EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

5:02

“How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried. Here's what we've heard so far: Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st. The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died. The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary. Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major

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15:13

“We judge activism by the wrong measures: four ways...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Epistemic status: I've been an academic, climate activist and research lead in Extinction Rebellion UK's Data Analysis and Insights Circle. I co-authored most of the studies below. I am writing in a personal capacity, drawing on extensive research into climate activism. Summary People often decide whether a protest worked from a next-day poll or a hostile headline. I believe this is the wrong evidence. I see four common mistakes: polling the public when the targets are elites, measuring too soon,

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8:25

“Wildlife Technology Fund @ Renaissance Philanthropy”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Cross-posted from my substack. Today, I’m launching the Wildlife Technology Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy. The purpose of the fund is to scope, design, and manage coordinated research programs (CRPs), focused on making wild animal welfare interventions a reality. To do this, we’re prioritizing work that benefits both people and animals, often by working to solve some kind of wildlife conflict. While I believe we should work to solve all kinds of wild animal welfare issues, things that

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14:20

“40 hot takes” by LewisBollard

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes. On factory farming 1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last long. This low salience is self-reinforcing: even people who care deeply about

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13:59

“What I learned from going on 230 dates with EAs” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/05

A conflict of interest to flag: I'm the founder of Settled, a relationship and matchmaking company with free and paid tiers. That may create bias in what I notice and what I recommend, so weigh these recommendations accordingly. I’d love for some of you to sign up to Settled, but my aim here is to share something useful whether or not you ever do. What this post is and isn’t We’re writing this because we hope it provide helpful insights - people have also asked, so here it is! This post is based

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12:26

“Reasons why far-future civilizations may still...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/04

Many people here have dismissed the value of biodiversity because it's not an x-risk an "ecosystem" does not experience qualia preserving large natural areas often conflicts with both economic growth and with boosting wild animals' welfare However, if humanity survives to build a flourishing future, it's reasonable to think that the inhabitants of this far-future civilization will greatly value Earth's heritage of biodiversity, similar to how they will likely appreciate cultural & historical

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12:32

“GiveWell fundraising up 49% in 2025, driven...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/03

Previously: GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023 · GiveWell fundraising up 17% in 2024 GiveWell has published its 2025 metrics, together with a metrics report and a public spreadsheet. As in previous years, I focus on how much was raised and who gave it. This year I also look at how concentrated GiveWell's donor base is. Truth be told I kinda phoned it in on this one, the full Claude version with better charts is here Summary Returning donors gave 443.6 million dollars

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22:05

“A reply to Austin Chen on his “keen debt” to FTX...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/03

New account here, created by an irate outsider to EA. I started typing this as a response to a comment by Austin, in the discussion of his recent shocking announcement that his organization Manifund has hired Caroline Ellison. My reply to him ballooned to a size that merits its own post. Please bear with me as I attempt to somewhat match this forum's style. I will be consolidating some of the points that I and others have made less charitably on X and other sites. -- General context: Caroline

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21:52

“Will AI Agents Pay to Avoid Killing Animals?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/02

This article was written by Jonah Woodward, and is a summary of an original study by Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML): Brazilek, J., Tidmarsh, M., Endres, M., Singh, A., & Miller, J. (2026). HarvestBench: Measuring whether LLM agents will pay to avoid killing animals. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04444 You can view the up-to-date results for HarvestBench on the leaderboard at https://compassionbench.com/harvestbench TL;DR HarvestBench evaluates AI agents' behaviour in a

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10:30

“Elevate Philanthropy: The Fieldshaper Program” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/02

Summary Over the course of a year, the Fieldshaper program develops you into a field-leading grantmaker. You’ll steward $1,000,000 in grant capital, receive a $125,000 annual stipend, and deploy that capital within a sub-field of one of three key areas (farmed animals, global health, or philanthropic infrastructure); building the track record to become a grantmaker who can shape a field. Role Details Title: Grantmaker-In-Residence (Leader of the X fund or Grantmaker in Y area also possible

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15:37

“What will it take to deliver billions a year to the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/01

by Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO The New York Times reports that “between 37 billion dollars and 100 billion dollars could become available to charities annually” from a wave of wealth generated by rapidly growing AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. We’ve been speaking to a number of existing GiveDirectly donors in the AI space about what they expect will happen. While we’re skeptical that giving will be that high, it is likely very large sums of philanthropic money will move from AI and

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2:23

“Thank you to the AI safety people” by Julia_Wise🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/30

I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past. The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood

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11:43

“What I have learnt from community building in...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/30

Summary I am drawing from my experience my 3+ years actively contributing to Effective Altruism Nigeria community building, I think that community building requires adapting to local context, measuring success by whether people become more agentic and take concrete actions rather than by attendance numbers, and investing in long-term capacity toward a community that can eventually sustain and lead itself. The biggest challenges I've observed are measuring outcomes since impact often surfaces much

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9:28

“Our Community Often Underestimates the Weaknesses of...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/29

The EA forum measures the level of AI usage in forum posts using the product Pangram. But how much does Pangram's "AI-Generated" label really indicate the degree to which an author has outsourced their thinking? When they tested their 4.0 product, Pangram found that, by their definition, the proportion of AI-Assisted documents it classified as AI-Generated was 0.01%, 4%, or 7%, depending on the experiment. Then they omitted the experiments that found 4% and 7% false positive rates (FPRs) on their

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3:34

“Meat Matters: Why I’m optimistic about cultivated...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/28

In my first “Meat Matters” substack, I wrote that despite some recent popular press obituaries, I remain optimistic about the scientific viability of cultivated meat, and I spelled out why. Here's the executive summary: In less than a decade, costs have fallen by orders of magnitude, government funding and scientific progress have surged, and multiple companies report that they are within striking distance of price parity. In short: The science and engineering challenges will not require

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47:30

“The cooperative silence hypothesis” by Magnus Vinding

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/28

It is often assumed that space expansion by intelligent actors would be clearly visible on a cosmic scale. I have previously outlined some reasons to doubt this assumption and to treat quiet cosmic expansion as a plausible explanation for the observed cosmic silence (see also Freitas, 1983; Fogg, 1987; Kent, 2011). My aim in this essay is to present some additional considerations in favor of quiet cosmic expansion based on prudent cooperation and risks of ruin. Although these considerations are

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17:31

“More founders should move to their country of...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/27

TLDR I moved from London to Accra a year ago to set up AWASH, a charity working on farmed fish welfare. I think more founders should move to their country of operations, particularly in LMICs. My hypothesis is that most people overestimate the cost of moving, relative to the benefits. The financial case is the clearest. The difference between what my Accra salary is and what my London salary would likely have been would fund roughly one year of AWASH's operations. Being in-country has made

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14:20

“CCF: Billions are coming. Still no plan to give...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/26

TLDR: Everyone's talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes. This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team at Rethink Priorities. Amid all the discussion of the coming wave of AI-driven

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3:52

“Middle Powers and Transformative AI: A request for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/25

Today, we are launching a request for proposals on AI policy in middle powers, with 10 million dollars (and potentially more) of funding available. Apply at middlepowers.ai by October 23. I think that most countries are on track to become increasingly irrelevant to the future of technology, the economy, and geopolitics. The US and China, along with perhaps a few countries with key roles in the chip supply chain and data center buildout, will hold all the cards. The rest of the world will be

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16:46

“The vegan trap: are we making animal advocacy harder...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/25

note: crosspost from my substack As a vegan for almost thirty years, I’ve long had second thoughts about how effective veganism is for helping animals. I am not alone in this. Recently others have expressed doubts about veganism (see for instance here, here, here, here, or here) To be sure, veganism has its uses. In essence, veganism is about boycotting animal products - which are almost invariably the products of suffering and exploitation. The hope is that with enough people participating in

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