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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

26:25

“How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/11

By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify As we now know, Anthropic has built an AI that can break into almost any computer on Earth. That AI has already found thousands of unknown security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major browser. And Anthropic has decided it's too dangerous to release to the public; it would just cause too much harm. Here are just a few of the things that AI accomplished during testing: It found a 27-year-old flaw in the world's most

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9:23

“Leading Insect Farm Took Millions In Subsidies, Then...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/11

Crosspost of a blog post. A recent investigation uncovered that the leading insect farming company, Ynsect, was a horrifying disaster. While company leadership soaked up millions in subsidies with sunny rhetoric about their commercial success, the dark reality inside the farm was like nothing anyone imagined. Investigators found filth clogging the machines, endangering workers. Larval bins would routinely break open, leading to repeated showers of larvae. Insects crawled all over the place, wholly

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12:09

“Help me launch Obsolete: a book aimed at building a...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/10

I wrote a book! It's called Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It, and it’ll be available in May if you preorder through my publisher (OR Books+The Nation). With it, I took on a dual mission: get anyone up to speed on the state of AI and its risks (especially skeptics and lefties) AND write something people working in the space will enjoy and learn from. An unbiased panel of early reviewers (i.e. people I know) think it succeeds. For instance, here's a

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2:12

“Launching a massively improved version of our job...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/09

We're excited to share that we’ve overhauled our job board! It now has a much better interface and email alerts, to help people find impactful roles. We’re still fixing a bunch of bugs, but we’ve opted to launch and iterate on the live version rather than wait until everything is perfect, because we think the board is now at a state where we expect this to be better for users. If you spot any issues or have suggestions, please let us know! Moving forward, we’ll continue improving the board, though

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20:47

[Linkpost] “Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/09

This is a link post. [Subtitle.] The utilitarians were right! This is a crosspost for Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture by Bentham's Bulldog, which was originally published on Bentham's Newsletter on 20 March 2026. Bentham's Bulldog published a post 2 days later responding to comments on the 1st post. 1 Introduction You hear the torture vs dust specks example come up a lot when discussing the alleged vices of utilitarianism. Emile Torres once wrote: On another occasion, Yudkowsky

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8:48

“Six milestones for AI automation” by Ajeya

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: What can AI do on its own, and when? The closer you think you are to your “powerful AI” milestone of choice, the more important it becomes to define it precisely. If your timelines are in the few-year range, changing the particular definition of powerful AI can easily double or triple your median forecast. Take my

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10:43

“The outsized benefits of removing bottlenecks: some...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

I once ran the monitoring and evaluation department of a large nonprofit in rural Tanzania. We had 25 full-time data collectors who ran surveys with farmers on their crop yields and planting practices. My job was to oversee the team, analyze their data and produce reports with actionable recommendations. The field team was incredibly productive and we were collecting tons of data. We were also producing very few actual reports and horrendously behind on everything. This seemed to me like a “time to

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18:27

[Linkpost] “Summarizing the evidence on AI and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

This is a link post. Rethink Priorities has recently come out with the Digital Consciousness Model, a groundbreaking synthesis of the evidence for and against the consciousness of large language models and chickens. I think the Digital Consciousness Model is some of the most exciting work coming out of consciousness studies recently, and I want to walk you through what we’ve learned from it. I’m going to start by talking about the model's findings. Then I’m going to get into the nitty-gritty

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8:55

“What questions do policymakers ask about foreign...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

I sit down with Lee Jae-jeong, one of the 21 parliamentarians on South Korea's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee. The National Assembly budget audit looms, and our conversation could impact the next year of Korea's health aid. I walk through a 5-minute presentation (stopping intermittently for translation) about Gavi's new malaria vaccines and why we at Coefficient Giving think so highly of them. She furrows her brow while she flips through the printed leave-behind I brought. What does she

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30:24

“Impact Requires Implementation: What Dispensers for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

TL;DR Between 2022 and 2023, GiveWell and Open Philanthropy committed over $70 million to Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water programme. An independent survey in 2025 found that in Uganda and Malawi the programme was reaching approximately 70% fewer people with detectable chlorine than its own monitoring had indicated (approximately 40% fewer in Kenya). This piece argues that this case-study reflects a structural gap in how sophisticated funders allocate analytical rigour: extraordinary

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6:12

“By Strong Default, ASI Will End Liberal Democracy”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

Cross-posted from my website.The existence of liberal democracy—with rule of law, constraints on government power, and enfranchised citizens—relies on a balance of power where individual bad actors can't do too much damage. Artificial superintelligence (ASI), even if it's aligned, would end that balance by default. It is not a question of who develops ASI. Whether the first ASI is developed by a totalitarian state or a democracy, the end result will—by strong default—be a de facto global

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4:03

“Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded Programs” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

This is a new episode of the GiveWell Conversations podcast. You can listen to the episode or read a summary of the conversation below. Vitamin A supplementation is one of the programs GiveWell has supported the longest, and we’re currently funding it in many African countries. The program has an unusually strong evidence base for reducing child mortality, with multiple randomized controlled trials. Yet, as is the case for most global health programs, the evidence for vitamin A supplementation has

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13:11

[Linkpost] “Menstrual Cups - A cost effective gem?”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/08

This is a link post. TLDR: Menstrual cups cost a few dollars and have great potential to improve lives in low-income settings. High quality Wellbeing research might tell us if they’re a big bet worth making. The Monthly Struggle Periods are a challenge to manage anywhere, but in low income rural areas, women must overcome huge physical, social and financial barriers. Every month. Most women in this tricky situation manage their periods in one of two ways.1 1. Reused cloths/rags, not made for

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51:26

[Linkpost] “Defense-favoured coordination design...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/06

This is a link post. Intro We think that near-term AI could make it much easier for groups to coordinate, find positive-sum deals, navigate tricky disagreements, and hold each other to account. Partly, this is because AI will be able to process huge amounts of data quickly, making complex multi-party negotiations and discussions much more tractable. And partly it's because secure enough AI systems would allow people to share sensitive information with trusted intermediaries without fear of broader

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3:35

“Coefficient Giving is seeking proposals for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/06

Coefficient Giving's Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team is launching a new Request for Proposals to support work aimed at preventing engineered biological threats from emerging and improving our response to these threats should prevention fail. Applications start with a simple expression of interest form (≤500 words), with a submission deadline of May 11 2026 at 11:59pm PT.Click here to learn more and apply More details We expect that the coming years will see unprecedented progress in AI

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2:27

“Chicken-Free Egg Whites” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/05

Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especially the way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them for ethical reasons, and this often limits what I can bake for them. I was very excited to learn, though, that you can now buy extremely realistic vegan egg whites! EVERY engineered yeast to convert sugar into ovalbumin, the main protein in egg whites and the one responsible for most of its culinary

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7:48

“You should write about your giving” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/05

In the early days of EA, people often tracked their giving on personal websites, or at least wrote about each year's donations. I read about it and felt inspired (and a bit competitive). This is less popular now. I want to see more. How to track donations Here's a list of examples. Some people write long posts with all their reasoning, others just share numbers. More info is nice, but anything beats nothing. My approach is minimal — a page explaining why I give in general, and a spreadsheet with

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5:59

“If You’re To Die” by Bentham’s Bulldog

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/04

Crosspost of a blog article. Andrew Sullivan's most impactful work came in the shadow of death. Tyler Cowen declared Sullivan the generation's most impactful public intellectual. Sullivan was hugely influential in the fight for gay marriage, as a thoughtful conservative advocate of gay marriage who was himself gay. He also pioneered the early art of blogging, with his early work leaving an indelible mark on how the craft developed. I’ve been grateful to have Sullivan occasionally link to my blog

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14:41

“Impact of Holocaust on soil nematodes, mites, and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/02

Summary I estimate the Holocaustincreased the living time of (wild) soil nematodes, mites, and springtails. My best guess is thatthose soil invertebrates have negative lives, so I think that indirectly increasing their animal-years by mass murdering millions of people was harmful on net. I have been estimating the cost-effectiveness of various interventions accounting for effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails. Any event which causes a large and sustained change in human population

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10:47

“EAGxAmsterdam 2025: What We Learned” by James Herbert

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/02

James Herbert, Co-Director, Effectief Altruïsme Nederland and EAGxAmsterdam Team Lead EAGxAmsterdam 2025 took place on 12–14 December at B.Amsterdam, bringing together 517 attendees from across Europe. This is a brief write-up of what went well, what didn't, and what I think other EAGx organisers can learn from it. The headline numbers: 517 attendees (up 36% from 380 at EAGxUtrecht 2024) — one of the largest EAGx events in recent years, behind only EAGxBerlin 2025 €387 cost per attendee (target

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2,311 results

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