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PODCAST

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you"d like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

technology philosophy

All Episodes

14:36

“Celebrating Benjamin Lay (died on this day 265 years...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/02/08

Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay died exactly 265 years ago today (on February 8, 1759). I’m using the anniversary of his death to reflect on his life and invite you to join me by sharing your thoughts sometime this week. Lay was a radical anti-slavery advocate and an important figure in the Quaker abolitionist movement. He's been described as a moral weirdo; besides viewing slavery as a great sin, he opposed the death penalty, was vegetarian, believed that men and women were equal in the eyes of

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1:52

“GWWC Pledge featured in new book from Head of TED,...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/25

Chris Anderson, Head of TED, has just released a new book called Infectious Generosity, which has a whole chapter that encourages readers to take the Giving What We Can Pledge! He has also taken the Giving What We Can Pledge with the new wealth option to give the greater of 10% of income or 2.5% of wealth each year. This inspiring book is a guide to making Infectious Generosity become a global movement to build a hopeful future. Chris offers a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts

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10:37

“5 possibly impactful career paths for researchers”...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/23

Charity Entrepreneurship is running a second edition of our Research Training Program (RTP) – a program designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. In this post, we discuss possible long-term career paths for researchers and a gap assessment of what skills people might want to prioritize to pursue those. This discussion may be helpful for people considering the RTP program or those more generally

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9:31

“Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/22

I investigate the rates of criminal misconduct amongst people who have taken The Giving Pledge(roughly: ~200 [non-EA] billionaires who have pledged to give most of their money to charity). I find that rates are fairly high: 25% of signatories have been accused of financial misconduct, and 10% convicted[1] 4% of signatories have spent at least one day in prison Overall, 41% of signatories have had at least one allegation of substantial misconduct (financial, sexual, or otherwise) I estimate that

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72:23

“On the abolition of man” by Joe_Carlsmith

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/18

(Cross-posted from my website. Podcast version here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.This essay is part of a series that I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that the individual essay can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far.) Earlier in this series, I discussed a certain kind of concern about the AI alignment discourse – namely, that it aspires to exert an

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6:53

“Report on the Desirability of Science Given New...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/17

Should we seek to make our scientific institutions more effective? On the one hand, rising material prosperity has so far been largely attributable to scientific and technological progress. On the other hand, new scientific capabilities also expand our powers to cause harm. Last year I wrote a report on this issue, “The Returns to Science in the Presence of Technological Risks.” The report focuses specifically on the net social impact of science when we take into account the potential abuses of new

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6:22

“EA Wins 2023” by Shakeel Hashim

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/15

Crossposted from Twitter. As the year comes to an end, we want to highlight and celebrate some of the incredible achievements from in and around the effective altruism ecosystem this year. 1. A new malaria vaccine The World Health Organization recommended its second-ever malaria vaccine this year: R21/Matrix-M, designed to protect babies and young children from malaria. The drug's recently concluded Phase III trial, which was co-funded by Open Philanthropy, found that the vaccine was between 68-75%

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4:26

“Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures”...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/14

Crossposted from AI Impacts blog The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is out, this time with 2778 participants from six top AI venues (up from about 700 and two in the 2022 ESPAI), making it probably the biggest ever survey of AI researchers. People answered in October, an eventful fourteen months after the 2022 survey, which had mostly identical questions for comparison. Here is the preprint. And here are six interesting bits in pictures (with figure numbers matching paper, for ease of

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1:50

“Zach Robinson will be CEA’s next CEO” by Ben_West,...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/14

We, on behalf of the EV US and EV UK boards, are very glad to share that Zach Robinson has been selected as the new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). We can personally attest to his exceptional leadership, judgement, and dedication from having worked with him at Effective Ventures US. These experiences are part of why we unanimously agreed with the hiring committee's recommendation to offer him the position.[1] We think Zach has the skills and the drive to lead CEA's very important

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2:40

“Double the donation: EA inadequacy found?” by Neil...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/13

I'm only 30% sure [Edit Jan 7: 90% sure] that this is actually an inadequacy made by those whose job it is to maximize donations but I’ve noticed that none of the donations pages of GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Horizon Institute, or METR have this little tab in them that MIRI has (just scroll down after following the link): This little tool comes from doublethedonation.com. I was looking for charities to donate to, and I’m grateful I stumbled upon the MIRI donation page because otherwise I would

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15:31

“Economic Growth - Donation suggestions and ideas” by...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/12

There was a recent post about economic growth & effective altruism by Karthik Tadepalli. He pointed out that a lot of people agree that economic growth is important, but it hasn't really led to many suggestions for specific interventions. I thought it would be good to get the ball rolling[1] by asking a few people what they think are good donation opportunities in this area, or if not, do they think this area is neglected when you have governments, development banks, investors etc all focused

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118:05

“Are Far-UVC Interventions Overhyped? [Founders...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/12

Much attention recently has focused on far-UVC light, part of the spectrum of germicidal UV (GUV), and its promise for pandemic prevention. In the following medium investigation, we examine different kinds of GUV, their strengths, weaknesses, and crucial considerations in the real-world deployment of these interventions. Throughout the report, we emphasize four points that we believe have been lost in some public discussions of far-UVC: A great deal of uncertainty remains around far-UVC

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[Podcast AMA] Rob Mather, Founder and CEO of the...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/08

This podcast is an Ask Me Anything with Rob Mather, Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, hosted by Toby Tremlett, the EA Forum’s Content Manager.If you’re interested in Effective Altruism, you’ve probably heard of Rob Mather’s charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. For almost two decades, they’ve been doing crucial work to protect people, especially children, from Malaria.To date, around 450 million people have been protected with malaria bed nets from this charity. Once all of their

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14:08

“MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy Update” by Malo

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/05

As we announced back in October, I have taken on the senior leadership role at MIRI as its CEO. It's a big pair of shoes to fill, and an awesome responsibility that I’m honored to take on. There have been several changes at MIRI since our 2020 strategic update, so let's get into it.[1] The short version: We think it's very unlikely that the AI alignment field will be able to make progress quickly enough to prevent human extinction and the loss of the future's potential value, that we expect will

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51:58

[Linkpost] “Practically A Book Review: Appendix to...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2024/01/03

A summary of the Nonlinear situation from a third-person perspective, by Ozy Brennan. I find it to be thoughtful, well-written, and well-researched enough to be part of the conversation. It was also posted on LessWrong. Edit: full text included below (with permission from the author). I had to reformat a lot so assume all formatting errors are done by me. About a week ago, I became one of a small, elite group—people who have read every single goddamn word of Nonlinear's Evidence: Debunking False

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5:03

“Altruism sharpens altruism” by Joey

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/12/26

I think many EAs have a unique view about how one altruistic action affects the next altruistic action, something like altruism is powerful in terms of its impact, and altruistic acts take time/energy/willpower; thus, it's better to conserve your resources for these topmost important altruistic actions (e.g., career choice) and not sweat it the other actions. However, I think this is a pretty simplified and incorrect model that leads to the wrong choices being taken. I wholeheartedly agree that

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7:08

[Linkpost] “A year of wins for farmed animals” by...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/12/24

This is a crosspost for A year of wins for farmed animals, published by Lewis Bollard on 14 December 2023 in Open Philanthropy farm animal welfare research newsletter. It's been a tough year for farmed animals. The European Union shelved the world's most ambitious farm animal welfare reform proposal, plant-based meat sales sagged, and the media panned cultivated meat while Italy banned it. But advocates for factory farmed animals still won major gains — here are ten of the biggest: 1. Wins for the

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14:22

“Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)” by...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/12/24

TL;DR: We ran a Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]). The winners are: Rethink Priorities - $12,847.75 Charity Entrepreneurship: Incubated Charities Fund - $11,351.11 Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) - $10,657.07 This post shares more information about the results: Comments from voters about their votes: patterns include referencing organizations' marginal funding posts, updating towards the neglectedness of animal

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29:21

[Linkpost] “Attention on Existential Risk from AI...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/12/21

Summary. In the past year, public fora have seen growing concern about existential risk (henceforth, x-risk) from AI. The thought is that we could see transformative AI in the coming years or decades, that it may be hard to ensure that such systems act with humanity's best interests in mind and that those highly advanced AIs may be able to overpower us if they aimed to do so, or otherwise that such systems may be catastrophically misused. Some have reacted by arguing that concerns about x-risk

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30:26

[Linkpost] “Attention on AI X-Risk Likely Hasn’t...

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) ·

2023/12/21

This is a link post. Summary In the past year, public fora have seen growing concern about existential risk (henceforth, x-risk) from AI. The thought is that we could see transformative AI in the coming years or decades, that it may be hard to ensure that such systems act with humanity's best interests in mind and that those highly advanced AIs may be able to overpower us if they aimed to do so, or otherwise that such systems may be catastrophically misused. Some have reacted by arguing that

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300 results

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