EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

17:07

“Targeting High-Risk Pregnancies: A...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/24

A century-old pill, given to the right people, could cost-effectively save many lives. Summary Targeting low-cost prevention toward people at elevated risk may uncover highly cost-effective ways to addressnoncommunicable diseases. Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy could be a test case for this approach. Meta-analyses indicate that low-dose aspirin reduces perinatal death by ~20% when given to women at risk of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication involving high blood pressure. Aspirin likely

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17:47

“Why I’m scared of RL” by Owen Cotton-Barratt

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/23

Summary: First, I give several different angles on how I feel about reinforcement learning: Theoretical case: RL is a black-box source of agency — this should give us classic misalignment worries, especially compared to agency-via-scaffolding Recent incidents (huggingface etc) and more mundane forms of misaligned behaviour in personal use give me bad vibes about the direction-of-travel of recent AI progress I’m worried things might get worse: if RL environments start incorporating agents, they may

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3:21

“Community Health: A Call for Transparency” by LauraC

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/23

In early 2024, I brought an employment claim against a former employer concerning unpaid work. Following information provided by my former employer, Community Health became involved and supported decisions excluding me from EA Global and some local EA events. These decisions were made before I was asked for my account. I subsequently provided Community Health with my account, relevant context and supporting evidence, but was told that this did not change the decision. I was not given a clear

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13:05

“Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/22

Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched a sophisticated

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16:40

“Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/22

Audio note: this article contains 36 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a

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16:09

“Advice for prospective incubators” by Aidan...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/22

Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice. Typically their motivation is that they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building or because they think an ecosystem needs more new projects or more talent absorption generally to deploy more funding effectively. Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious, we recommend asking them of yourself. This is a

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14:32

“What even is an incubator?” by Aidan Alexander,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/21

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two (the six questions we ask people trying to incubate new organizations) is coming out on Monday.“Incubator” is a very vague term. It tells you very little about what the organization actually does. All it tells you is that they cause new projects to exist. But that's the outcome. The activities that get you there can vary enormously. This is a framework for people who want more good organisations to exist. When trying to get a particular type of

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4:24

“Pacing the Frontier: A Framework & Research Agenda”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/20

Below is the executive summary from our new paper at pacing.tech. The full paper is available on the site and as a PDF. The full author list is Raymond Douglas, Charles Dillon, Nikola Moore, Gavin Leech, Shahar Avin, Mathias Kirk Bonde, Rohit Krishnan, Noah Perez, Nathan Young, Cormac Slade Byrd, Stephen Casper, Jan Kulveit, & David Duvenaud “Pacing AI” usually refers to how to conclusively handle the most extreme risks in the face of race dynamics. However, even for the goal of handling

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14:22

“You can’t join the secret inner circle of cool...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/20

I, and a lot of other people I know, seem to believe something like this: Somewhere out there, there are the cool, high-impact effective altruists who are really having a positive effect on the world. They are all invited to lots of awesome parties with other cool, high-impact effective altruists. They know all kinds of secrets that us normal people don’t know, and they laugh at us for our out-of-touch takes. They can get jobs and grants by having a fifteen-minute conversation with a friend or a

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1:58

“YCombinator companies still aren’t growing faster...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/18

A year ago I posted that YCombinator (YC) companies didn’t seem to be growing faster since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. I reran that experiment and found that 2023+ YC companies are arguably growing a bit faster than pre-2023 companies (including AfterQuery, YC's fastest-ever unicorn), but the difference isn’t large relative to the underlying variance. It's worth noting that YC has somewhat fallen from grace: the most valuable AI startups are generally not incubated by YC. Nonetheless, it's

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7:50

“How we might actually pace the frontier: A proposal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/18

TL;DR This is a proposal for AI companies to conduct public “pacing exercises”, such as halting all pre-training and RL for 2 to 3 days. Each exercise could announce its scope in advance and publish findings afterwards, including the evidence of compliance and any limits to what they could verify. Companies could invite independent evaluators to help identify the evidence needed before the exercise, and to assess compliance during the exercise. The exercises could be repeated every 1 to 3 months to

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15:14

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/17

In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck. Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, hit bookshelves as an instant bestseller. It was praised by many voices, ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to Steve Bannon to Yoshua Bengio,

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7:11

“The Crisis Task Force” by brentonmayer

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/17

tl;dr: when a crisis with major implications for your organisation unfolds, consider setting up a crisis task force. It should have its own org chart and adopt norms which are better suited for a crisis. Most organisations aren’t set up to work well in a crisis. At 80,000 Hours, we found three things tend to go wrong. Work slows down across the org, because staff are worried and distracted. Lots of people individually follow the news, duplicating each other's work, before anyone can say what it

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26:16

“Results from the Population Ethics Quiz” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/16

Two weeks ago, I released a population ethics quiz. 582 people took it. Here's what I learned from reading the responses.Cross-posted from my website. Preamble, and a new edition of the quiz I was worried that I'd only get like four people taking the quiz. But that turned out not to be a problem, because people really like taking quizzes! Even when they're about difficult philosophical subjects! Some people even reported that this quiz helped them learn about population ethics. That wasn't part

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2:29

“It’s time to vote” by Michelle_Hutchinson

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

It's been a pretty crazy week in terms of the world waking up to the risks from AI. I’m hoping that the future is a bit safer this week than it was last. Certainly more people are realising the significant action needed to slow down AI development. In my day job, I’m mostly thinking about how we can put out content about how to increase the safety of the future as we approach TAI. But I’m planning to take tomorrow off from that to go to Westminster with PauseAI to call on the Prime Minister to

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36:31

“Building a Stronger Vegan Movement Through...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organisation I’m affiliated with. I'm grateful to Aaron Boddy, Elizabeth Crewe, Sebastian Joy, Aidan Kankyoku, Tobias Leenaert, Ginny Messina, and Felix Werdermann for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the views presented. In this post, I aim to show that messaging in the vegan movement often understates the challenges and uncertainties of

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1:40

“Dario Amodei: “We Must Pace The Frontier”” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

[...] Along with my co-founders and employees, I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic. Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way: to show that it's possible to build carefully and succeed commercially, and to make safety something on which AI companies compete. In other words, to create a race to the top. We

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5x in a year" by Chris Clay🔸&source_url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.effectivealtruism.org%2Fposts%2FhFAushcPhTwJiy9u9%2Fthe-uk-has-quietly-downgraded-biorisk-worst-case-scenarios&created_at=2026-09-14T13%3A46%3A23.202262%2B00%3A00&duration=333" data-stream-description-author="EA Forum Podcast (All audio)" data-stream-description-title="“The UK has quietly downgraded Biorisk Worst-Case Scenarios >5x in a year” by Chris Clay🔸" data-stream-link-author="/podcasts/detail?p=749174&q=cat%3A%22philosophy%22">

5:33

“The UK has quietly downgraded Biorisk Worst-Case...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

The National Risk Register is a morbidly fascinating document I've stumbled across recently. It aims to provide the UK Government's public-facing opinion on what the most serious risks facing the UK are. It's unclear how much this document is used in justifying internal decisions made across UK Government. However, one document its cited in is the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy. One of the headline figures of this register is the Impact-Likelihood matrix across all risks. The important numbers to

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21:45

“Community (Part 1: From FTX to Manifund) |...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/15

Caroline Ellison has accepted a role at Manifund, to develop our funding platform and research how to effectively direct philanthropic dollars. Austin Chen and Caroline Ellison, “Caroline Ellison has joined Manifund.” Listen to this post 1. Introduction This is Part 1 of a new series, Community. The effective altruist and rationalist communities are strange beasts. They are often impenetrable to outsiders and frequently misunderstood. However, understanding the structure of these communities is

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8:24

“Announcing BluePerch, a new animal welfare fund...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/09/14

Author: Grace Ryba (she/her), Executive Director TL;DR: BluePerch is a new animal welfare grantmaker. Grant applications aren't open yet - we're aiming to open applications in roughly mid-2027. We welcome early expressions of interest from potential grantseekers so we can notify you when applications open - express your interest here or see further details below. We're also seeking board members to help run BluePerch; details below. BluePerch BluePerch is a new animal welfare fund seeking to make

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