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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

3:45

“GIFTing breeder animals is a humanitarian...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/28

This is a memo I wrote for the 2025 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which were encouraged to be highly opinionated to generate discussion on animal advocacy strategy. Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia In 1980, the global population was approximately 4.5 billion and growing. There were emerging concerns about food and nutrition security with 28% of the global population undernourished. Fish was seen as key to combatting this challenge. More than 75% of the world's fish is consumed in developing

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62:38

“Techies Wanted: How STEM Backgrounds Can Advance...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

TL;DR – Individuals with technical backgrounds are well-positioned to advance AI safety policy in numerous ways. Opportunities include both A) technical research directions, including evals, compute governance mechanisms, infosec, and forecasting, and B) career paths for advancing AI policy, including policymaking and communication efforts. Contrary to what many people assume, most of these roles do not require extensive political backgrounds or unusually good social skills, and many technical

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33:13

“Long-Run Human Impact On Wild Animal Suffering: Much...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

1 Controversy (Crosspost of my blog article). Humans affect staggering numbers of wild animals. There are likely quadrillions fewer insects presently walking the face of the earth because of our activities. Most people don’t think this matters—assigning essentially zero weight to bugs. But for reasons I’ve given before at length, and thus won’t repeat here, I think these people are dead wrong. Wild animal suffering is literally the worst thing in the world. Every other present issue is a rounding

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8:01

“Of Sacrifice and Mercy: What Every Muslim Should...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

From Effective Altruism, Lagos State University, we have this message for our fellow muslims: Islam teaches that animals are sentient communities created by Allah, deserving compassion and mercy as the Quran affirms animals form “communities like you” (Quran 6:38) "There is no creature on earth nor a bird that flies with its wings but they are communities like yourselves." —Qur'an 6:38 Prophet Muḥammad (ﷺ) repeatedly modelled kindness to animals: for example he rebuked Aisha when she strucks a

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1:46

[Linkpost] “Hank Green on recognizing invisible...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

This is a link post. From a vlogbrothers video by Hank Green comes the most EA-flavored framing from a non-EA I've ever seen. In the following quote from the video he's referencing the work done by Partners in Health and supported by the YouTube community that exists around him, his brother John Green, and the work they do. More information on that project is in another recent video. I think about this in the context of this community's work in Sierra Leone: already fewer women are dying in

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6:21

“Revamped effectivealtruism.org” by Agnes Stenlund

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

We’ve redesigned effectivealtruism.org to improve understanding and perception of effective altruism, and make it easier to take action. View the new site I led the redesign and will be writing in the first person here, but many others contributed research, feedback, writing, editing, and development. I’d love to hear what you think, here is a feedback form. Redesign goals This redesign is part of CEA's broader efforts to improve how effective altruism is understood and perceived. I focused on

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40:29

“Socratic Persuasion: Giving Opinionated Yet...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/27

The full post is long, but you can 80/20 the value with the 700 word summary! Over half the post is eight optional case studies. Thanks to Jemima Jones, Claude 4 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro for help copy-editing and drafting TL;DR: I recommend giving advice by asking questions to walk someone through key steps in my argument — often I’m missing key info, which comes up quickly as an unexpected answer, while if I’m right I’m more persuasive, and can still express my case. This is useful in a wide range

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14:48

“Rescaling and The Easterlin Paradox (2.0)” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/26

Around 1 month ago, I wrote a similar Forum post on the Easterlin Paradox. I decided to take it down because: 1) after useful comments, the method looked a little half-baked; 2) I got in touch with two academics – Profs. Caspar Kaiser and Andrew Oswald – and we are now working on a paper together using a related method. That blog post actually came to the opposite conclusion, but, as mentioned, I don't think the method was fully thought through. I'm a little more confident about this work. It

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6:23

[Linkpost] “Podcast: How not to waste a billion...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/26

This is a link post. I hosted Meri Beckwith, CEO of Lindus Health, on my podcast Development & Research. Meri founded Lindus after being a clinical trial patient—because he was astounded at how badly clinical drug trials were being run by the world's leading companies.We talk about why clinical trials companies are twenty years behind in adopting new technologies, how a flooded supply closet can cause a billion-dollar clinical trial to fail, and his speculation about the incentives that—so

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20:05

“Transformative AI and Animals: Animal Advocacy Under...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/26

Thanks to Max Taylor, Irina Gueorguiev, Robert Praas, Albert Didriksen, Mark Rogers and Justis Mills (EA Forum) for feedback on this post. All mistakes are my own. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.Executive Summary This post explores how farmed animal advocacy might change in a post-work world enabled by transformative AI (TAI), mass automation, and universal basic income (UBI). It is not a forecast, but a speculative exploration, intended to surface underexplored

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4:13

“What Drives Progress in Nigeria? A personal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/25

I recently had a thought-provoking conversation about progress studies in the Nigerian context. One core question we kept returning to was this: What actually drives progress in Nigeria? From my experience, the answer is rarely the government. In many sectors where the state should be leading—healthcare, science, infrastructure—the reality is stagnation. Corruption and personal interests often override any semblance of strategic policy or institutional continuity. When progress happens, it is

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12:19

[Linkpost] “Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/23

This is a link post. The company released a model it classified as risky — without meeting requirements it previously promised This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. After

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5:12

“Don’t update too much from EA community involvement”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/23

Summary While many people and organisations in the EA community can be great connections, don't assume that just because a person has been in the EA community for a long time, they'll be a good fit for you to work with or be friends with. Don’t assume that just because a project or org has been around for a long time, it would be a good place for you to work. It may be a great opportunity, but it might not. Do some of the usual things you would do to check that this is a good interaction for you

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3:18

“Is There Actually a Standard or Convincing Response...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/22

A while back (as I've just been reminded by a discussion on another thread), David Thorstad wrote a bunch of posts critiquing the idea that small reductions in extinction risk have very high value, because the expected number of people who will exist in the future is very high: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/mistakes-in-moral-mathematics/. The arguments are quite complicated, but the basic points are that the expected number of people in the future is much lower than longtermists

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12:56

“State of the EA Newsletter” by Toby Tremlett🔹

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/22

This is a brushed up memo from a CEA retreat, aimed at orienting staff to the current state of the EA Newsletter, in preparation for a marketing push. If you want to subscribe to the EA Newsletter, you can do so here. Purpose and goal The EA Newsletter is a frankenstein project - built by many people, not all of whom I've met. It's five months off a decade old. I've been its writer and custodian for a year and change (before me it was Lizka, and before her, Aaron Gertler). When it began in 2015,

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37:34

[Linkpost] “The stakes of AI moral status” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/22

This is a link post. Podcast version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app. 1. Introduction Currently, most people treat AIs like tools. We act like AIs don’t matter in themselves. We use them however we please. For certain sorts of beings, though, we shouldn’t act like this. Call such beings “moral patients.” Humans are the paradigm example. But many of us accept that some non-human animals are probably moral patients as well. You shouldn’t kick a stray

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6:55

“A widely shared AI productivity paper was retracted,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/21

Confidence notes: I am a physicist working on computational material science, so I have some familiarity with the field, but don't know much about R&D firms or economics. Some of the links in this article were gathered from a post at pivot-to-ai.com and the BS detector. The paper "Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation" was published as an Arxiv preprint last December, roughly 5 months ago, and was submitted to a top economics journal. The paper claimed to show

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17:37

[Linkpost] “Where’s my ten minute AGI?” by Vasco Grilo🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/20

This is a link post. This is a crosspost for Where's my ten minute AGI? by Hanson Ho, which was originally published on Gradient Updates on 2 May 2025. Recently, METR released a paper arguing that the length of tasks that AIs can do is doubling every 7 months. We can see this in the following graph, where the best AI system[1] is able to do roughly hour-long tasks at a 50% success rate on average: METR's research finds that AIs are rapidly able to do longer and longer tasks, where length is

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2:37

[Linkpost] “US credit rating downgraded, $1T in Gulf...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/20

This is a link post. Executive summary Moody's downgraded the US credit rating as the US budget deficit grows and US borrowing costs rise. House Republicans are advancing a budget that would increase the deficit further. Meanwhile, China is reducing its holdings of US Treasuries and its dependencies on foreign components in its supply chains as it seeks to de-risk its economy from the US and the West. Google announced a new coding agent, AlphaEvolve, that has creative problem-solving abilities. Gulf

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3:03

[Linkpost] “One Year in DC” by tlevin

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/20

This is a link post. (h/t Otis Reid) I think this post captures a lot of important features of the US policymaking system. Pulling out a few especially relevant/broadly applicable sections: 1. There's No Efficient Market For Policy There can be a huge problem that nobody is working on; that is not evidence that it's not a huge problem. Conversely, there can be a marginal problem swamped with policy work; that's not evidence it's really all that big of a deal. On the upside, this means there are

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