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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

8:06

[Linkpost] “Why ‘Solving Alignment’ Is Likely a...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/07

This is a link post. A common framing of the AI alignment problem is that it's a technical hurdle to be overcome. A clever team at DeepMind or Anthropic would publish a paper titled "Alignment is All You Need," everyone would implement it, and we'd all live happily ever after in harmonious coexistence with our artificial friends. I suspect this perspective constitutes a category mistake on multiple levels. Firstly, it presupposes that the aims, drives, and objectives of both the artificial general

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17:14

[Linkpost] “AI Governance to Avoid Extinction: The...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/07

This is a link post. We’re excited to release a new AI governance research agenda from the MIRI Technical Governance Team. With this research agenda, we have two main aims: to describe the strategic landscape of AI development and to catalog important governance research questions. We base the agenda around four high-level scenarios for the geopolitical response to advanced AI development. Our favored scenario involves building the technical, legal, and institutional infrastructure required to

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7:58

“EA as a Tree of Questions” by OGTutzauer🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/06

Introduction As a community builder, I sometimes get into conversations with EA-skeptics that aren't going to sway the person I'm talking to. The Tree of Questions is a tool I use to be more sure of having effective conversations, faster identifying the crux. Much of this is inspired by Scott Alexander's "tower of assumptions" and Benjamin Todd's ideas of The Core of EA. The Tree a trunk with core ideas almost all EAs accept - and without which you have to jump through some very specific hoops in

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15:38

“The crucible — how I think about the situation with...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/06

The basic situation The world is wild and terrible and wonderful and rushing forwards so so fast. Modern economies are tremendous things, allowing crazy amounts of coordination. People have got really very good at producing stuff. Long-term trends are towards more affluence, and less violence. The enlightenment was pretty fantastic not just for bringing us better tech, but also more truthseeking, better values, etc. People, on the whole, are basically good — they want good things for others, and

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0:53

“Vetted Causes’ 2025 Charity Recommendations” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/05

Vetted Causes is excited to announce our 2025 charity recommendations: Animal Legal Defense Fund Fish Welfare Initiative Shrimp Welfare Project Each of these recommended charities has received a published review (linked above), and a $1,000 donation in support of their work. Please join us in recognizing these organizations for their outstanding contributions! ---First published: May 5th, 2025 Source:

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1:57

“We don’t have evidence that the best charities are...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/05

I very frequently hear the statement "the best charities are over 1000x more cost effective than the average". This is often alongside the accompanying graph. Where does this figure come from? Most sources link it to Toby Ord's 2013 paper "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health". The data in this paper comes from the 2006 paper "Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries". How should this information affect our claims as EAs? 1. We should not extrapolate this

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13:21

“Interpretability Will Not Reliably Find Deceptive...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/05

(Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal hot takes and do not in any way represent my employer's views.)TL;DR:** I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety**[1]** of superintelligent systems** via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise[2]. Interpretability seems a valuable tool here and remains worth investing in, as it will hopefully increase the reliability we can achieve. However,

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6:37

“Update: EAIF is now more funding constrained” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/04

Tl;dr: Over the past few months, the EA Infrastructure Fund's (EAIF) grantmaking has increased significantly, and funding has become more of a constraint. Your donations would help us continue supporting impactful projects.The situation EA Infrastructure Fund aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. In November 2024, we postedsaying that EAIF wasn’t funding constrained at the time. We’ve

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16:21

“Creating Market Incentives or, Shrimp Stunning...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/03

Introduction This post is intended to be read after reading our previous post outlining Shrimp Welfare Project's 2030 Vision & Absorbency Plans. This post therefore assumes some baseline knowledge of our Humane Slaughter Initiative, which can be found in that post. Problem(s) Market Incentives How do we create the incentives for the market to shift to pre-slaughter stunning? The suffering shrimps experience at the end of their lives can be reduced by rendering them unconscious prior to

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33:47

“Shrimp Welfare Project’s 2030 Vision & Absorbency...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/03

Introduction ~440 billion shrimps are farmed each year [1]. This is over 5x the total number of all farmed land animals put together [2]. Many farmed shrimps suffer from conditions that can and should be addressed, such as poor water quality, high stocking densities, inhumane slaughter methods, and avoidable mutilations (such as eyestalk ablation) [3]. Shrimp Welfare Project is an organisation of people who believe that shrimps are capable of suffering and deserve our moral consideration [4]. We

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2:22

“Oliver Habryka on OpenPhil and GoodVentures” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/03

In this episode of our podcast, Elizabeth Van Nostrand and I talk to Oliver Habryka of Lightcone Infrastructure about his thoughts on the Open Philanthropy Project, which he believes has become stifled by the PR interests of its primary funder, Good Ventures. Oliver's main claim is that around mid 2023 or early 2024, Good Ventures founder Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation, and this put a straight jacket over what Open Phil could fund. Moreover it was not enough for a

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12:30

“Why I am Still Skeptical about AGI by 2030” by James...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/02

Introduction I have been writing posts critical of mainstream EA narratives about AI capabilities and timelines for many years now. Compared to the situation when I wrote my posts in 2018 or 2020, LLMs now dominate the discussion, and timelines have also shrunk enormously. The ‘mainstream view’ within EA now appears to be that human-level AI will be arriving by 2030, even as early as 2027. This view has been articulated by 80,000 Hours, on the forum (though see this excellent piece excellent piece

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8:26

“EA North 2025 retrospective” by matthes

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/02

intro EA North was a one-day conference in Sheffield (UK) aimed at people in the North of England (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, etc.). The event had 35 attendees on the day.[1] The cost per attendee was £50 and the cost per new connection was £11. The total cost was £1765. The attendee feedback was quite positive (see below). I am happy with how it all turned out and think it was a very worthwhile use of my time. Thank you for everyone who attended! Special thanks to the speakers and

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14:23

“12x more cost-effective than EAG - how I organised...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/02

I put on a small one-day conference. The cost per attendee was £50 (vs £1.2k for EAGs) and the cost per new connection was £11 (vs £130 for EAGs). intro EA North was a one-day event for the North of England. 35 people showed up on the day. In total, I spent £1765 (≈ $2.4k), including paying myself £20/h for 30h total. This money will be reimbursed by EA UK[1]. The cost per attendee was £50 and the cost per new connection was £11. These are significantly lower than for EAG events, suggesting that

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4:44

“Reflections on 7 years building the EA Forum — and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

I’m ironically not a very prolific writer. I’ve preferred to stay behind the scenes here and leave the writing to my colleagues who have more of a knack for it. But a goodbye post is something I must write for myself. Perhaps I’m getting old and nostalgic, because what came out wound up being a wander down memory lane. I probably am getting old and nostalgic, but I also hope I’ve communicated something about my love for this community and the gratefulness for the chance to serve you all.My story of

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2:43

“Community Polls for the Community” by Will Aldred

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

The Meta Coordination Forum (MCF) is a place where EA leaders are polled on matters of EA community strategy. I thought it could be fun (and interesting) to run these same polls on EAs at large.[1] Note: I link to the corresponding MCF results throughout this post, but I recommend readers don’t look at those until after voting themselves, to avoid anchoring. (MCF results) (MCF results) (MCF results) (MCF results) (MCF results; see also the AIS field-building survey results) (MCF results; see

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4:40

“Arkose is closing, but you can help” by Arkose

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

Arkose is an AI safety fieldbuilding organisation that supports experienced machine learning professionals — such as professors and research engineers — to engage with the field. We focus on those new to AI safety, and have strong evidence that our work helps them take meaningful first steps. Since December 2023, we’ve held nearly 300 one-on-one calls with senior machine learning researchers and engineers. In follow-up surveys, 79% reported that the call accelerated their involvement in AI

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36:52

“Should we expect the future to be good?” by Neil...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

Audio note: this article contains 54 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. 1. Introduction 'Should we expect the future to be good? This is an important question for many reasons. One such reason is that the answer to this question has implications for what our intermediate goals should be. If we should expect the future to be good, then it would be relatively more important for us to focus on ensuring

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6:27

“Debate: should EA avoid using AI art outside of...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

There is a growing movement to ban or discourage the use of AI art, citing ethical concerns over unethical data scraping, environmental cost, and harm to the incomes of real artists. This sentiment seems most prevalent in left-leaning online spaces like reddit and bluesky. Some are even starting to associate AI art with the far-right, with one popular article declaring it to be “the new aesthetics of fascism”. As an example of how far this movement is spreading, the subreddit for the poker

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1:30

“Prioritizing Work” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/05/01

I recently read a blog post that concluded with: When I'm on my deathbed, I won't look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I'll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved. Setting aside that some people don't have the economic breathing room to make this kind of tradeoff, what jumps out at me is the implication that you're not working on something important that you'll endorse in retrospect. I don't think the author is envisioning directly valuable

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2,074 results

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