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PODCAST

EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30 karma, and other great writing. If you"d like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

17:57

“ACTRA: First-Year Learnings” by Henning Peters,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/09

Summary ACTRA's first year was deliberately ambitious: we partnered with government actors from month two, built a curriculum in record time and ran an in-house Randomized-Controlled Trial (RCT) before our organization was six months old. This gave us unusually fast and concrete learnings, but also created significant overhead and avoidable inefficiencies. Looking back, we would still choose to design for scale from day 1 — but we would sequence learning more deliberately, separate R&D from

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1:43

“EA Grants Database - a new website” by Brian Foerster

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/08

The EA Grants Database is a new site that neatly aggregates grant data from major EA funders who publish individual or total grant information. It is intended to be easy to maintain long term, entirely piggybacking off of existing data that is likely to be maintained. The website data is updated by a script that can be run in seconds, and I anticipate doing this for the foreseeable future. In creating the website, I tried to make things as clear and straightforward as possible. If your user

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14:14

[Linkpost] “Animal Welfare at the Start of the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/07

This is a link post. I am not a historian! Fact check me please, dear God! We are at the beginning of another industrial revolution. The first was the automation of muscle, the current one is the automation of mind. To get into the right frame of mind, I want to step back and imagine:We are living in the UK[1], the year is 1800, and we are trying to end animal suffering. We know nothing about how the tech is about to develop, nor how the economy or politics is about to be transformed, but there are

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1:34

“First Effective Altruism AI Uplift Meetup” by Joey...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/07

Running the first meetup for people hoping to accelerate Effective Altruism with AI tools. Why now? AI is accelerating productivity across industries. People who invest learning to use AI tools are able to work much faster and more productively. As a result, we can accelerate our favourite impactful organisations by helping them adopt these tools. What will we discuss? We will discuss visibility, e.g. building personal sites and blogs - useful for growing luck surface area, raising awareness

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36:39

[Linkpost] “The shrimp bet: When big numbers...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/07

This is a link post. [Subtitle.] Sentience and moral priority-setting This is a crosspost for The shrimp bet: When big numbers outsprint the evidence by Rob Velzeboer, which was originally published on 27 January 2026. TLDR: Shrimp welfare looks like the ultimate “scale + tractability” slam-dunk: massive numbers, cheap fixes, grim-sounding deaths. But the flagship farmed species—the penaeid shrimp L. vannamei—is an evidential outlier: beyond basic nociception, the sentience case is close to empty,

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2:37

[Linkpost] “Some tools for collective epistemics” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/07

This is a link post. We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for AI tools that help with collective epistemics. We think that these tools could be a pretty big deal: If it gets easier to track what's trustworthy and what isn’t, we might end up in an equilibrium which rewards honesty This could make the world saner in a bunch of ways, and in particular could give us a better shot at handling the transition to more advanced AI systems We’re excited for people to get started on building tech

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26:40

“Building sustainable momentum: progress report on...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/06

“I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism's CEO. Oscar is CEA's Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed to the development and implementation of our strategy. Mistakes are of course our own.Executive summary One year into our 2025-26 strategy, we have reversed our programs’ negative growth trajectory from 2023-24 and will sustain that momentum in 2026 while preparing to hit much more ambitious goals from 2027 onwards: CEA grew the

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13:45

“Agent Economics: a BOTEC on feasibility” by Margot...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/06

Summary: I built a simple back-of-the-envelope model of AI agent economics that combines Ord's half-life analysis of agent reliability with real inference costs. The core idea is that agent cost per successful outcome scales exponentially with task length, while human cost scales linearly. This creates a sharp viability boundary that cost reductions alone cannot meaningfully shift. The only parameter that matters much is the agent's half-life (reliability horizon), which is precisely the thing that

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14:50

“AI benchmarking has a Y-axis problem” by Lizka

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/06

TLDR: People plot benchmark scores over time and then do math on them, looking for speed-ups & inflection points, interpreting slopes, or extending apparent trends. But that math doesn’t actually tell you anything real unless the scores have natural units. Most don’t.Think of benchmark scores as funhouse-mirror projections of “true” capability-space, which stretch some regions and compress others by assigning warped scores for how much accomplishing that task counts in units of “AI progress”. A

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2:07

“U.S. Democracy Preservation & Politics - Fellowship...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/06

Considering how important politics are to most EA cause areas, I find it surprising how little attention political work gets among EAs. I get the feeling that because politics are blocked from the Forum homepage, and because EA fellowships fail to mention high-leverage political work, young EAs often assume that this is not a high impact space without looking into it themselves. Luckily, this is changing. There is a growing movement of EAs recognizing the huge importance of politics, and

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4:22

“The USDA is investing $100M in innovation for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/05

The USDA New World Screwworm Grand Challenge represents the largest single funding opportunity for screwworm research and control technologies in decades. Applications are due February 23, 2026. What's happening? The New World Screwworm (NWS) is a flesh-eating fly endemic to the Americas that lays eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals. The larvae burrow into living flesh, consuming the host from inside. Infected animals experience excruciating pain, stop eating, and die slowly over days to

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5:13

[Linkpost] “Thoughts on Toby Ords AI Scaling Series”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/05

This is a link post. I've been reading Toby Ord's recent sequence on AI scaling a bit. General notes come first, then my thoughts.Notes The Scaling Paradox basically argues that the scaling laws are actually pretty bad and mean progress will hit a wall fairly quickly unless the next gen or two of models somehow speed up AI research, we find a new scaling paradigm etc... Inference Scaling and the Log X Chart says that inference is also not a big deal because the scaling is again logarithmic. My

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4:47

“Review of MEAT by Bruce Friedrich” by Chris Bryant 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/05

Bruce Friedrich's new book, MEAT, is a deeply thoughtful, pragmatic, and hope-inspiring story about alternative proteins. In his role as the Founder and President of the Good Food Institute, Bruce is uniquely positioned to give an insider's account of how far plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cultivated meat have come, and where they are likely to go from here. The book's publication comes at what seems to be a critical junction for alternative proteins. Several years of exponential growth in

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6:26

“Request for proposals: Humane fish slaughter...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/05

Over 100 billion farmed fish are slaughtered each year. At Coefficient Giving, where I (Michelle Lavery) work as a Senior Program Associate, we estimate that only ~0.5% of them are reliably stunned before slaughter. For the more than a trillion wild-caught fish killed annually, conditions are even worse: most are left to suffocate slowly in air or in low-oxygen water, a process that can take minutes to hours. Though fish slaughter represents only a few hours in an animal's life, we believe the pain

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24:53

“Don’t overupdate on evolutionary cost-balancing...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/04

Evolutionary cost-balancing arguments in welfare biology (the study of animal well-being in the wild) assume that producing suffering and happiness has metabolic or neural costs, and that natural selection allocated these states efficiently. A specific version of this reasoning – which I'll call the "Evening Out Argument" – holds that if a type of suffering is highly likely and largely unavoidable for an animal, evolution would reduce its intensity. The logic is that, if suffering functions to

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3:22

[Linkpost] “Maybe develop your strengths” by MaxDalton

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/04

This is a link post. This is the latest from my blog about EA-org-style management, together with Brenton of 80k. You can subscribe on Substack if you like. Sometimes people review their strengths and weaknesses, and then automatically assume that they should try to improve their weaknesses. I think that you should at least consider focusing on strengths instead. Why focus on strengths? Increasing returns. You can often create a lot of value by becoming excellent at a few important things, and then

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11:57

“The Vegan Filter: Overcoming the Leading Barrier to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/03

Key takeaways 84% of people who try veganism quit, most citing inconvenience as a major reason. The Vegan Filter is a project concept designed to make veganism dramatically more convenient. It introduces a single Vegan filter button in online supermarkets that hides all non-vegan products, effectively turning the supermarket vegan. At very low cost, the Vegan Filter could substantially increase vegan retention, making it one of the most scalable and neglected opportunities to reduce animal

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7:25

“Preparing for a flush future: work, giving, and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/03

Note: opinions are all my own. Following Jeff Kaufman's Front-Load Giving Because of Anthropic Donors and Jenn's Funding Conversation We Left Unfinished, I think there is a real likelihood that impactful causes will receive significantly more funding in the near future. As background on where this new funding could come from: Coefficient Givingannounced: A recentNYT piece covered rumors of an Anthropic valuation at $350 billion. Many of Anthropic's cofounders and early employees have pledged to

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15:20

[Linkpost] “Dwarkesh Patel’s thoughts on AI progress...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/02

This is a link post. [Subtitle.] Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term This is a crosspost for Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) by Dwarkesh Patel, which was originally published on Dwarkesh Podcast on 2 December 2025. What are we scaling? I’m confused why some people have short timelines and at the same time are bullish on the current scale up of reinforcement learning atop LLMs. If we’re actually close to a human-like learner, this whole approach

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11:56

“More EAs should consider working for the EU” by EU...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/02/02

Context: The authors are a few EAs who currently work or have previously worked at the European Commission. In this post, we make the case that more people[1] aiming for a high impact career should consider working for the EU institutions[2] using the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework, and; briefly outline how one might get started on this, highlighting a currently open recruitment drive (deadline 10 March) that only comes along once every ~5 years.Why working at the EU can be

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2,109 results

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