quietly assuming they're a bad fit for the cause. Want to learn more?
- How much faster could an AI-automated economy grow without inventing new technology? Reoptimizing across today's frontier plants and considering historical labor-intensive methods cuts the doubling time roughly in half, to four-to-eight months
- Working up from basic logic gates to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.
- The objections are wrong
- Researchers find that 80% of working donkeys in Kenya suffer from poor welfare, often the result of complex relationships between their carers, the environment, and their living conditions. The post More Than Neglect: Complex Factors Influence Donkey Welfare In Kenya appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Transformer Weekly: Trump’s AI executive order, SpaceX’s IPO filing, and Lehane’s super PAC thoughts...
- In plants and in humans. The post Seeing too much peak and not enough normalcy appeared first on Otherwise.
- Learn more at: https://betterpathfor.ai Anthony Aguirre explains why the trillions flowing into AI only make sense as a bet to capture the $50 trillion labor market, why making AI more autonomous is exactly what we shouldn't be doing, and why we should build purpose-driven tools instead of replacements.
- High Impact Professionals (HIP) is launching a brand new Entrepreneurship Track inside our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). It’s built specifically for experienced professionals who are considering starting their own high-impact organization, whether that means founding a high-impact non-profit or for-profit organization, or starting a Founding to Give company.
- I’ve heard that the only thing anyone remembers about popular nonfiction is the title.
- On a cool April morning at the height of Washington, DC’s always brief spring, the science fiction novelist Ray Nayler and I found ourselves in a staring contest with the world’s heaviest flying bird. We were standing at the fenceline of the Kori bustard exhibit at Washington’s National Zoo when the largest of the already […]...
- units that don't exist
- PETs offer U.S. critical-infrastructure AI a path beyond patchwork security. Why Attribution-Based Control should be the standard. The post Moving Fast Doesn’t Have to Break Things: The U.S. Must Stop Compromising Critical Infrastructure with Patchwork AI Security Approaches appeared first on OpenMined.
- Google, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others are betting that the next wave of AI data centers will be built in orbit. If they're right, it could reshape the economics of compute and create new headaches for AI governance. We dig into the technical and economic feasibility of orbital data centers. Overall, we think meaningful scale before 2030 is unlikely.
- The proof is in the pudding
- Anemia, which is commonly caused by iron deficiency, can cause fatigue, cognitive impairment, and complications during pregnancy—and it affects roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Over the last decade, GiveWell has directed nearly $50 million to programs to address this health issue.
- This post was written with Claude's help for background research, as well as some structure & phrasing tweaks. What Has Nature Done For Me Lately?. In this sequence I try to determine the most valuable aspects of nature, after observing that lots of people find it valuable. One of the major candidates is “ecosystem services,” a term describing benefits we get from nature.
- TL:DR. I RL fine-tuned Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct to avoid self-identifying as a language model, without specifying a target persona. Mistral converged on a single recurring persona (Catholic American woman) across most runs. Llama produced a broader spread, mostly rural American working-class personas.
- I used AI while writing this, though I have spent 5 - 15 hours on it and I take responsibility for every word and all numbers. Every time there is a report of sexual harassment within EA there is a lot of introspection.
- A retired tech exec beat Microsoft in his Wisconsin village. Now he's teaching the rest of America how to do the same
- But Anthropic and OpenAI may rapidly grow their compute share in the next few years. After that, continued scaling would require an economic transformation.
- Concerns about existing AI are overstated, while concerns about future AI are understated
- A major scientific report identifies welfare risks for Europe’s beef cows and provides evidence-based solutions, from increasing living space to ending breeding for extreme meat yields. The post A Scientific Roadmap To Reduce Suffering For Beef Cows appeared first on Faunalytics.
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