Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- A disease that was once a death sentence is increasingly treatable
- Local shoppers pressure one of the nation’s largest grocers after failing to fulfill their 2025 commitment LOS ANGELES — Kroger promised customers it would go 100% cage-free. Instead, the nation’s number one supermarket chain failed to deliver, leaving millions of hens confined in cages across its supply chain, raising serious concerns about corporate accountability and […].
- For the past decade, the fight to make it legal and feasible to build housing at scale in California felt Sisyphean. California YIMBY and our allies pushed against exclusionary land use policies, and a political class content to blame the…. The post On the Race for California Governor: An Abundance of <span class="dewidow">Pro-Housing Candidates</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- The Availability Problem: Imagine you have cancer, or chronic pain, or a progressive degenerative disease of some sort. You have exhausted the traditional treatment options available to you, and none of them have worked. However, there are treatments that are still undergoing clinical trials which might help you.
- New York lawmakers are advancing legislation that could make the state the first on the East Coast to preemptively ban octopus factory farming, a practice scientists and advocates warn would pose significant animal welfare and environmental concerns. This week, a key Assembly bill advanced out of committee with a favorable vote, marking a major step […].
- GiveWell is launching a new request for information (RFI) to expand and strengthen our malaria grantmaking in Africa and help our donors make a greater impact. Expressions of interest can be submitted through one of two tracks, the first for malaria chemoprevention and vector control pilot programs and the second for research and evaluation.
- This post was drafted by Buck, and substantially edited by Anders. "I" refers to Buck. Thanks to Alex Mallen for comments. People who work inside AI companies get access to information that I only get later or never. Quantitatively, how big a deal is this access?. Here’s an operationalization of this. Consider the following two ways my knowledge could be augmented:
- 1.1 Tl;dr. Alignment is often conceptualized as AIs helping humans achieve their goals: AIs that increase people’s agency and empowerment; AIs that are helpful, corrigible, and/or obedient; AIs that avoid manipulating people. But that last one—manipulation—points to a challenge for all these desiderata: a human’s goals are themselves under-determined and manipulable, and it’s awfully hard to...
- 1.1 Tl;dr. Alignment is often conceptualized as AIs helping humans achieve their goals: AIs that increase people’s agency and empowerment; AIs that are helpful, corrigible, and/or obedient; AIs that avoid manipulating people. But that last one—manipulation—points to a challenge for all these desiderata: a human’s goals are themselves under-determined and manipulable, and it’s awfully hard to...
- This is a crosspost of the full text of Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here. June Jambiha was a quintessential hustler.
- It really is Sydney Sweeney’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Human female breasts are an evolutionary mystery along several dimensions. First, breast permanence is unique to humans. All other mammals develop breast prominence during pregnancy or nursing, and the mammary tissue recedes after weaning. This process is called “involution”.
- Anthony Aguirre is the CEO of the Future of Life Institute. He joins the podcast to discuss A Better Path for AI, his essay series on steering AI away from races to replace people. The conversation covers races for attention, attachment, automation, and superintelligence, and how these can concentrate power and undermine human agency.
- Executive summary
- More Than Good is a new podcast from Effective Altruism Australia, aimed at introducing the ideas and principles of effective altruism to a broader audience. The episodes are framed around moral questions and how people think about doing good, covering topics like global inequality, animal welfare, ethics, philosophy and more. For a global movement, there is relatively little content that is...
- In a recent tweet, Anthropic seems to have asserted that hyperstition is responsible for observed misalignment in their AIs. Strangely, the research they use as evidence actually doesn’t seem to be related to hyperstition at all?
- On inflating your case
- My median guess: it's as good as a crystal ball that sees 2.5 months into the future.
- A survey of Muslim consumers in Türkiye revealed significant gaps in public awareness around animal welfare in halal practices. However, many demonstrated a willingness to change their behavior when given accurate information. The post Halal’s Animal Welfare Gap: What Muslim Consumers Believe And Know appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The Center for Open Science (COS) is introducing the Open Scholarship Training for Researchers Series, a collection of seven self-paced online courses developed by COS in response to what researchers have told us they actually need. Enrollment is now open for the first two courses, with additional courses launching through Winter 2026.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Haleh Fotowat | Harnessing Biological Intelligence for Building Living Machines with Nervous SystemsThis talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computerWhat laws does superintelligence demand?
- Greetings from a world where…...
- an oddly specific but brief gripe-post
- A forecaster's breakdown of the Hondius cruise ship outbreak
- I wrote this essay as a submission to Dwarkesh Patel’s blog prize, though I have been meaning to write this up for a while. Usually, for a company to become profitable, they need to increase revenue, decrease costs, or some mixture of the two.
- The biggest hook they had in me was this fear that I’m dangerously inadequate and *they* somehow held the keys to mitigating that.
- What I'm reading, May '26, pt.1
- I used an LLM to help draft this post, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. AI in Context is a channel about transformative AI and its risks, published by 80,000 Hours. Writing up our current approach to thumbnails, which is nowhere near perfect, for easy shareability and cross-pollination of lessons. Would love to hear what other people are trying!. Making thumbnails.
- A few years back, I got a big pile of money from working at a tech startup. I put a lot of that money into a donor-advised fund. Since now I make hardly any money, that DAF might represent the majority of my lifetime donations. How much of my DAF should I donate per year?. In particular, how much should I donate in light of short AI timelines?. I created a simple model to answer this question.
- Most people have an above average number of legs, and what that means for our political imagination
- And a review of girl scouting in general. The post Book review: Girl Scout Handbook 1956 appeared first on Otherwise.
- Engineered pathogens pose a grave threat to society, plausibly constituting an existential risk (‘x-risk’) to humanity. Yet remarkably few people are working full-time on this problem. By my count, there are ~160 people on the planet whose full-time job is reducing bio x-risk. This entire group could fit on a single short-haul flight.
- What can countries with high stunting rates today learn from Japan’s experience of going from 70% to 5%?
- WHOA … I’ve won the inaugural Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science! This has a particular meaning for me as someone who knew Luca Trevisan as well as I did for 25 years — who had him as a professor and thesis committee member, whose blog bounced off his blog, who […]...
- This is a brief elaboration on The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivations, based on some feedback and thoughts I’ve had since publishing. Written quickly in a personal capacity. The main focus of this post is clarifying the basic machinery of the behavioral selection model, and conveying why it matters to disambiguate between different “motivations” for AI behavior.
- LLM disclosure: I wrote this post myself, then asked an LLM to copy-edit it before posting. I manually made any edits I liked and copy-pasted no text from the LLM (my current practice for using LLMs in writing that I care about). This is crossposted from my blog. These are personal reflections on feelings that I’ve been sitting with recently.
- Crossposted from Substack and the EA Forum. . A common argument for optimism about the future is that living conditions have improved a lot in the past few hundred years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and so on. It’s a very strong, grounding piece of evidence - probably the best we have in figuring out what our foundational beliefs about the world should be.
- Notes from 29 interviews with researchers, philosophers, lawyers, and policy experts on what the new field should do.
- Personal reflections I've been sitting on lately.
- Why every sentient being matters
- 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. Here’s this week’s question from […]...
- The context for this post is primarily Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, but after first drafting a half-assed comment, I decided to get off my ass and write a whole-assed post. I agree with Eliezer's main thesis that individual violence against AI researchers is both morally wrong and strategically stupid. Where I disagree is with the claim that international law can prevent extinction.
- Dans cet épisode du Podcast La Prospective, Gaëtan Selle de The Flares répond aux questions posées par les abonnés à l’occasion du passage des 80 000 abonnés sur YouTube. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Dans cet épisode du Podcast La Prospective, Gaëtan Selle de The Flares répond aux questions posées par les abonnés à l’occasion du passage des 80 000...
- Overview: We train a tiny ReLU network to output sparse top- distributions over a vocabulary much larger than its residual dimension. The trained network seems to converge to a mechanism closely resembling a Bloom filter: tokens are assigned sparse binary hashes, the hidden layer computes an approximate union indicator, and the output logits are linearly read from this union.
- How fast could an AI-automated economy actually start growing? Today's economy doesn't produce enough of the stuff that makes stuff. Restructuring takes a few years — but then the second doubling comes in half the time, and the economy is many times its current size within a decade.
- Contemporary debate over the moral patienthood of digital minds misses the forest for the trees. Mainstream opinion is divided into physicalist and computationalist camps, who believe that consciousness is substrate dependent and substrate independent, respectively. For this reason, those on the physicalist side frequently make the claim that digital computers will never be conscious.
- The field of people working on reducing bio x-risk is distressingly small. I sketch out 10 big, urgent projects I'd be excited for new people to come work on and own.
- The common assumption that they should is completely wrong
- The simple mental picture. A simple mental picture we have for an AI capability benchmark is to think of it as a sensor with a certain sensitivity within a certain range of capabilities. The sensitivity of a benchmark, i.e. it's ability to distinguish the capability of different models, is given by a curve like this:
- There are few news subjects more reliably depressing than nutritional science. A glance at the headlines will tell you that sugar is bad for you, red meat is bad for you, and alcohol is really, really bad for you. The message seems to be that if a food or drink gives you even an iota […]...
- Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times: Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline. Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don't write their own headlines?. …. But what I care about is the misleading headline, not your org chart. Another example I’ve encountered recently is (anonymizing) when a friend complained about a prosaic safety...
- AI chip supply chain bottlenecks, smuggling to China, benchmark saturation, revenue efficiency at AI companies, and more
- Drop 10,000 humans naked in the savannah and we'll bootstrap our way to nuclear weapons. That's the capability AI labs are racing to automate, with no idea what they're building. MIRI President Nate Soares at Harvard on why we only get one shot at this. Comment "danger" to get access to the full video.
- By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript. Episode summary. I want my children to live in a world where they will have a future and there will be a democracy for them to live in. Even a 1% chance of something going really, really bad is not acceptable to me.
- The ones who are most successful at writeathons (Inkhaven, NaNoWriMo) are those with an overhang of things to say, usually in the form of: draft posts. daydreams. When Scott Alexander said: Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it's very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don't get good.
- A week ago the Copy Fail vulnerability came out, and Hyunwoo Kim immediately realized that the fixes were insufficient, sharing a patch the same day. In doing this he followed standard procedure for Linux, especially within networking: share the security impact with a closed list of Linux security engineers, while fixing the bug quietly and efficiently in the open.
- TL;DR: Coefficient Giving is running a major hiring round for 10+ grantmakers and senior generalists across five Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) teams. We're allocating around $1 billion in 2026 across AI safety and catastrophic biorisk, and we’re acutely capacity-constrained. Apply here by May 17. Why we’re hiring.
- Check out our recent site updates!
- When suburbs block apartments, rents in nearby poor neighborhoods may rise by about $27 a month, according to a new national study. Most research on exclusionary zoning has focused on costs within the communities that adopt it; this study finds…. The post Suburban Apartment Bans May Be Making Poorer Neighborhoods’ <span class="dewidow">Rents Increase</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- Wildfire hazard zones across the Pacific Northwest are expanding — and according to Sightline Institute, so is the public cost. Nearly 1.6 million residents lived in high-risk areas in 2023, up 8 percent since 2018, with population growing fastest in…. The post How the Northwest’s Wildfire Crisis is a <span class="dewidow">Sprawl Crisis</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- A discussion with Bentham's Bulldog
- ProgramBench is a new coding benchmark that all frontier models spectacularly fail. We’ve been on a quest for “hard benchmarks” for a while so it’s refreshing to see a benchmark where top models do badly. Unfortunately, ProgramBench has one big problem: it’s impossible!. What is ProgramBench?. ProgramBench tests if a model can recreate a program from a “clean room” environment.
- This forum post was first drafted using an LLM to summarise information from human-written job postings and was then edited/adjusted by hiring managers. The primary author/coordinator is Arden Koehler. Overview. 80,000 Hours has eight open positions across our advising, operations, video, and web teams, plus three expressions of interest open for video and operations roles. We're trying to...
- And explain why the main objections don't work
- "Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."
- Does the supreme principle of morality say that you matter 360 billion times more than foreign strangers?
- “Who and what agendas does rivalry serve?”...
- Global hotel chains are falling short on cage-free egg sourcing, suggesting that regulation, not corporate promises, may be the real driver of progress for hens. The post Cage-Free Hotel Pledges Mean Little Without Strong Regulation appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Preamble. The preamble is less useful for the typical AlignmentForum/LessWrong reader, who may want to skip to Adversaria vs Basinland section. On 28th of October 2025, Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist of the UK AI Security Institute, gave a keynote talk (slides) at the Alignment Conference.
- Episode 16 is about building data centers, school districts and redistribution
- Lifecycle Open Science (LOS) is an approach to research that promotes transparency, openness, and accessibility across the entire research lifecycle—from planning and data collection through analysis, publication, and reuse—by making research outputs and processes more interoperable, machine-readable, and actionable across systems.
- Write for Works in Progress.
- Google DeepMind UK employees voted to unionize, but not for higher pay.
- This talk was recorded live at Vision Weekend USA, held December 5–7, 2025 in the Bay Area. Vision Weekends are our flagship conference series, bringing together leading scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and policymakers to explore frontier science and technology and to imagine paths toward flourishing futures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- It’s hard to imagine modern life without glycols. They are used in cosmetics, fog machines, and food. As you read this, you’re almost certainly wearing or drinking from something they were used to produce — polyester fabric or plastic bottles, for example. If you brush your teeth with toothpaste or top your salad with bottled […]...
- So, what’s a guy got to do to become a billionaire around here? Greg Brockman scribbled the question in his diary, recently unsealed as trial evidence, just two years after co-founding OpenAI as a charity in 2015: “Financially, what will take me to $1B?” For Brockman, now OpenAI’s president, the answer was a yearslong restructuring […]...
- The post Strengthening County Financing for Sustainable Community Health Systems in Kenya appeared first on Living Goods.
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