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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

4:06

“The current market price for animal welfare is zero”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

This is a lightly-edited memo I wrote for the 2025 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which were encouraged to be highly opinionated to generate strategy discussion. I actually wrote more about Shrimp Welfare Project's exploration of Credits here, but I think this 2-minute pitch for the value of Credits is useful to publish on its own. In 2011, Jayson Lusk published a paper titled The Market for Animal Welfare: The idea, in short, is to create a separate market for animal welfare that is decoupled

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6:05

“Gaslit by humanity” by tobiasleenaert

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

Hi all, This is a one time cross-post from my substack. If you like it, you can subscribe to the substack at tobiasleenaert.substack.com. Thanks Gaslit by humanity After twenty-five years in the animal liberation movement, I’m still looking for ways to make people see. I’ve given countless talks, co-founded organizations, written numerous articles and cited hundreds of statistics to thousands of people. And yet, most days, I know none of this will do what I hope: open their eyes to the immensity

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5:27

[Linkpost] “LLMs might already be conscious” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

This is a link post. Among people who have thought about LLM consciousness, a common belief is something like LLMs might be conscious soon, but they aren't yet. How sure are we that they aren't conscious already? I made a quick list of arguments for/against LLM consciousness, and it seems to me that high confidence in non-consciousness is not justified. I don't feel comfortable assigning less than a 10% chance to LLM consciousness, and I believe a 1% chance is unreasonably confident. But I am

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4:15

“Buying your way out of personal ethics” by escapealert

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/05

I’ve noticed a recurring argument in EA spaces around veganism: “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.” While this may sound compelling on the surface, I believe it fails for several reasons—both ethically and practically. First-Order Utilitarianism Can Justify Harm This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook, where harm is permissible as long as

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23:16

“How could AI affect different animal advocacy...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/04

Many thanks to Alina Salmen, Vince Mak, Constance Li, and Johannes Pichler for feedback on this post. All mistakes are our own. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of our employers.Introduction Rapid AI development presents unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for animal advocacy. AI could either worsen animal suffering by, e.g, making exploitative systems more efficient, or drastically reduce it by enabling new and improving current solutions. The stakes are immense:

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2:27

“AMA: Saloni Dattani” by Toby Tremlett🔹, salonium

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/03

Saloni will answer the questions in this AMA between 6-8pm BST on July 8th. Leave your questions as comments, and upvote other questions you’d like to see answered. If you’ve been around EA for a while, and you’re interested in global health, you’ve probably read Saloni Dattani before. Saloni writes about global health at Our World In Data and is a co-founder and editor of Works in Progress magazine. She's also recently started a podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen. She also (somehow) finds

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57:07

“We should be more uncertain about cause...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/03

Summary In this article, I argue most of the interesting cross-cause prioritization decisions and conclusions rest on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust enough to justify high degrees of certainty that any given intervention (or class of cause interventions) is “best” above all others. I hold this to be true generally because of the reliance of such cross-cause prioritization judgments on relatively weak philosophical evidence. In particular, the case for high confidence in conclusions on

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6:28

[Linkpost] “Eating Honey is (Probably) Fine,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

This is a link post. I wrote a reply to the Bentham Bulldog argument that has been going mildly viral. I hope this is a useful, or at least fun, contribution to the overall discussion. “One pump of honey?” the barista asked. “Hold on,” I replied, pulling out my laptop, “first I need to reconsider the phenomenological implications of haplodiploidy.” Recently, an article arguing against honey has been making the rounds. The argument is mathematically elegant (millions of bees, fractional suffering,

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1:01

“1Day Sooner Open Phil Funding Request” by 1Day Sooner

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

We thought it might be useful to post a (lightly) redacted version of our most recent funding request to Open Philanthropy for our work in 2025-2026. It lays out what we’ve done over the last several years, the lessons we’ve learned, and how we go about accounting for our causal impact in that time. This request led to $3 million in funding from Open Philanthropy. OP has provided about 40% of our funding to date, which is our goal going forward. If you read this request and would like to support

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1:31

[Linkpost] “Senate Strikes Potential AI Moratorium”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

This is a link post. The vote was 99-1, removing the 10 year moratorium on AI legislation at the state level set by the version passed in the House. Interestingly, the attempt to propose an alternative 5 year moratorium with further restrictions, which itself passed the procedural roadblock which might have prevented the 10 year moratorium, fell apart reportedly as a result of Senator Blackburn pulling her support. Why did she change her mind? "The current language is not acceptable to those who

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8:23

“GoodWallet: turning everyday repayments into...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

TL;DR GoodWallet is a digital wallet that lets you redirect your own and your friends’ money towards effective charities. By streamlining and socializing the giving process, we aim to unlock new, counterfactual donations within the EA community. Additionally, by making effective giving the default, we hope to expose non-EA friends to impact-per-€ cues, exporting the idea of effective giving far beyond EA's borders. Eventually, we hope that saying “just pay me back via GoodWallet” will be as common

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11:33

“Road to AnimalHarmBench” by Artūrs Kaņepājs,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/01

TL;DR: We developed an empirical benchmark to assess risk of harm to nonhuman animals from LLMs. Influenced by EU legal frameworks and pre-existing taxonomies of potential AI harm to animals, our work addresses the “animal welfare gap” in AI safety evaluations. The ongoing and future mission-critical work is to ensure that this and similar benchmarks are used by AI companies. The aim of this post is to introduce you to AnimalHarmBench, the first standardized LLM eval to assess the level of risk of

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15:01

“Animal farming impacts soil nematodes, mites, and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/01

Side note. You can give me feedback here (anonymously or not).Summary I estimateanimal farming: Decreases the living time of (wild) soil nematodes, mites, and springtailshugely more than it increases that of directly affected animals. Increases the welfare of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails hugely more than it changes that of directly affected animals. My best guess isthatthose soil animals have negative lives, so I think decreasing their animal-years by increasing land use is beneficial

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14:16

[Linkpost] “How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired:...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/01

This is a link post. Tl;dr: In this post, I introduce a concept I call surface area for serendipity — the informal, behind-the-scenes work that makes it easier for others to notice, trust, and collaborate with you. In a job market where some EA and animal advocacy roles attract over 1,300 applicants, relying on traditional applications alone is unlikely to land you a role. This post offers a tactical roadmap to the hidden layer of hiring: small, often unpaid but high-leverage actions that build

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13:03

“Debate: Depopulation Matters” by Richard Y Chappell🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/01

Depopulation is BadPlace your vote or view results.disagreeagree After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso is one of the most [...] ---Outline:(01:36) The Facts(02:50) Is Population Bad?(03:39) Climate change(05:30) Progress comes from people(08:29) More Good is Better(09:59) Related Reading(10:29) Framing the DebateThe original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---First published: July 1st,

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4:27

“Do we need a new Moral Weights Project?” by NickLaing

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/30

Is now the time to add to RP's great work? Someone should commission new moral weights work in the next yearPlace your vote or view results.disagreeagree Rethink's [...] ---Outline:(00:09) Is now the time to add to RP's great work?(01:54) Arguments against more Moral Weights work(02:32) Steps I'd like to see in a new projectThe original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 30th, 2025 Source:

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11:58

“Don’t Eat Honey” by Bentham’s Bulldog

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/30

Crosspost from my blog. (I think this is a pretty important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it—thanks!) There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products. Now,

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1:02

“If you want to be vegan but you worry about health...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/30

1) They're unlikely to be sentient (few neurons, immobile) 2) If they are sentient, the farming practices look likely to be pretty humane 3) They're extremely nutritionally dense Buying canned smoked oysters/mussels and eating them plain or on crackers is super easy and cheap. It's an acquired taste for some, but I love them. --- First published: June 30th, 2025 Source:

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1:09

“If you want to be vegan but you worry about health...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/30

1) They're unlikely to be sentient (few neurons, immobile) 2) If they are sentient, the farming practices look likely to be pretty humane 3) They're extremely nutritionally dense Buying canned smoked oysters/mussels and eating them plain or on crackers is super easy and cheap. It's an acquired taste for some, but I love them. --- First published: June 30th, 2025 Source:

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4:51

“Who Are Your EA Role Models?” by EAvalues🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/30

Learning from Inspiring Figures in Our Community Background This post emerged from discussions during the EA values project, where we observed that many community members cite specific individuals (whether EA founders, organization leaders, or mentors) as key influences in their journey into effective altruism. Understanding who inspires us and why can help us identify the values and approaches that make EA compelling to newcomers and sustaining for existing members. Historical movements have often

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2,063 results

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