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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

52:29

“Transformative AI and wild animals: An exploration.”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/25

A note on status: The following post is Wild Animal Initiative's first foray into thinking about the intersection of transformative AI and wild animal welfare. I’m not an AI safety expert, but I’ve been largely familiar with the main ideas since 2012. I’ve done my best to read around the issues and asked several more AI-informed folks to give feedback on this draft; however, our ideas at Wild Animal Initiative remain very early days so please take this all with a grain of salt. We welcome

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9:11

“Why you can justify almost anything using historical...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/24

[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right? The answer is all of them and none of them. This is because many people use research and historical

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78:44

[Linkpost] “Podcast on ‘AI tools for existential...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/24

This is a link post.About two months ago, @finm and I recorded a discussion about my now-published piece on “AI tools for Existential Security”[1] (for the podcast Fin has been running at Forethought). I’d never done something like this before, and liked the result a lot more than I thought I would![2]I'm sharing a quick transcript here in case anyone appreciates section headers, hyperlinks, etc.. Please note that this is very rough; it's an unpolished, not-double-checked “MVP” edit of an

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18:56

[Linkpost] “OpenAI Alums, Nobel Laureates Urge...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/24

This is a link post. Converting to a for-profit model would undermine the company's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity," argues new letter This is the full text of a post from 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

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1:26

“Two jobs at The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/24

I'm in the process of setting up The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, and I have two new job ads out: Research Officer in Animal Sentience (Animals and AI) - this is an open-ended, research-focused postdoctoral role looking at the impacts AI is having on non-human animals, ways of promoting beneficial uses, and ways of ameliorating harmful uses. Centre Manager (Impact and Administration) - this person will work with me to run the Centre on a day-to-day basis and work towards

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11:00

“Insects Are Not Moderately Important” by Bentham’s...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/23

Crosspost from my blog that you should totally check out! If I were an animal, I would be a bug. Statistically. —David Sposito. C.S. Lewis once said, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, the thing one cannot think is that Christianity is only a bit important—that following the way of Christ should be part of one's life, but not a big part. You should not be the sort of person who

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3:45

“Open Phil’s Farm Animal Welfare team is hiring a...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/23

Open Philanthropy's Farm Animal Welfare team is hiring! We’re looking for a Program Assistant to support the team's work to reduce the suffering of farmed animals by managing processes, coordinating logistics, and keeping complex administrative projects on track. We’re looking for someone who is: Organized and efficient: able to juggle time-sensitive tasks while keeping longer-term projects on track. We have a high bar for team members’ output, and being efficient will make it much easier to meet

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4:47

“China Vegan Society’s V-March results” by Rakefet...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/22

We're thrilled to share the results of our V-March (vegan in March) 2025 campaign! The numbers speak for themselves: - Reached over 7 million people across China - More than 70,000 active engagements through comments and shares - 600+ daily check-ins via our WeChat Mini Program - 341 Sogdian Trees planted (reclaiming approximately 3410㎡ of desert) - 3410.12 RMB donated to the Alashan SEE Ecology AssociationBy Arkadiusz Nowak, Marcin Nobis, Sylwia Nowak, Agnieszka Nobis,Anna Wróbel, Sebastian

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12:24

“NOVAH’s first year: from AIM’s research report to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/22

One year as a Charity Entrepreneur When we founded NOVAH (No Violence At Home) in April 2024 through the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program, we had a research-backed hypothesis that edutainment (mixing social messages in entertaining content) could effectively reduce domestic violence (technical term: intimate partner violence, IPV). Now, twelve months later, our first radio drama, Twubakane (meaning "Let's build together"), has reached ~30,000 listeners in Rwanda, where 24% of married

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3:46

“Consider starting a for-profit company instead” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/22

I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good through nonprofit organisations. I think this is often an error for four main reasons. Scalability Capital counterfactuals Standards Learning potential Earning to give potentialThese arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1] Scalability There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems

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5:05

“FT article on potential charity regulation change in...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/21

Article in Financial Times - Excerpts “Multiple staff from US-based foundations and non-profits told the FT that they expected the Trump administration to end their tax exemptions for projects that involved spending overseas or were focused on climate or racial justice. The likelihood has risen since President Trump threatened this week to remove Harvard's tax exempt status.” It may also affect overseas aids apart from climate. I heard from a well connected friend this may be done via executive

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5:09

“Spending on Ourselves” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/21

The Effective Altruism community has encouraged a range of differentapproaches to doing good over time. Initially there was more focus on frugality as a way to increase how much you could donate, which was mostly supplanted by emphasis on earning more. In late 2015 this started to shift towards doing things that are directly useful, which accelerated in 2021. Then the market fell in 2022, FTX turned out to be a fraud, and there haven't been new donors near the scale of Open Phil / Good

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157:51

“Health Systems Strengthening” by Rethink Priorities

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/20

Editorial note This report is a “shallow” investigation, as described here, and was commissioned by Open Philanthropy and originally produced by Rethink Priorities from September to October 2024. Open Philanthropy does not necessarily endorse our conclusions, nor do the organizations represented by those who were interviewed. Our report focuses on exploring health systems strengthening (HSS) as a potential new cause area for Open Philanthropy. We examined a range of interventions to improve health

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72:53

“Do Protests Work? A Critical Review” by MichaelDickens

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/19

James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today.I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions: Do protests work? Are

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1:43

“Relaunching our 1-1 career advising services” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

Need help planning your career? Probably Good's 1-1 advising service is back! After refining our approach and expanding our capacity, we’re excited to once again offer personal advising sessions to help people figure out how to build careers that are good for them and for the world. Our advising is open to people at all career stages who want to have a positive impact across a range of cause areas—whether you're early in your career, looking to make a transition, or facing uncertainty about your

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20:26

[Linkpost] “Genes did misalignment first: comparing...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

This is a link post. My PhD is in evolutionary biology, and I spent much of my time learning and thinking about genetic governance mechanisms like meiosis. I find myself wanting a link to share on these concepts, so I'm publishing some old writing I did in 2022 that makes the comparison. Gradient descent and natural selection are analogous Gradient descent can be compared to natural selection. Both are optimization algorithms. But while gradient descent is only decades old as part of the field of

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4:16

“Measurability is Doubly Important in Animal...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

EA-aligned animal advocacy is often criticized for measurability bias. In this post, I argue that the usual epistemic safeguards of leftist advocacy are unavailable in animal advocacy, and as a result, measurability is doubly important in our domain. What do pro-measurement people say? Intuition and abstract reasoning are very poor predictors of charity performance. Furthermore, charities differ 100x in effectiveness, therefore measuring the cost-effectiveness of charities enables us to do much

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2:24

“How many shrimp really undergo eyestalk ablation?”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

Saw this post by @Henri Thunberg 🔸 on Twitter: If true, these numbers are suprisingly low to me. Eyestalk ablation gets quite a bit of attention on the forum. Shrimp Welfare Project focuses on it and it forms part of their Shrimp Welfare Index. It gets attention from various animal welfare groups (Mercy For Animals, Animals Australia). A post on Reddit about it from a couple of days ago has 35 k upvotes and 2000 comments. An Australian politician recently posted about it. A lot of this attention,

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2:31

“Epoch alumni launch Mechanize to ‘automate the whole...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

Three Epoch employees – Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, and Ege Erdil – have left to launch Mechanize, an AI startup aiming for broad automation of ordinary labour: Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy. We will achieve this by creating simulated environments and evaluations that capture the full scope of what people do at their jobs. ... Currently, AI models

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5:22

“E2G help available” by Will Kirkpatrick

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/04/18

If you’re interested in having a meaningful EA career but your experience doesn’t match the types of jobs that the typical white collar, intellectual EA community leans towards, then you’re just like me. I have been earning to give as a nuclear power plant operator in Southern Maryland for the past few years, and I think it's a great opportunity for other EA's who want to make a difference but don’t have a PhD in philosophy or public policy. Additionally, I have personal sway with Constellation

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2,077 results

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