EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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Prepared by: Claudinéia Pereira Costa, PhD; Meghan Barrett, PhD Note: This report has not been peer-reviewed and has only been generated for the Forum.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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11:31

“Systemic change and EA: What is it all about?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/18

Ever felt like something's missing from how EA talks about “doing good”? Like the conversation stops just short of asking what's actually broken at the root? This opening post introduces a sequence born from exactly that itch: a group of EA-adjacent volunteers who spent three years exploring whether there are systems-level dynamics and interventions that the community should be paying more attention to. Post 1: In this first post of our sequence, we set the stage for the empirical and conceptual

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17:14

“Growing Requires Growth: Building the Systems Behind...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/18

I love EA; I am really proud of what we have built at CEA, and I am excited about where CEA is heading- that is all still very true. And after taking time to step back and think about where I most want to direct my energy next, I made the bittersweet decision to move on from CEA. I have spent my entire (!) full-time career there. I so deeply admire my stellar coworkers, and I deeply love EA and the impact we have- that is a big part of what made this decision so hard. I also still think it's the

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42:46

“Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/18

This competition entry has been selected for publication by the Forum team. Summary Kollin, Clifton, DiGiovanni, and Macé (2025) propose two “bracketing” theories for recovering altruistic action guidance under cluelessness, formalizing a response that DiGiovanni (2025) had earlier viewed sympathetically but raised doubts about. On bottom-up bracketing, we set aside beneficiaries for whom it is indeterminate which option is better, and then aggregate over the remaining beneficiaries. On top-down

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27:00

“Challenging the unawareness argument with third...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/17

This competition entry has been selected for publication by the Forum team. 1. Introduction Here's Anthony DiGiovanni's unawareness argument, quoted from his summary post (footnotes omitted): Let's say that we c-prefer A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences. P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it's not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected

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8:10

“Non-AI Grantmakers Should Be Pricing In AGI...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/17

Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong. Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing. This post was significantly inspired by “You (Yes You) Should Have A Feb 2020 Checklist For AI Policy,” which is more geared for the existing AI safety crowd but directionally a good push in general

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10:46

“Five Wild Animal Welfare Organizations estimate...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/15

Summary With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to room for roughly 3.16

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6:27

“Learning from Agricultural Development to Reshape...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/14

This is a cross-post of the executive summary from The Centre for Animal Life and Farming's first report. See the full report here. We will also be hosting a webinar on 25th August 2026 to discuss these findings with the animal welfare movement. Executive SummaryRoughly 80-90% of farmed animals live in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), yet the animal welfare movement has seen fewer milestone victories in these contexts than in High-Income Countries (HICs). The standard advocacy models used

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8:01

“Slot hiring vs bar hiring” by brentonmayer

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/14

This is from Same Page, a blog about EA-org-style management I write with Max Dalton of Forethought. Defining slot vs. bar hiring I’m fairly confident this distinction has been kicking around the effective altruism movement for at least eight years. I didn’t invent it, and I’m not sure who did. Claude and I couldn’t find a public write-up of the idea, so I’ve made one. In slot hiring, an organisation decides it has a particular position to fill (or maybe two positions, or more). It runs a hiring

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12:49

“Concrete Generalist Projects in AI Safety (and how...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/14

The AI safety ecosystem is still in need of generalists: people who will go out and solve the tasks that people who feel limited by their job description won’t address. This post will explain how to break into generalist work, then provide an important set of projects that, if completed, could strengthen many crucial parts of the AI safety ecosystem, as well as your own career. TL;DR If you’re looking for something concrete to do, there are a bunch of good entry points: Find a project:

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16:43

“A Modest Proposal: Why Vegans Should Start Factory...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/14

TL;DR: The animal welfare movement has been doing advocacy wrong. If we’re serious about ending factory farming, vegans need to start running factory farms ourselves. I lay out the case below and address common objections. The Core Argument For decades, the animal welfare movement has operated from the outside: funding investigations, lobbying for regulation, producing documentaries, and encouraging dietary change. The results have been modest at best. Global meat consumption continues to rise. I

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20:01

“What 27 AI Safety Generalists Are Building This...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/12

This summer, 27 residents came to Berkeley for the first cohort of the Generator Residency, a three-month program for AI safety generalists run by Kairos and Constellation. Residents receive mentorship from experienced generalists and researchers and are working on projects like running workshops for professionals entering AI safety, building a cross-org talent directory, supporting university AI safety groups, serving as chiefs of staff at new and growing organizations, building tools for model

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7:10

“Mental health challenges in the AI safety ecosystem...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/12

A tough lesson I learned over the past few years is that it's pretty stressful to work in the “Please Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” ecosystem, especially as it increasingly seems like the world is hell-bent on building the Torment Nexus.This is what it can feel like to be an impact-pursuing person who stumbles into the AI safety field. It's hard to be productive when you’re stressed and anxious. And setting aside productivity, it's also just plain bad if people working on AI safety — My peers! My

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15:15

“What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/11

TL;DR NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda. We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Preliminary results are

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12:21

“Closing the LTFF, Spending Down Funds, and a New AI...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/11

The current Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) fund managers and I have decided to step back from our work on the LTFF. Because we believe LTFF donors trusted the fund managers to ensure that the funds would be used in line with the purposes of their donation, we've decided the right move is to close the fund. While LTFF is closing, note that EA Funds has launched a new fund, called the Transformative AI Fund (TAIF), with a large overlap in scope, funding early-stage projects that reduce risks from

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15:01

“The Acuity Problem: Maybe we can’t infer how...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/11

Summary A lot of scientific evidence has been gestured at to show how wide an organism's welfare range(i.e., the absolute intensity at the end of the affective spectrum) might be. But most (if not all) of this evidence is in fact evidence of evaluative acuity(i.e., how many differentiable gradients of pain and pleasure the spectrum contains). (§2) In theory, a cognitively simple organism could feel either nothing or something extreme, and nothing in between. And a complex one could dissociate

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16:12

“EA Funds is launching the Transformative AI Fund” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/11

TL;DR The Long-Term Future Fund is closing down, and EA Funds is launching theTransformative AI Fund with a new full-time team. The fund's primary focus is technical AI safety and AI governance (including post-AGI governance), as well as supporting fields such as field-building and forecasting. We'll also consider non-GCR implications of transformative AI such as flourishing futures and digital sentience, though we expect these to be a small minority of grants. For now, biosecurity and nuclear

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10:59

“EA Animal Welfare Fund: Request for Proposals for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/11

Priority deadline: October 15, 2026. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and we encourage earlier submission for time-sensitive work. Apply here. Summary The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) is seeking proposals that accelerate the cage-free transition for laying hens at scale, especially in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (although we are open to applications from other regions, too). The majority of the world's laying hens are still confined in barren battery cages, and the fastest growth

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17:36

“Most donors get risk wrong” by Jack Lewars

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/08/09

Linkpost for my Substack piece, lightly adapted. Donors are holding AI wealth at enormous risk. Their giving is often extremely risk-averse. “What is the most common mistake donors make?” This is one of the questions I get asked most as a donation adviser. Often, I say that it's risk tolerance. Many donors have risk backwards. They hold the money they plan to give at close to maximum risk, often in a single company's stock, then give it away at close to minimum risk, backing only the most heavily

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