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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

7:23

“GWWC’s 2023–2024 impact evaluation (executive...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/04

This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can's impact evaluation for the 2023–2024 period. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and working sheet for this evaluation. We look forward to your questions and comments! This report estimates Giving What We Can's (GWWC's) impact over the 2023–2024 period, expressed in terms of our giving multiplier — the donations GWWC caused to go to highly effective charities per dollar we spent. We

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36:15

“2. Why intuitive comparisons of large-scale impact...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/04

Audio note: this article contains 55 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. We’ve seen so far that unawareness leaves us with gaps in the impartial altruistic justification for our decisions. It's fundamentally unclear how the possible outcomes of our actions trade off against each other. But perhaps this ambiguity doesn’t matter much in practice, since the consequences that predominantly shape the

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11:34

“The Importance of Blasting Good Ideas Into The...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

Crossposted from my blog. When I started this blog in high school, I did not imagine that I would cause The Daily Show to do an episode about shrimp, containing the following dialogue: Andres: I was working in investment banking. My wife was helping refugees, and I saw how meaningful her work was. And I decided to do the same. Ronny: Oh, so you're helping refugees? Andres: Well, not quite. I'm helping shrimp. (Would be a crazy rug pull if, in fact, this did not happen and the dialogue was just

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44:03

“Cost-effectiveness accounting for soil nematodes,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

I am looking for work, and welcome suggestions for posts.Summary I thinkthe impact of the vast majority of interventions is driven by effects on wild animals. In particular, by effects from land use change on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, which are the most abundant terrestrial animals. There are 4.4*10^20top soil nematodes, and 10^19soil arthropods, “≈95% of which are soil mites and springtails”. I estimate random soil nematodes, mites, and springtailshave (expected) welfare ranges(as

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12:40

“The EA’s guide to Moral Ambition” by OGTutzauer🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

Epistemic status: An email thread with a representative for Moral Ambition, consumption of Rutger Bregman's and Moral Ambition's book and social media. A year of leading my local EA group, deep understanding of EA ideas. Introduction In early 2025, historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman published his book Moral Ambition, urging readers to "stop wasting talent and start making a difference." The book serves as a compliment and guide to the movement he's founded [1] called The School for

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11:21

“EA Forum update (June 2025)” by Sarah Cheng

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

In January, I wrote about the EA Forum Team's shift in direction. Since then, our usage metrics have been pretty stable, nice! 😊 (Compare to 2024 where the metrics were going steadily downward the whole year.) When I wrote that post, my role was focused on the EA Forum, and I had intended to spend the majority of my effort on the EA Forum. However, my role and my team are in flux right now, primarily in order to better align with CEA's strategy. I’m currently running the CEA Online Team, and so

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34:01

“3. Why impartial altruists should suspend judgment...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

Audio note: this article contains 135 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. To recap, first, we face an epistemic challenge beyond uncertainty over possible futures. Due to unawareness, we can’t conceive of many relevant futures in the first place, which makes the standard EV framework ill-suited for impartial altruistic decision-making. And second, we can’t trust that our intuitive comparisons of

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10:00

“Advice for Sending Cold Messages to Busy People at...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/03

TL;DR The main thing I expect busy people want when receiving an EAG cold message is: Enough info to roughly estimate the expected impact they’d have by helping you, Conciseness My recommended message structure: Background (1-2 sentences) 1-3 pieces of evidence of your future impact/potential (1-2 sentences each) What you want help with: Concreteness encouraged, eg specific upcoming choices (max 1 paragraph) Why they, specifically, are a good person to help with this (skip if obvious) A concrete

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5:22

[Linkpost] “A Defense of Mid-Tier EA/LW Writing” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/02

This is a link post. I think it's easy to get disenchanted when writing posts or comments on blogs. I've particularly noticed this for the EA Forum and LessWrong. Engagement can be highly random, and often rewards behaviors not correlated with quality. For example, posts like "10 more reasons to dislike Sam Altman" will often do a lot better than "My theoretical exploration of a new idea regarding AI policy"[1] It's incredibly easy to have excellent work be completely ignored. I've experienced

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13:19

“The Horror Of Unfathomable Pain” by Bentham’s Bulldog

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/02

Crosspost from my blog. Content warning: this article will discuss extreme agony. This is deliberate; I think it's important to get a glimpse of the horror that fills the world and that you can do something about. I think this is one of my most important articles so I’d really appreciate if you could share and restack it! The world is filled with extreme agony. We go through our daily life mostly ignoring its unfathomably shocking dreadfulness because if we didn’t, we could barely focus on

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25:52

“1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/02

(This sequence assumes basic familiarity with longtermist cause prioritization concepts, though the issues I raise also apply to non-longtermist interventions.) Are EA interventions net-positive from an impartial perspective — one that gives moral weight to all consequences, no matter how distant? What if they’re neither positive, nor negative, nor neutral? Trying to reduce x-risk, improve institutions, or end factory farming might seem robustly positive. After all, we don’t need to be certain in

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20:25

“Estimating the Substitutability between Compute and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/06/01

Audio note: this article contains 127 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Confidence: Medium, underlying data is patchy and relies on a good amount of guesswork, data work involved a fair amount of vibecoding. Intro: Tom Davidson has an excellent post explaining the compute bottleneck objection to the software-only intelligence explosion.[1] The rough idea is that AI research requires two inputs:

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8:47

“Positive effects of EA on mental health” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Mental illness (including struggles that don’t meet a specific diagnosis) is a serious public health burden that affects a large proportion of people. This is true within EA as well as in the general population. In EA, as in any community, it's important for us to try to support those who are struggling. We sometimes see the theory that EA causes unusually bad mental health, but the evidence lightly points toward EA being good or neutral for the wellbeing of most people who engage with it. Most

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10:48

“Farmed Animal Funders: Sharing Our Strategy” by Zoë...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Over the last year and a half, Farmed Animal Funders (FAF) shifted our strategy to leverage our positioning and maximize impact. This post updates the wider EA community on our work and how you can get involved. Summary: FAF unites 50+ philanthropists and foundations reforming and replacing factory farming. Collectively, we direct about 80% of the movement's funding. FAF helps funders—both current members and prospective major funders—increase their giving's impact through shared learning,

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33:46

“Impact Review: Updates from Charity...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Ambitious Impact's Charity Entrepreneurship program has now been running for over 5 years, launching more than 50 charities across animal welfare, global development, mental health, education, and many other cause areas. We’re incredibly proud of the work of our founders and the organisations they have built, yet we take far too little time to celebrate their achievements. In light of this, we’re delighted to share a collection of updates in this post from some of our charities, written by the

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33:46

“Impact Review: Updates from Charity...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Ambitious Impact's Charity Entrepreneurship program has now been running for over 5 years, launching more than 50 charities across animal welfare, global development, mental health, education, and many other cause areas. We’re incredibly proud of the work of our founders and the organisations they have built, yet we take far too little time to celebrate their achievements. In light of this, we’re delighted to share a collection of updates in this post from some of our charities, written by the

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14:10

“Should EA Introductions Be More Transparent About...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Epistemic Status: I think this is a real issue, and think the importance of the issue varies significantly by introductory experience/facilitator. TLDR EA introductions present the movement as cause-neutral, but newcomers discover that most funding and opportunities actually focus on longtermism (especially biosecurity and AI) This creates a "bait and switch" problem where people join expecting balanced cause prioritization but find stark funding hierarchies The solution is honest upfront

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20:57

“How we use back-of-the-envelope calculations in our...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Emma Buckland, Program Associate in Farm Animal Welfare, drafts a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for her colleagues. This post was written by Open Philanthropy Global Health and Wellbeing Staff. Original blog post here. At Open Philanthropy, our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. When making tough calls about which grants will help the most, we rely on a tool that helps clarify expected impact: back-of-the-envelope calculations, or BOTECs. BOTECs

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54:50

“Shift Resources to Advocacy Now (Post 4 of 6 on AI...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

In my previous post in this series, I estimated that we have 3 researchers for every advocate working on US AI governance, and I argued that this ratio is backwards. When allocating staff, you almost always want to have more people working on the more central activity. I argued that in the case of AI policy, the central activity is advocacy, not research, because the core problem to be solved is fixing the bad private incentives faced by AI developers. As I explained, the problem with these

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8:20

“Digital sentience funding opportunities: Support for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/29

Summary I’m excited to announce a “Digital Sentience Consortium” hosted by Longview Philanthropy, in collaboration with The Navigation Fund and Macroscopic Ventures, to support research and applied projects focused on the potential consciousness, sentience, moral status, and experiences of artificial intelligence systems. The opportunities include research fellowships, career transition fellowships, and a broad request for proposals for applied work on these topics. For years, I’ve thought this

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2,070 results

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