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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

7:27

“Sense-making about extreme power concentration” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/14

Various people are worried about AI causing extreme power concentration of some form, for example via: Powergrabs The intelligence curse Gradual disempowerment I have been talking to some of these people and trying to sense-make about ‘power concentration’. These are some notes on that, mostly prompted by some comment exchanges with Nora Ammann (in the below I’m riffing on her ideas but not representing her views). Sharing because I found some of the below helpful for thinking with, and maybe

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15:58

“Updates on the effective giving ecosystem (MCF 2025...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

Written by Lucas Moore (Partnerships Manager) and Sjir Hoeijmakers (CEO), Giving What We Can. This memo provides updates on and a high-level overview of the effective giving landscape as of mid-2025, adapted from an earlier memo for Effective Giving Summit in June 2025. It is based largely on information gathered through our 2025 EG ecosystem pulse survey and builds on the memos we wrote for the MCF last year: 1, 2, 3, 4. Please leave a comment if you’d like us to clarify anything further. All

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15:11

“US public attitudes towards artificial intelligence...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

This report is the second in a sequence detailing the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults aimed at tracking and understanding public attitudes towards effective giving and multiple impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with ~5600 respondents.[1] Results from our first wave of Pulse, fielded from July-September of 2024, can be found here, with the forum sequence version

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3:48

“Student group organising is hard and important” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

It's been several years since I was an EA student group organiser, so please forgive any part of this post which feels out of touch (& correct me in comments!) Wow, student group organising is hard. A few structural things that make it hard to be an organiser: You maybe haven’t had a job before, or have only had kind of informal jobs. So, you might not have learned a lot of stuff about how to accomplish things at work. You’re probably trying to do a degree at the same time, which is hard

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2:14

“SPCA cruelty enforcement case clears another hurdle”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

Hi EAs! We posted earlier about Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC) proving in court that SPCAs can sue to stop agricultural cruelty. LIC had survived a demurrer in our lawsuit against well-known dairy Alexandre Family Farm. In a victory for farmed animals, the Humboldt County Superior Court had acknowledged LIC's power, as a California society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCA), to prevent animal cruelty through civil litigation. Since then, Alexandre petitioned the California Court of

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17:32

“How cost-effective are AI safety YouTubers?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

Early work on ”GiveWell for AI Safety” Intro EA was founded on the principle of cost-effectiveness. We should fund projects that do more with less, and more generally, spend resources as efficiently as possible. And yet, while much interest, funding, and resources in EA have shifted towards AI safety, it's rare to see any cost-effectiveness calculations. The focus on AI safety is based on vague philosophical arguments that the future could be very large and valuable, and thus whatever is done

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20:54

“My talk on AI risks at the National Conservatism...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/12

Lately I’ve been trying to raise awareness of AI risks among American conservatives. Stopping the reckless development of advanced AI agents (including Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)) should be a human issue, not a partisan issue. Yet most people working in AI safety advocacy lean to the Left politically, and we seem to be ignoring many potential allies on the Right. This neglect of conservative allies seems suboptimal, given that the Republican Party

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5:58

“Want to start a Philanthropic Organization?...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/11

A special edition of our flagship CE program, focused on increasing effectiveness in the philanthropic sector. TL;DR: Each year, AIM incubates new nonprofits in global health and farmed animal welfare. In 2026, we’ll also run a special edition round dedicated to launching ~3–5 new philanthropic organizations. Applications for all three 2026 cohorts are open until October 5th. What We’re thrilled to announce that in 2026, AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Program will expand to three rounds per

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13:40

“Your Sacrifice Portfolio Is Probably Terrible” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/11

or Maximizing Good Within Your Personal Constraints Note: The specific numbers and examples below are approximations meant to illustrate the framework. Your actual calculations will vary based on your situation, values, and cause area. The goal isn't precision—it's to start thinking explicitly about impact per unit of sacrifice rather than assuming certain actions are inherently virtuous. You're at an EA meetup. Two people are discussing their impact: Alice: "I went vegan, buy only secondhand,

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11:53

“What happens when you send Ugandan students to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/10

Note: This post was crossposted from the Lauren Policy blog by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Most of this blog is about international migration, and particularly, the economics of international migration. I write about income gains, but more in the sense of “here is the headline result of a working paper” rather than personal stories. This post is an exception to that. I joined Malengo for their annual retreat[1] this year,

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12:40

“Good government” by rosehadshar

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/10

In the town hall in Siena, there is a set of frescos by Lorenzetti called the Allegory of Good and Bad Government. It was painted between 1338 and 1339 on the walls of the Sala dei Nove, where Siena's magistrates held council. One of the long walls shows the Effects of good government. The harvest is ready in the fields and vineyards beyond the city walls, a farmer drives his pig to town, the city is clean and elegant, and citizens are dancing in the streets to celebrate a wedding. One of the

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18:59

“Sam’s Hot(?) Takes on EA Community Building” by Sam...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/09

Executive Summary I think EA community building is too focused on frameworks and optimising for impact when what actually works is much more basic: genuine relationships and starting where people already are, not just treating the community as instrumental for impact, but something valuable in and of itself. Learn from groups that actually work. Every other society at freshers' fair is trying to build student communities too, and many of them do it better than us. We're not special just because we

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7:23

“Marginally More Effective Altruism” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/09

There's a huge amount of energy spent on how to get the most QALYs/$. And a good amount of energy spent on how to increase total $. And you might think that across those efforts, we are succeeding in maximizing total QALYs. I think a third avenue is under investigated: marginally improving the effectiveness of ineffective capital. That's to say, improving outcomes, only somewhat, for the pool of money that is not at all EA-aligned. This cash is not being spent optimally, and likely never will be

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7:28

“When the world feels unstable, don’t let that drive...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/09

I drafted this in May. I’m just getting this post out the door now, but the atmosphere feels similar. I’m feeling unusually worried right now about problems in the world. I'm typically skeptical when people claim things are uniquely bad—and I counter their claim with some uplifting graph from Our World in Data. But recent developments around AI timelines, global political changes, and cuts to important global health programs, have left me more pessimistic than usual. I'm reminded of physicist

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23:23

“Who should found high-impact NGOs in the Global...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/08

Reflections from an Incubation Program in Latin America This is the second in a series of posts about a nonprofit incubation program we’re running in Spanish-speaking Latin America, funded by Open Philanthropy. The goal is to support the creation of new, evidence-based organizations that implement cost-effective interventions adapted to local contexts. You can find the first post here. We have finished selecting the first cohort of founders. In this post we will introduce the framework used to

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3:43

[Linkpost] “Room for optimism on cultured meat?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/08

This is a link post. ACX/Scott Alexander's summary: But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it's more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. From the report: Not long after Humbird's analysis was

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8:58

“Announcing: The ‘Essays on Longtermism’ Competition”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/08

‘Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future’ was recently published by Oxford University Press. It's open access — you can read it for free here[1]. The book covers the case for longtermism, ways to forecast and evaluate the future, discussions of our priorities in light of longtermism, and the prospects for longtermism in institutions. David Thorstad goes into more detail on the book's contents here. An academic book like this is published in the hope that it will generate more

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9:16

“Essays on longtermism” by David Thorstad

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/08

Introduction We are pleased to announce the publication of Essays on Longtermism, now available from Oxford University Press. This is the first peer-reviewed edited volume on longtermism, containing an introduction and 30 substantive chapters, which are all available open access here. (Please bear with us as we work through a few issues with the ebook). The book is edited by Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford), Jacob Barrett (Vanderbilt University), and David Thorstad (Vanderbilt University)

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4:48

“How big a deal is donating 10% of your income...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/07

Why 10%? Because that's the number of the 10% Pledge. No other reason. How big a deal is donating 10% of your pre-tax income really? On the one hand, 10% of one's income feels like a lot of money no matter how much you make. But on the other hand, incomes vary tremendously such that no matter how much you make, giving away 10% of your income won't change your relative income rank by much. If you're an American who income is higher than 20% / X% / 80% of Americans, then your effective income

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4:48

“How big a deal is donating 10% of your income...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/07

Why 10%? Because that's the number of the 10% Pledge. No other reason. How big a deal is donating 10% of your pre-tax income really? On the one hand, 10% of one's income feels like a lot of money no matter how much you make. But on the other hand, incomes vary tremendously such that no matter how much you make, giving away 10% of your income won't change your relative income rank by much. If you're an American who income is higher than 20% / X% / 80% of Americans, then your effective income

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2,309 results

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