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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

5:04

[Linkpost] “My Career Plan: Launching Elevate...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/25

This is a link post. At this point, I am confident that philanthropy is the best area for me to work in, and I have a clearer sense of what I plan to do in the area. Broad Area: Philanthropy Over time, I have become increasingly convinced that philanthropy is the right area for me. I think this applies both broadly to many people considering impact and more specifically to me from a personal fit perspective. Broadly, I find the area exciting for a few reasons. Much like starting a charity incubator

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22:18

“Do we get automated alignment research before an AI...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/24

TLDR: Will AI-automation first speed up capabilities or safety research? I forecast that most areas of capabilities research will see a 10x speedup before safety research. This is primarily because capabilities research has clearer feedback signals and relies more on engineering than on novel insights. To change this, researchers should now build and adopt tools to automate AI Safety research, focus on creating benchmarks, model organisms, and research proposals, and companies should grant

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31:47

“Reflections on FarmKind’s January media campaign” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/24

Summary In January 2025, FarmKind ran a provocative media campaign which used controversial media messaging and materials to promote ‘offsetting’ as an option for individuals who are concerned about factory farming but are currently unwilling or unable to change their diet. The campaign raised an estimated $16,700--$59,300 (explained in our Results section below) and generated a number of media ‘hits’ including TV and created some debate that many advocates have told us they found productive

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2:35

[Linkpost] “The first type of transformative AI?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/23

This is a link post. AI risk discussion often seems to assume that the AI we most want to prepare for will emerge in a “normal” world — one that hasn’t really been transformed by earlier AI systems. I think betting on this assumption could be a big mistake. If it turns out to be wrong, most of our preparation for advanced AI could end up ~worthless, or at least far less effective than it could have been. We might find ourselves wishing that we’d laid the groundwork for leveraging enormous political

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11:13

[Linkpost] “How (and why) to read Drexler on AI” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/23

This is a link post. I have been reading Eric Drexler's writing on the future of AI for more than a decade at this point. I love it, but I also think it can be tricky or frustrating. More than anyone else I know, Eric seems to tap into a deep vision for how the future of technology may work — and having once tuned into this, I find many other perspectives can feel hollow. (This reminds me of how, once I had enough of a feel for how economies work, I found a lot of science fiction felt hollow, if the

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3:56

“A sliding scale for donation percentage” by Thomas Kwa

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/23

In 2023, the top 20 donors to GiveWell gave more than the other 31,890 donors combined. These donors gave at least $1 million each with a mean of $5.87 million. With stats like these, I mostly view the 10% pledge as a social commitment device rather than a sensible rule for how much to donate. One can think of the 10% pledge as requiring people to give up a constant amount of personal utility under logarithmic utility of consumption. But this doesn't make sense; one should obviously give up more

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3:46

“A sliding scale for donation percentage” by Thomas Kwa🔹

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/23

In 2023, the top 20 donors to GiveWell gave more than the other 31,890 donors combined. These donors gave at least $1 million each with a mean of $5.87 million. With stats like these, I mostly view the 10% pledge as a social commitment device rather than a sensible rule for how much to donate. One can think of the 10% pledge as requiring people to give up a constant amount of personal utility under logarithmic utility of consumption. But this doesn't make sense; one should obviously give up more

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3:27

“Minor updates to EA Global Code of Conduct” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/22

We've made some minor updates to the EA Global Code of Conduct for 2026. These changes will be effective immediately. The core remains the same: we expect professional, respectful behavior at all EA Global and EAGx events. Anyone already signed up for an event in 2026 will receive an email letting them know about the change. What we changed: We added some further behaviours that we don’t want at our events: Not recording people without permission, Not excessively promoting your own services or

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2:59

“ALLFED is looking for a CEO” by AronM, Laura Cook

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/22

The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED)—an effective-altruism–aligned, global charity, registered in the US as a 501(c)(3) and with sister entities in the UK and Australia – is seeking its first Chief Executive Officer to guide the organization through a pivotal and challenging moment in its history. ALLFED is the only organization in the world dedicated solely to building resilience to global catastrophic food system failure, events that could reduce global caloric output or access by

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14:18

“Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/22

Introduction This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from July 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025 (6 months). It follows the previous April-June 2025 payout report. We combined Q3 and Q4 payout reports and the annual review into one report because our grantmaking volume was lower in Q3 as a result of EA Funds’ grantmaking pause, which ran from 1 June to 31 July. During the grantmaking pause, AWF focused on improving our grantmaking strategy and plans for the remainder of 2025

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2:56

“High-Leverage Campaign to Prevent Battery Cage...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/21

TDRL; The African Organisation for Standardisation is advancing a draft standard (CD-ARS 1241) that would legitimize battery cages across 44 member countries, despite scientific evidence and market trends moving in the opposite direction. The Technical Committee meets February 4, 2026 to discuss the standard. How to Help Campaign site: https://stoparsobatterycages.org/ Takes 10 seconds to email ARSO. Takes 2-5 minutes to share in networks. Takes 30 seconds to log your action for campaign tracking

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31:28

“Should farmed animal donation appeals de-emphasize...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/21

This report is the fourth in a sequence presenting the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults designed to track and improve understanding of public attitudes toward effective giving and different impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with approximately 5600 respondents.[1] Results from our first wave of Pulse, fielded between July and September of 2024, can be found here,

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1:17

“Digital Consciousness Model launch events” by Hayley...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/21

The AI Cognition Initiative at Rethink Priorities will be releasing the initial results of our Digital Consciousness Model this Friday, January 23. The DCM evaluates evidence across 13 diverse perspectives on consciousness and over 200 specific indicators to assess the state of the evidence for consciousness in AI systems and biological organisms. We will be presenting our work and answering questions about it at two upcoming webinar events: A launch event hosted by NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics,

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14:04

[Linkpost] “Against Maxipok: existential risk isn’t...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/21

This is a link post. Bostrom's Maxipok principle suggests reducing existential risk should be the overwhelming focus for those looking to improve humanity's long-term prospects. This rests on an implicitly dichotomous view of future value, where most outcomes are either near-worthless or near-best. We argue against the dichotomous view, and against Maxipok. In the coming century, values, institutions, and power distributions could become locked-in. But we could influence what gets locked-in, and

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16:57

“AI predictions for 2026” by Ajeya

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/21

But first, scoring my predictions for 2025 Note: This post was crossposted from the Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. On December 13th, 2024, I registered predictions about what would happen with AI by the end of 2025, using this survey run by Sage. They asked five questions about benchmarks, four about the OpenAI Preparedness Framework risk categories, one about revenues, and one about public salience

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9:09

“Why Isn’t EA at the Table When $121 Billion Gets...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/20

There is an insane amount of money being thrown around by international organizations and agreements. Nobody with any kind of power over these agreements is asking basic EA questions like: "What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?" As someone coming from an EA background reading through plans for $200-700 billion in annual funding commitments that focus on

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3:36

“Why I Steal (Ideas) and You Should Too” by Tom...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/20

TL;DR: The EA movement has yet to fully incorporate ideas, skills, people, and knowledge from existing fields (e.g. monitoring and evaluation). You could potentially have a lot of impact just through stealing these and adapting them to our contexts. Epistemic status: Quick informal post on something I've been thinking about. I’m currently basing a large portion of my career (and more importantly, my impact) on stealing ideas, best practices, and people from existing sectors and applying them in new

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5:04

“Celebrating wins — discussion thread” by Eli Svoboda🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/19

Perhaps my favorite part of my job is that I’m often exposed to mind-boggling accomplishments achieved by people within and around the EA community. Stories of impact remind us why our principles are valuable, inspire an openness to ambitious bets, and motivate altruism. Yet we can’t expect to hear about positive outcomes by default — the problems we solve are neglected, and beneficiaries are frequently voiceless (literally). That's why @Toby Tremlett🔹 and I would like to invite you to add stories

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15:20

“5 ways to better charity work in 2026” by NickLaing

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/19

I've started a substack, so a few more people might encounter my spicy takes - I'll still mostly be here. USAID is gone. Direct country aid to low income countries is down 25%. So now's a great time to share five ways I think development charity can be done better in 2026. To state the obvious... none of these ideas will be the best approach all of the time, there's plenty of grey area and nuance. I start a little playful, then get a little more serious. 1. Ditch the Cars Close your eyes and

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15:13

“Return Stacked Funds: A New Way to Get Leverage” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/01/19

Some people (including me) have argued that altruists often benefit from leveraging their investments. Recently, it has become easier to use leverage thanks to the emergence of return stacked funds.This is not financial advice. Cross-posted from my website. I originally wrote this a year ago and just made some revisions for 2026. What is return stacking? Return stacking is a way of getting up to leveraged exposure to multiple return streams simultaneously. For example, RSSB invests 100% into

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2,110 results

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