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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

2:36

[Linkpost] “What is NZ’s comparative advantage?” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/10

This is a link post. Living in New Zealand can sometimes feel like an obstacle to doing good effectively. We’re far from the EA hubs in the UK/US, and from opportunities for direct work on global health & development. But are there any areas where we might have an advantage? Here are some possibilities that the community has been discussing recently: As a low-risk environment for AI training. Alethios argues that NZ's legislative environment and geothermal resources could make us a good

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14:24

“10 of Founders Pledge’s biggest grants” by Matt_Lerner

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/10

This is a crosspost of a recent post by Hannah Yang, FP Research's comms lead, on Founders Pledge's website. I thought it was important to post this on the Forum because it's unclear to me what people know about FP, and because I often encounter various misconceptions — the three most common being that we focus only on climate (we don't), that we're driven primarily by member interests (we're not), and that we don't move very much money (see below). Many of the grants below are advised grants —

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6:20

“The relative range heuristic” by Karthik Tadepalli

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/10

This is a rough explanation of relative ranges, a heuristic that I've found very helpful for quickly comparing two options that trade off between two dimensions. Consider the following examples of tradeoffs: Should we prioritize helping small animals or large animals? There are more small animals, but large animals have a higher capacity for suffering. Should we fund medical research on the most promising candidates across diseases, or should we focus only on the most important diseases? Broad

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18:11

[Linkpost] “My kidney donation” by Molly Hickman

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/09

This is a link post. I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under. I'm going to talk about one complication and one consequence of my donation, but I want to be clear from the get: I would do it again in a

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35:08

“A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/08

Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are our own and do not represent those of any organisation we're affiliated with. We're grateful to Bob Fischer, Tobias Leenaert, Pablo Moleman, Felix Werdermann, and Kevin Xia for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the arguments presented. While we've done our best to base this post on careful research and reasoning, we don't claim to be experts on this topic. Our aim is not to assert a

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18:15

“Organising Bookclub: How to Create a Vegan World” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/08

1. Introduction One of the first activities I organized in Effective Altruism 3 years ago, after I participated in the first Dutch Effective Altruism Introductory course 3.5 years ago, was a bookclub on Tobias Leenaert's book How to Create a Vegan World. The proximate cause was that this was organized earlier once by Marieke de Visscher but not again and I also wanted to participate. I ran it 3 or 4 times and am quite enthusiastic about it, so I want to share the format here to enable (and

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24:54

[Linkpost] “How I failed to donate my kidney” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/08

This is a link post. Cross-posted from my personal blog after strong encouragement from two people. The text is partially personal musings over my journey through the pre-surgery process, and partially a review of arguments why it might or might not make sense for a person who cares about effective altruism to donate a kidney. Some of the content is specific to where I am based in (Finland), and some of the content is less honed than I'd like, but if I didn't timebox my writing and just push

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44:42

“A shallow review of what transformative AI means for...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/08

Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that.Summary There's been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates. After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet

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4:06

“The current market price for animal welfare is zero”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

This is a lightly-edited memo I wrote for the 2025 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which were encouraged to be highly opinionated to generate strategy discussion. I actually wrote more about Shrimp Welfare Project's exploration of Credits here, but I think this 2-minute pitch for the value of Credits is useful to publish on its own. In 2011, Jayson Lusk published a paper titled The Market for Animal Welfare: The idea, in short, is to create a separate market for animal welfare that is decoupled

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6:05

“Gaslit by humanity” by tobiasleenaert

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

Hi all, This is a one time cross-post from my substack. If you like it, you can subscribe to the substack at tobiasleenaert.substack.com. Thanks Gaslit by humanity After twenty-five years in the animal liberation movement, I’m still looking for ways to make people see. I’ve given countless talks, co-founded organizations, written numerous articles and cited hundreds of statistics to thousands of people. And yet, most days, I know none of this will do what I hope: open their eyes to the immensity

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5:27

[Linkpost] “LLMs might already be conscious” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/07

This is a link post. Among people who have thought about LLM consciousness, a common belief is something like LLMs might be conscious soon, but they aren't yet. How sure are we that they aren't conscious already? I made a quick list of arguments for/against LLM consciousness, and it seems to me that high confidence in non-consciousness is not justified. I don't feel comfortable assigning less than a 10% chance to LLM consciousness, and I believe a 1% chance is unreasonably confident. But I am

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4:15

“Buying your way out of personal ethics” by escapealert

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/05

I’ve noticed a recurring argument in EA spaces around veganism: “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.” While this may sound compelling on the surface, I believe it fails for several reasons—both ethically and practically. First-Order Utilitarianism Can Justify Harm This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook, where harm is permissible as long as

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23:16

“How could AI affect different animal advocacy...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/04

Many thanks to Alina Salmen, Vince Mak, Constance Li, and Johannes Pichler for feedback on this post. All mistakes are our own. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of our employers.Introduction Rapid AI development presents unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for animal advocacy. AI could either worsen animal suffering by, e.g, making exploitative systems more efficient, or drastically reduce it by enabling new and improving current solutions. The stakes are immense:

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2:27

“AMA: Saloni Dattani” by Toby Tremlett🔹, salonium

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/03

Saloni will answer the questions in this AMA between 6-8pm BST on July 8th. Leave your questions as comments, and upvote other questions you’d like to see answered. If you’ve been around EA for a while, and you’re interested in global health, you’ve probably read Saloni Dattani before. Saloni writes about global health at Our World In Data and is a co-founder and editor of Works in Progress magazine. She's also recently started a podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen. She also (somehow) finds

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57:07

“We should be more uncertain about cause...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/03

Summary In this article, I argue most of the interesting cross-cause prioritization decisions and conclusions rest on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust enough to justify high degrees of certainty that any given intervention (or class of cause interventions) is “best” above all others. I hold this to be true generally because of the reliance of such cross-cause prioritization judgments on relatively weak philosophical evidence. In particular, the case for high confidence in conclusions on

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6:28

[Linkpost] “Eating Honey is (Probably) Fine,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

This is a link post. I wrote a reply to the Bentham Bulldog argument that has been going mildly viral. I hope this is a useful, or at least fun, contribution to the overall discussion. “One pump of honey?” the barista asked. “Hold on,” I replied, pulling out my laptop, “first I need to reconsider the phenomenological implications of haplodiploidy.” Recently, an article arguing against honey has been making the rounds. The argument is mathematically elegant (millions of bees, fractional suffering,

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1:01

“1Day Sooner Open Phil Funding Request” by 1Day Sooner

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

We thought it might be useful to post a (lightly) redacted version of our most recent funding request to Open Philanthropy for our work in 2025-2026. It lays out what we’ve done over the last several years, the lessons we’ve learned, and how we go about accounting for our causal impact in that time. This request led to $3 million in funding from Open Philanthropy. OP has provided about 40% of our funding to date, which is our goal going forward. If you read this request and would like to support

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1:31

[Linkpost] “Senate Strikes Potential AI Moratorium”...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

This is a link post. The vote was 99-1, removing the 10 year moratorium on AI legislation at the state level set by the version passed in the House. Interestingly, the attempt to propose an alternative 5 year moratorium with further restrictions, which itself passed the procedural roadblock which might have prevented the 10 year moratorium, fell apart reportedly as a result of Senator Blackburn pulling her support. Why did she change her mind? "The current language is not acceptable to those who

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8:23

“GoodWallet: turning everyday repayments into...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/02

TL;DR GoodWallet is a digital wallet that lets you redirect your own and your friends’ money towards effective charities. By streamlining and socializing the giving process, we aim to unlock new, counterfactual donations within the EA community. Additionally, by making effective giving the default, we hope to expose non-EA friends to impact-per-€ cues, exporting the idea of effective giving far beyond EA's borders. Eventually, we hope that saying “just pay me back via GoodWallet” will be as common

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11:33

“Road to AnimalHarmBench” by Artūrs Kaņepājs,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2025/07/01

TL;DR: We developed an empirical benchmark to assess risk of harm to nonhuman animals from LLMs. Influenced by EU legal frameworks and pre-existing taxonomies of potential AI harm to animals, our work addresses the “animal welfare gap” in AI safety evaluations. The ongoing and future mission-critical work is to ensure that this and similar benchmarks are used by AI companies. The aim of this post is to introduce you to AnimalHarmBench, the first standardized LLM eval to assess the level of risk of

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2,311 results

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