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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

10:13

“Rejected from all the ‘EA’ Jobs you applied for -...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/06

Hi, have you been rejected from all the 80K listed EA jobs you’ve applied for? It sucks, right? Welcome to the club. What might be comforting is that you (and I) are not alone. EA Job listings are extremely competitive, and in the classic EA career path, you just get rejected over and over. Many others have written about their rejection experience, here, here, and here. Even if it is quite normal for very smart, hardworking, proactive, and highly motivated EAs to get rejected from high-impact

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10:04

“My TED Talk” by LewisBollard

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/05

Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. How I decided what to say — and what not to I’m excited to share my TED talk. Here I want to share the story of how the talk came to be, and the three biggest decisions I struggled with in drafting it. The backstory Last fall, I posted on X about Trump's new Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke

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8:28

“Is Now an Unusually Good Time to Pursue Political...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/04

Some quick but important disclaimers: I'm definitely not an expert in the topics discussed, and the thoughts I've put together here are not particularly rigorous. This is really just a call for broader discussion of this topic, and a request for people to consider acting on or evaluating the "Next Steps" below. This article was largely written with animal welfare considerations in mind. Though you could substitute in different cause areas, this obviously introduces different considerations (I

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10:16

“What failure looks like for animals” by Alistair...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/04

Introduction Inspired by Paul Christiano's 2019 piece What failure looks like, we sketch a range of ways in which a future with powerful AI may go badly for animals. We suggest: At some point in the future, AI is likely to become very powerful (e.g. AGI, TAI, ASI). This point may be soon (e.g. by 2030). Powerful AI is likely to have a huge impact on animals. We don’t know what this impact on animals will be, and it could be very bad or catastrophic. Here are two philosophical assumptions we make

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16:00

“EA in the Lakes - Reflections” by Kestrel🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/03

This is a set of personal reflections from running EA in the Lakes, a lower-cost retreat in the northern UK. (we've also got some great photos of reflections in water sources, if that's more your thing.) -- The organising team: I was the organising team. To be fair, my housemate (who works in mental health) was going to come along and do participant welfare / shuttle driving but then had to be at counselling supervision, and my backup event cook friend got a paid cooking job that weekend as well

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1:41

[Linkpost] “Assessing Near-Term Accuracy in the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/03

This is a link post. Forecasting Research Institute just released a new report: Assessing Near-Term Accuracy in the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament In June–October 2022, we convened 169 people to participate in the “Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament” (XPT). The XPT participants included both superforecasters with proven forecasting track records and domain experts with subject-matter expertise. The tournament incentivized accurate forecasting and persuasive argumentation about long-term

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8:26

“Chip Production Policy Won’t Matter as Much as You’d...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/02

tl;dr - If timelines are short, it's too late, and if they are long (and if we don't all die,) the way to win the "AI race" is to generate more benefit from AI, not control of chip production. In AI policy, there's a lot of focus on the speed frontier AI develops and becomes increasingly important for the economy, and creates substantial new risks of loss of control. There is also a lot of focus on the chips needed for training and running the frontier models, which involves industrial policy

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78:55

“Anthropic’s leading researchers acted as moderate...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/02

In 2021, a circle of researchers left OpenAI, after a bitter dispute with their executives. They started a competing company, Anthropic, stating that they wanted to put safety first. The safety community responded with broad support. Thought leaders recommended engineers to apply, and allied billionaires invested.[1] Anthropic's focus has shifted – from internal-only research and cautious demos of model safety and capabilities, toward commercialising models for Amazon and the military. Despite the

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1:51

“I bet superforecaster David Manheim 2 k$ that the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/02

I and David Manheim, a Good Judgement's superforecaster, agreed on the following bet on 19 May 2025: If the mean monthly unemployment rate in the United States (US) in 2027, as reportedby the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), is higher than 8 %, I donate2 k$ to an organisation or fund of David's choice in January 2028. Otherwise, David donates 1 k$ to an organisation or fund of my choice in January 2028. Currently, it wouldbe the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research's (CEARCH's) High

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3:52

“Why Experienced Founders Should Still Consider...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/01

The AIM incubation program was always built a little like the incubation program I wish I'd had when I was much younger and founding Charity Science Outreach or Charity Science Health. For me, founding was going to happen with or without a program, and yet even 10 years and three projects into founding, I'm still seriously considering going through my own program if I found again (I'm considering both the AIM charity program and the AIM Founding to Give program). I think the value proposition for

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6:26

“Want to make the future go well for animals? Apply...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/09/01

🚀 Applications are now live for two future-facing animal welfare fellowships from Sentient Futures! Application Deadlines: Prioritizing Neglected Animals Fellowship: Learner deadline: September 15 Facilitator deadline: September 23 AI×Animals Fellowship: Learner deadline: October 8 Facilitator deadline: September 17 AI×Animals Fellowship AI×Animals is an 8-week program preparing learners for impactful careers at the intersection of AI and animal welfare. As part of the fellowship, learners

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12:39

“AI Safety’s Talent Pipeline is Over-optimised for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/31

Thank you to all the wonderful people who've taken the time to share their thoughts with me. All opinions are my own: Will Aldred, Jonah Boucher, Deena Englander, Dewi Erwan, Bella Forristal, Patrick Gruban, William Gunn, Tobias Häberli, James Herbert, Adam Jones, Michael Kerrison, Schäfer Kleinert, Chris Leong, Cheryl Luo, Sobanan Narenthiran, Alicia Pollard, Will Saunter, Nate Simmons, Sam Smith, Chengcheng Tan, Simon Taylor, Ben West, Peter Wildeford, Jian Xin.Executive Summary There is broad

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3:50

“I Am Not a Good Fit: Reflections on My Journey with...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/30

I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too. Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult. I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make

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3:59

“I Am Not a Good Fit: Reflections on My Journey with...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/30

I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too. Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult. I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make

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19:25

“Reflections on EA Spain’s First National Retreat” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/30

Introduction We recently hosted a weekend-long, 22 person retreat in Spain to bring together budding EA communities from the two biggest cities: Barcelona and Madrid, as well as EAs from other parts of the country. In this post, we’ll walk through a brief history of community building in Spain, why we chose to do the retreat, how we think it went, and what our plans are for the near future. We think the How did we plan the retreat? and Lessons Learned sections will be particularly valuable for other

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7:57

“CEA is hiring for a Chief of Staff (Events Team)” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/30

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is seeking a strong operator to join our Events team as Chief of Staff, providing essential support to scale up the effective altruism community's largest conference series and event portfolio.Apply now About CEA and the Events team The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA, that's us!) is an organization dedicated to building and stewarding a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world's most pressing problems and taking action to

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16:42

“Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/29

Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet) Epistemic status: I think you should interpret this as roughly something like “GenAI is not so powerful that it shows up in the most obvious way of analyzing the data, but maybe if someone did a more careful analysis which controlled for e.g. macroeconomic trends they would find that GenAI is indeed causing faster growth.” Some people have asked me to consider going back to earning-to-give, and so I am

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3:42

“The ‘community’ tag is problematic” by Arepo

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/29

It was originally introduced as a way to separate out FTX-scandal related tags. Now that that purpose is no longer relevant it serves as a noisy but biased way of de facto deprioritising posts. It's also very top-down: ironically, the community can't tag or untag community; only CEA can do that. I worry this has lead to a consistent bias in CEA posts not receiving the tag - see e.g. this recent post, which is about as community-oriented as anything I've seen on the forum. [1] As an experiment, see

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5:01

[Linkpost] “Not stepping on bugs” by Yadav

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/29

This is a link post. I let a tooth rot for over a year. It was my upper right second molar, the one just before the wisdom tooth. Every time I ate something hard, like a peanut, it would wedge into the decay and shoot a spike of pain through my upper jaw. I was lazy, so I ignored it until it got worse. And then it did. One afternoon in June, a truly terrible toothache set in. Before I could get an emergency dental appointment, I found myself standing in the shower, letting hot water run over my head

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3:43

“AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto” by J. Birch

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/08/29

One of my goals for this year was to write a piece setting out my own views on the topic of AI consciousness and the possible paths forward. I wrote it because I realized that I'd co-authored a string of pieces (Butlin et al. 2023; Long et al. 2024; Keeling et al. 2024; Caviola et al. 2025; Colombatto et al. 2025) and yet none of these quite captured my personal position as of 2025. I've also given media interviews but they're always a bad way to explain your views clearly. To make matters worse,

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2,309 results

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