EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

14:23

“Results: Cluelessness Critiques Competition” by Will...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/30

Last week, the Forum grappled with cluelessness. The volume of entries (76 essays!)—from newcomers and Forum power users alike—was a happy surprise, and there were many thoughtful contributions beyond those mentioned below.Essay winners First place ($2,500): Elliott Thornley, for Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions Joint second place ($1,500 each): Magnus Vinding (aka ‘unsharp’), for Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification Impartial Partially, for

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9:00

“The Hugging Face attack surprised me” by Ajeya

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/29

Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: It's a major warning shot, and might be the last one we get All opinions are my personal view, and don’t represent my employer or fellow investigators. This week, METR and Redwood Research published the report on our independent investigation into agents’ behavior and motivations in the Hugging Face attack; I was one of the

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6:51

“The Hugging Face attack surprised me” by Ajeya

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/29

Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Subtitle: It's a major warning shot, and might be the last one we get This week, METR and Redwood Research published the report on our independent investigation into agents’ behavior and motivations in the Hugging Face attack; I was one of the investigators. This was an absolutely wild incident — I encourage you to check out the full

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15:17

“Is mild lifelong acne really worse than stunted...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/28

A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones. Summary I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed. Epistemic status Exploratory and back-of-envelope, ~100 hours invested in an area well outside my

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8:50

“AI Safety Acculturation is Neglected” by jenn

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/26

At the local AI safety co-working space, there are ~two kinds of regulars.There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists. Then there's the kind of regular who comes in with many years of impressive industry or government experience, who realized in the last few years that it is

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24:28

“Is Extinction Risk Mitigation Uniquely...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/26

This is a linkpost for Is Extinction Risk Mitigation Uniquely Cost-Effective? Not in Standard Population Models by Gustav Alexandrie and Maya Eden, which was published on 18 August 2025 as chapter 20 of the book Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future. I got Claude Opus 5 to write the summary and 2 objections below after some iteration. The objections came from me. Gustav said the summary "looks correct from very quickly skimming it, though I may well have missed if there are

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10:54

“We need more empirical research on biological AI...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/26

Epistemic status: We are quite confident that Biological AI models (BAIMs) safety requires further work, but uncertain about its scale. The apparent gap may be refuted by one experiment, filled by a few researchers working for a year, or prove to be substantial enough to call for an entire subfield. Disclaimer: this post has been written with a colleague, that due to her current job can't post out of her own forum account What we’re looking for: please poke holes in this. In particular, we’d value:

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15:15

“Beware Silver Bullets: Are we making “welfare tech”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/24

Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata. Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is interspersed with side comments about dogs

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15:01

“Hiring Good In-House Counsel - a braindump” by Molly

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/24

I'm Molly Kovite, General Counsel at Coefficient Giving. I joined in 2021 as the organization's first lawyer and have since grown the team to (soon to be) seven lawyers and three legal admins. Over the past couple of months, a number of AI safety organizations have asked me about whether they should hire in-house counsel and if so, what they should look for. This post is my attempt to write down what I've told them: how to tell when you've outgrown outside counsel, what in-house counsel does and

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11:02

“Moral Imagination & Effective Altruism” by Toby_Ord

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/24

Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'. As examples, he gives: Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens. St Gregory of Nyssa's argument (in 379 CE) that the entire institution of slavery was morally wrong. Joyce Roush's (1998 CE)

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23:10

“How One Clueless Layman Makes Decisions in Animal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/23

This personal post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation.TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless. To avoid choosing actions at random, I decided to write a decision procedure for myself and to indicate the assumptions that accompany it. This does not constitute a new argument on the topic. Rather, this is a

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13:19

“Hard Questions Aren’t Hopeless” by Richard Y Chappell🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/23

Why I favor fallibilism over cluelessness I’ve long been struck by a structural commonality between radical skepticism and cluelessness worries. Since the EA Forum has been discussing cluelessness this week, I figured I’d take another stab at explaining why I don’t find it a credible concern. (Too late to qualify for the official contest, alas.) Skeptical Burdens Open-minded people may be tempted by a discourse norm on which we should treat our interlocutors as epistemic equals in a sense that

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11:05

“College EA Meetups Everywhere: Call For Organizers”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/21

This is a cross-post from Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander's Substack. Original post here. There are ACX meetup groups in cities around the world. Every fall and spring, I make a Meetups Everywhere post to try to signal-boost and support them. This summer, I want to focus on college effective altruist groups in particular. Many colleges have effective altruist meetup groups or clubs. They range from fun social gatherings of like-minded individuals, to serious organizations working hard to build a

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8:29

“Thoughts on Taking OpenAI Foundation Funding” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/21

In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit, who was working on national security policy at OpenAI and was thinking about how to prepare for a future in which models could seriously assist attackers in creating pandemics. We had a call, and when I shared notes with my team their main response was: "maybe start with not making models that can do that?" Which is, in many ways, fair: by continuing to push the frontier in biological capabilities, OpenAI's actions were making things worse on many of the problems

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5:59

“Effective Altruism and End-Times Fascism” by Denis

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/21

I just read an article from The Guardian, written in April 2025 (I'm a bit behind on my reading ...). It's a good read, but that's noy why I share it here. What I want to highlight is something I'm seeing more and more, which is very negative portrayals and stereotyping of EA. Some EA's seem ok with this, or accept that it goes with the territory. I vehemently disagree. I would argue that bringing EA thinking to the centre of the Overton window would be the single most impactful achievement of the

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3:11

“Sentient Futures Summit Bay Area 2027” by Sentient...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/20

Sentient Futures Summit (SFS) Bay Area 2027 is a three-day conference taking place on March 12 to 14, 2027 @ Mox, San Francisco, exploring the impact of AI and other emerging technologies on sentient non-humans, both biological and potentially artificial. This is the 7th conference of our series, which has served as a premier meeting place for those working to ensure that non-human sentient beings are not left behind in the long-term future. What to expect: A range of talks, workshops, and

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26:12

“WAI is starting Phase 3 of field-building for wild...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/19

Summary This post will summarize the trajectory of Wild Animal Initiative's field-building for wild animal welfare science so far, along with patterns and indicators we want to see more of going forward. Beginning with an initial phase focused on establishing credibility and awareness of the field, through a second phase that has placed more emphasis on the distinctiveness and broad priorities of the field, we are now moving into a third phase designed to consolidate effort and encourage more

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6:28

“Two crazy-ish charitable global poverty project...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/19

I am writing up two crazy-ish charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to! Vulture preservation as a global health intervention Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures. A paper by two

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21:22

“Research Report: A genetic basis for potential...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/18

Prepared by: Claudinéia Pereira Costa, PhD; Meghan Barrett, PhD Note: This report has not been peer-reviewed and has only been generated for the Forum. Results should be interpreted with caution, though we do follow peer-reviewed methodologies. Executive Summary We analyzed the publicly-availableKerria lacca(Hemiptera: Kerriidae) genome, which was generated from late-stage, sessile adult females, for evidence of nine receptor genes in seven orthologous gene families related to heat, cold,

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13:58

“New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/18

Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my interpretation of the work. More EA Near/Medium-Termist Money Should be Flowing to Climate Change Mitigation2 votes so far. Voting closes in 6 days

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