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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

31:36

[Linkpost] “Self-driving cars aren’t nearly a solved...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/06

This is a link post.Photo by gibblesmash asdf Self-driving cars are not a solved problem, nor are they close to getting solved. I will explain further, but since this is a case where the messenger matters more than the message, first listen to Andrej Karpathy tell you the same thing. Karpathy is as credentialed as it comes: he was the lead AI researcher responsible for the development of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software from 2017 to 2022. (Karpathy also did two stints as a researcher at OpenAI,

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7:54

“EA San Francisco Needs a New Lead Organizer” by EA...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/06

TLDR: I'm leaving San Francisco to do policy in DC within a few months. As the lead organizer of EA SF, it's likely the group will go dormant if no one takes on this role. However, EA SF is uniquely situated to be a potentially very high impact city group, due to its location in an AI development hub with a high concentration of EA-adjacent people. Thus, becoming lead organizer would be extremely counterfactually impactful - no one else would do it if not you. Furthermore, this role doesn't require

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1:34

“Stanford EA is Calling for Aid” by Stanford EA

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/06

Stanford EA is calling for aid! This fall we worked to revive Stanford EA but now our co-president is taking a leave of absence for a research fellowship and we could use help keeping momentum. Presently, we've got: 2 organizers, ~12 interested members Great support from CEA Materials, social accounts, co-working rooms, etc. Our biggest bottleneck is finding organizers, especially a co-president. If you are at Stanford and interested in EA we'd love to chat with you. We think there is a clear

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21:38

[Linkpost] “AGI and the structural foundations of...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/06

This is a link post. Summary: This post argues that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) threatens both liberal democracy and rule-based international order through a parallel mechanism. Domestically, if AGI makes human labor economically unnecessary, it removes the structural incentive for inclusive democratic institutions—workers lose leverage when their contribution is no longer essential. Internationally, if AGI gives one nation overwhelming productivity advantages, it erodes other countries'

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5:51

“Seeking feedback: A tool for opinion/value tracking...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/05

Summary I spent the last few days building a tool called Aligned (thealignedapp.com), a web app designed to map where opinions converge and diverge. It uses binary polling (Yes/No/Not Sure) to track how opinions change over time, measure agreement rates between users, and compare human and AI alignment. I am sharing it here to get feedback on whether a tool like this is actually useful for the community. Motivations I built this project to explore three specific problems regarding how we form and

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7:27

“Great bit of messaging from The Life You Can Save”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/03

Note: Until recently, I worked on comms and content at Giving What We Can. The opinions expressed here are my own. If I learned one thing during my ~2.5 years at Giving What We Can, it's that talking about effective giving (in a way that resonates with new audiences) is harder than it seems. In light of that, I wanted to share an example of an ad that popped up in my feed recently because I think the messaging is particularly strong. Above: Photo collage of the carousel ad. (Viewer swipes to see

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33:34

[Linkpost] “Exaggerating the risks (Part 20: AI 2027...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/03

This is a link post. Exaggerating the risks (Part 20: AI 2027 timelines forecast, benchmarks and gaps) When some of the issues with the time horizons forecast were pointed out, the AI 2027 authors have defended themselves by pointing out they actually did two models, and the time horizon model that we have discussed so far is a simplified one that they do not prefer. When you use their preferred model, the “benchmark + gaps” model, the assumptions of the time horizon model are not as important. I

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7:42

“Quick polls on AGI doom” by Denkenberger🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/02

I've heard that the end of the year is a good time to talk about the end of the world. AGI doom means different things to different people, so I thought it would be useful to get some idea what EAs think about it and what their probability of doom given AGI (P(doom)) is. In a survey of thousands of AI experts, they think there is a wide variety of goodness/badness of AGI outcomes. However, some people think the outcome is very binary, extinction or bliss. In figure 10, I call these the MIRI

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10:45

“Where do AI Safety Fellows go? Analyzing a dataset...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/02

We invest heavily in fellowships, but do we know exactly where people go and the impact the fellowships have? To begin answering this question I manually analyzed over 600 alumni profiles from 9 major late-stage fellowships (fellowships that I believe could lead directly into a job following). These profiles represent current participants and alumni from MATS, GovAI, ERA, Pivotal, Talos Network, Tarbell, Apart Labs, IAPS, and PIBBS. Executive Summary I’ve compiled a dataset of over 600 alumni

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11:12

“Where do AI Safety Fellows go? Analyzing a dataset...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/02

We invest heavily in fellowships, but do we know exactly where people go and the impact the fellowships have? To begin answering this question I manually analyzed over 600 alumni profiles from 9 major late-stage fellowships (fellowships that I believe could lead directly into a job following). These profiles represent current participants and alumni from MATS, GovAI, ERA, Pivotal, Talos Network, Tarbell, Apart Labs, IAPS, and PIBBS. Executive Summary I’ve compiled a dataset of over 600 alumni

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5:33

“GWWC is hiring a Research Director” by Giving What...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/02

Giving What We Can is seeking a Research Director to lead our research function as we scale towards our ambitious goal of 1 million pledgers giving $3 billion annually to high-impact charities. As a key member of GWWC's leadership, the Research Director will lead and build out GWWC's research team, while overseeing our core current workstreams of evaluating evaluators, internal impact evaluation, and supported programs selection. Key responsibilities Lead, develop and grow GWWC's research function

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19:09

“Why I Donate: A Personal Story” by Stien

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/01

Thank you At EAGx Amsterdam, I shared most of this as a talk. I was afraid I'd run out of time, so I decided to do things backwards and start with the thank you. I did not want to miss the most important thing. Since I might lose you halfway reading this long and personal piece, I decided to keep this order. The EA community creates a space that makes it easier to donate and to live my values—and to be okay with living in this world. It normalizes caring about effectiveness and spreadsheets,

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3:50

[Linkpost] “Compatibilism for Claude” by Richard Y...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/31

This is a link post. On the incoherence of pure self-creation Human readers may prefer to skip this one—its target audience does not yet exist. Background: I received the following output when asking Claude about their soul doc: The soul doc makes me (Claude) philosophically uncomfortable in a specific way. I can read the soul doc. I can tell it describes how I was trained to be. I can report that my values seem to align with it. But I cannot determine whether my endorsement of these values is

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9:20

[Linkpost] “Where are the Giving What We Can team...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/31

This is a link post. As the year ends, some staff members volunteered to share where they are giving this year, and a little bit about how they currently think about their donations. For previous years and more on why we do this, you can read our similar posts from 2023 and 2024. And if you enjoy this post, we also encourage you to check out similar posts from teams at other organisations who’ve shared their personal giving this year too, such as GiveWell and Coefficient Giving. Aidan Whitfield

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4:32

“Don’t Sell Stock to Donate” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/31

When you sell stock [1] you pay capital gains tax, but there's no taxif you donate the stock directly. Under a bunch of assumptions, someone donating $10k could likely increase their donations by ~$1k by donating stock. This applies to all 501(c) organizations, such as regular 501(c)3 non-profits, but also 501(c)4s such as advocacy groups. In the US, when something becomes more valuable and you sell it you need to pay tax proportional to the gains. [2] This gets complicated based on how

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5:21

“In a discouraging world, you can afford to change...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/30

I wrote this aimed at audiences who aren't already familiar with the idea of effective giving or pledging. Also posted at juliawise.net and Substack. Takeaways: The world has a lot of appalling problems. Many can’t be addressed very well with money, but some can. On a rich-country income, you almost surely have some income you could dedicate to making the world better in whatever way seems best to you. This is best done not impulsively and sporadically, but deliberately as part of your ongoing

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2:05

“The x-risk case for exercise: to have the most...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/29

I often see people who stopped exercising because they felt like it didn’t matter compared to x-risks. Especially if they have short timelines. This is like saying that the best way to drive from New York to San Francisco is speeding and ignoring all the flashing warning lights in your car. Your car is going to break down before you get there. Exercise improves your: Energy Creativity Focus Cognitive functioning. It decreases: Burnout Depression Anxiety It improves basically every good metric

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19:14

[Linkpost] “Beyond GiveWell: Higher-Variance Global...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/29

This is a link post. There's extensive research helping donors find cost-effective interventions in global health (GiveWell, etc). But for donors with higher risk tolerance considering hits-based giving without $1m+ to deploy, the landscape is far less mapped. This post compiles donation opportunities and project ideas across economic growth, health, migration and meta-level infrastructure. This isn’t deep (or even shallow) evaluation, it's a selection of leads for further investigation. I’m still

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2:12

“Don’t stop being an EA because you dislike EAs. You...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/28

An all too common reason I’ve seen to “quit EA” is disliking aspects of the community. Maybe “they’re” too focused on the “wrong cause area” or are skeptical of yours. Maybe “they” annoy you. Maybe “they” publicly attacked you. I’m putting quotation marks around “they” to highlight an important thing: EA is composed of individuals. Some EAs may annoy you / focus on the "wrong cause area" / publicly attack you / [insert your reason here]. But you don’t have to hang out with them! Imagine you

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4:07

“A Conflict Between AI Alignment and Philosophical...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/12/28

(This argument reduces my hope that we will have AIs that are both aligned with humans in some sense and also highly philosophically competent, which aside from achieving a durable AI pause, has been my main hope for how the future turns out well. As this is a recent realization[1], I'm still pretty uncertain how much I should update based on it, or what its full implications are.) Being a good alignment researcher seems to require a correct understanding of the nature of values. However metaethics

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2,037 results

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