EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

17:56

“Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/07

I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you're doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.I think so because (1) the writing

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5:04

“The Schmotte-and-Bailey Fallacy” by Richard Y Chappell🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/07

Subtitle: Sometimes the easily defended view is the one you really want The most striking thing about effective altruism, dialectically, is that it's a neglected truism: Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it's worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good as one among one's many life projects. Most people do not, in fact, adopt the efficient promotion of the impartial good as

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2:17

“About The Altruists: the Netflix series on FTX” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/06

Hi everyone. I lead marketing and communications at CEA. Given the amount of attention we expect The Altruists series to generate, I'm posting a high-level update and introducing myself as a point of contact for questions or coordination. Later this year, Netflix is expected to release The Altruists, an eight-episode crime drama series telling the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the collapse of FTX. It's produced by Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas' production company) and

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17:55

“You can now afford to work at AIM: our new salary...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/06

Public service announcement Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what's different this round hereand apply here. AIM itself is hungry for talent (nom nom!). We’re seeking applications from ambitious people for a wide range of roles to scale our impact. Are you generally talented? Express your interest here. Are you specifically talented? Express your interest here.TL;DR AIM has

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11:09

“The AI Windfall” by LewisBollard

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/05

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. The third wave of American philanthropy is finally coming. It could usher in a Golden Age of Animal Welfare. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend reading the linked pieces by Nan Ransohoff and Itsi Weinstock. If you do, read on. Newly-minted AI millionaires have already

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2:25

“Reaching Out to Formerly Engaged EAs” by Sam Anschell

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/05

As a community builder, it doesn’t get much better than receiving a message like this: Others who work on movement growth have reported similar success stories: someone learns about EA, doesn’t immediately work in an EA-shaped role, but then transitions to impactful work years later. I can’t help but wonder: might there be people who lost touch with EA, but would be excited to put themselves back out there if nudged? When I learned about EA as a college student in 2017, there were relatively few

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1:36

“AMA with GiveWell’s Chief Operations Officer” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/05

GiveWell's Operations department is growing! We have roles open across multiple Ops functions: Grants Administration, People Operations, Talent Acquisition, Technology, and the offices of the CEO and COO. We hope to make multiple hires for many of these roles. We’re hosting an Ask Me Anything session with our COO, Sai Jahann, to answer questions from the Forum community about what it's like to work at GiveWell, our Operations functions, this hiring round, and impactful Operations careers at

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9:02

“The animal welfare movement could scale fast. Have...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/05

Summary The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more. The EA Animal Welfare Fund is encouraging those working in animal advocacy to actively set aside time and resources now to concretely plan for scaling sustainably, and we’ll support you in doing that. We’re requesting advocates set concrete ambitious goals and submit plans to be able to achieve them. This is a call for more ambitious concrete plans, not for lowering the bar for

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8:57

“The animal welfare movement could scale fast. Have...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/05

Summary The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more. The EA Animal Welfare Fund is encouraging you to actively set aside time and resources now to concretely plan for scaling sustainably, and we’ll support you in doing that. We’re requesting you set concrete ambitious goals and submit your plans to be able to achieve them. This is a call for more ambitious concrete plans, not for lowering the bar for the sake of spending more

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67:38

“General capability - and capabilities generally -...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/04

BLUF: To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’. Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our measures are of something related-to but

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5:23

“EAs Should Use Less Bayesian Reasoning” by James Brobin

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/04

This is a crosspost from my blog post. Many EAs use extensive “bayesian reasoning.” The basic idea behind it is that you should do the following: Be willing to assign probabilities to the likelihood of anything occurring or being true. Update these probabilities when you learn new information. Act on these probabilities if they suggest that certain actions are higher in value than all other actions. Bayesian reasoning is helpful for a lot of everyday decision-making. If you’re trying to figure out

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6:40

“Community Polls on Alignment Controversies II” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/03

Please spend <5 minutes filling in the below polls on AI alignment! Thank you to everyone who filled out last month's polls. It was great to see 60+ comments engaging with these issues. This month's survey has already been taken by a panel of 15 alignment researchers, including Scott Alexander (ACX), David Manheim (ALTER), Jeff Sebo (NYU), and Tobias Baumann (CRS). We'll compare panel and community responses in an upcoming report, which we'll publish here and on LessWrong. To get notified when

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22:56

“Urban Animals Deserve a Global Nonprofit” by Ronen Bar

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/03

TLDR Most urban animals, especially those other than cats and dogs, are highly neglected, even though probably tens of billions of them live in urban environments, and suffer from preventable harms. This post argues for a global nonprofit that would research the problem, test interventions and support local groups under the idea that cities are multispecies societies. Despite major uncertainty about scale and expected value, this could directly help many urban animals and potentially have strong

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5:21

“When you donate can matter more than where” by Carol...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/03

And why our 2023 regrant to Timaeus was goated We think the for-profit funding ecosystem has some cool properties. Different funders naturally come in at different stages, from angel investors who are good at spotting early opportunities to large funds who might invest in late-stage startups to public market traders. Funders race to back promising projects. And the more they get right, the more they’re rewarded with more money to invest in the future. It would be great if more of those properties

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13:21

“AIM’s first ever dedicated animal welfare incubation...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/03

TL;DR: Applications are open for AIM's first ever animal-only incubation round. The program runs February 2027, and it is different from any round we've run before: we’ve rebuilt the research process with animal welfare in mind, recommending frontier problems rather than fully-scoped solutions, there is a new funded three-month exploration phase after the core program, and two weeks in San Francisco alongside the movement's biggest funders and thinkers. Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare

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4:36

“Blog Revival Project” by Austin, Carol N

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/03

Blogs have shaped our philosophical worldviews, found us careers and friends, and changed our lives. There's a good chance that a great blog of yore is the reason you’re reading this right now. But many great bloggers have stopped blogging. The pile-on dynamics of the internet discourage unfiltered thoughts, and algorithmic feeds amplify ragebait and slop. Fear of scrutiny leads people to confine things to private Google docs and group chats. And good blogs are often victims of their own success —

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10:41

“Money, taste, dealflow, hustle, trust” by Austin

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/02

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of grant programs, from small microgrants to regranting to ambitious new platforms to galaxy-brained schemes for impact markets. Here are five components that I think any grant program needs to be good: 1. Money This one is obvious: a grant program needs money to give out. Historically in EA and AI safety, this started as individual small donations from earning-to-give, to Dustin Moskovitz's money via Good Ventures, to an ill-fated boom around the

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34:31

“I Spent 167 Hours Mapping the AIxAnimals Ecosystem...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/07/31

It's my belief that the intersection of AI x Animals represents one of the most pressing current opportunities for the prevention of suffering. It's also a very new area, with information spread across lots of locations, making it hard to get your bearings and know where to consider taking action. To help with that this post includes: Aliterature review table summarising 96 papers, youtube videos, articles and other sources. The table includes links to the papers, brief summaries of each, and

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9:09

“What if the third wave is a puddle?” by Morgan Fairless

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/07/30

The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of the effective giving community as reported by Giving What We Can, make it difficult for even hardcore sceptics (and I probably count myself among this curmudgeonly crowd) to stick to the view that we are in business as usual. There are many reasons to believe that this expected growth will happen, and

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22:17

“Introducing First Embrace: an Ambitious Impact...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/07/29

Executive Summary Newborns born too small or too soon (vulnerable) account for 70% of the world's 2 million newborn deaths every year, despite representing just 15% of births. Kangaroo Care, a practice of skin to skin care and exclusive breastfeeding, is proven to reduce mortality among vulnerable newborns by a third compared to conventional care. Despite WHO recommendation, only 5% of eligible newborns receive it. First Embrace was incubated in the Ambitious Impact program in late 2025 to minimise

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