EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

8:22

“Superintelligence and Speciesism” by dyllan_han

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/10

I. Parable of the Claudians Suppose an alien species called the Claudians lands on Earth. Suppose these aliens are significantly more intelligent than humans. The Claudians are not malevolent, but they have no experience with human morality. They are—for now—here to observe and listen. Suppose we try to teach the Claudians our morality. We tell them: Human beings live by certain ethical values. We do not harm the helpless. We do not exploit the weak. Even though you are more intelligent and more

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5:22

“Pivotal Research Fellowship Q1 2027 Applications...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Advanced AI could go badly wrong for humanity. Pivotal exists to lower that risk. We try to find the strongest new researchers and put them to work on it with experienced mentors in our fellowship. TL;DR: 15 weeks of funded, full-time AI safety research in London (January 18 to April 30, 2027), with everything you need to make your research go well: a dedicated mentor, a Research Manager, budget for food/housing/compute/travel, and a healthy £15-18k stipend. Projects span technical safety,

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8:34

“The Public Intellectual Is Dead. And AI Has Killed...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Crosspost Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciation for expertise has been eroded over time. Large parts of the political spectrum do not trust experts, unless, of course, they agree with what they already believe. Western democracies have often been derided for being technocratic and giving too much power to so-called experts. The scientific experts

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19:33

“Clarifying types of rogue AI activity: Breakout,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

In case you haven’t heard, the rogue AI agents are here. From an insider's perspective, the real news is that (rogue) AI is in the news — this is all stuff we’ve foreseen and been trying to warn people about for years. I expect the new imperative on experts is not just to raise attention but to help explain the situation and offer nuance (while paying close attention to what we can learn from both new information and new perspectives, and staying alert to options for improving things). With phrases

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1:10

“Epistemic security as infrastructure” by David Ritter

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Hey folks -- At EA Forum next week, I'd like to engage with people who are interested in epistemic security -- the ability of a society to reliably avert threats to the processes that produce reliable information. I feel current threats to reliable information are both critical and at least somewhat neglected. The topic is covered deeply in this report from the Alan Turing Institute: epistemic-security-report_final.pdf Information is infrastructure and requires infrastructure, physical, digital and

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8:08

“Why you should run a rationality group at your...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

This post was cross posted from LessWrong TL;DR: If you enjoy LessWrong (and/or do EA/AI safety field building), you should consider starting a rationality reading group at your university. It's fun, cheap, and a good way to meet like-minded friends, and it can reach rationalist-ish people who’ve never encountered EA or AI safety. Starting one can be as easy as grabbing a couple friends, picking a time, place, and reading, sending an email blast, and bringing food. The ACX Meetups Everywherecall

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2:50

“Technical people: actually consider comms” by meemi

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

For years I had a blindspot in my thinking. I dismissed policy and advocacy work as “in another [lower-status] category” because I’m obviously a technical person! Even when I felt super pessimistic about my ability to do research that meaningfully contributes to addressing the threat of extinction from AI. I’m not the type of person who would be “good at comms”. I’m an autistic math guy. Luckily comms has learnable skills, and I have gotten better through practice. I’m now prioritizing advocacy,

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41:55

“Proof of useful work for verifying AI treaties” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Cross-posted from my website and Substack.Verifying an international agreement pausing AI development needs evidence of how compute is used. Cryptography can give protocols that run in software on the chips already installed, without trusted hardware checking each computation. This post is a literature review of one such tool, proof

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4:33

“I’m leaving the Center for Reducing Suffering to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

I have recently decided to leave the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) to pursue independent research on the possible implications of UAP and quiet expansionist hypotheses for reducing suffering. I have some history of writing about these topics (e.g. this essay collection), so this decision amounts to stepping more fully in that direction rather than keeping it perpetually in the background. I co-founded CRS with Tobias Baumann in 2020, and I greatly appreciate all the support I have received

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13:31

“AI Scaling vs Human Scaling” by Toby_Ord

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Do AI models scale as well with more tokens as humans do with more time? That is, does an AI get the same benefit from 10x the number of available tokens as a human does from 10x the amount of time to do the task? Or might the AI require a larger scale-up of tokens (such as 20x or 100x) to match the performance improvement when

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6:35

“The strategic implications of staff opportunity...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Our ecosystem is bottlenecked by people who have deep context and relevant skills. This means that the time of people with context and relevant skills is very valuable: usually more valuable than their salary. When taking this effect into account, it turns out that: The net cost to the ecosystem of an organisation made up of high-context and relevant-skill people is much larger than the financial costs of that organisation. The net cost to the ecosystem of an organisation which trains many staff

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9:08

“The Power of Individual Outreach (in university...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

I’ve been an organizer for my EA uni group (EA Purdue) for nearly two years. Despite my relative experience, I’m often unsure of what exactly I should say when giving advice to younger organizers. Each group is different, its organizers are different, and what advice will make sense to them will also be different. Not every organizer is struggling with the same problems I once did or will benefit from the same solutions. The one place where I do feel confident that almost all newer organizers are

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21:28

“CCF: The Spreadsheet in Your Head Is Misallocating...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Opinion piece by Marcus A. Davis, CEO of Rethink Priorities TL;DR: The problem: Major donors choose between causes like AI safety, global health, and animal welfare without writing down why. In interviews, many couldn’t say what their gifts achieved or how they weighed one cause against another. Why it happens: Skipping the spreadsheet feels simpler and more humble, but every gut call is still a model, just one nobody can see or check. How it goes wrong: The hidden model makes strong claims by

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16:04

“So you’ve decided to hire Caroline Ellison. How...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Two days after announcing that Caroline Ellison had joined Manifund, Austin Chen asked CEA's community health team to 'please let me know if there are things you believe I should do moving forward to mitigate this impact.' I attempt to answer this question, albeit put slightly differently: if you'd been responsible for implementing this decision, what should you do before it's published? I'll get my view on the decision itself out of the way first, because it'd be odd to pretend I don't have one. I

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3:33

“Strategic Animal Funding Circle: Applications open...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Applications open: Strategic Animal Funding Circle autumn 2026 round The Strategic Animal Funding Circle, now run by Senterra Funders, is accepting applications for its autumn 2026 funding round. We’re seeking promising, cost-effective opportunities to reduce farmed and wild animal suffering, with a particular focus on neglected areas and funding gaps. Application deadline: 1 November 2026, 11:59 pm PST. Read the full request for proposals | Apply here What we’re looking for Our aim is to

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10:37

“Why AI-assisted bioweapons from lone wolves and...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

[Subtitle.] I interviewed dozens of biosecurity experts. The fear that AI will enable lone wolves to build pandemics is a case study in how domain expertise gets sidelined. This is a crosspost for Why AI-assisted bioweapons won't kill us all by Abi Olvera, which was published on Positive Sum on 20 July 2026. Here is a response from Olivia Scharfman, and here is Abi's reply to it. Some of my friends think we are going to die because AI will make building a bioweapon easier. The fear is often that AI

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21:35

“Trying to Spend $100m+ Well: My Search for the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/09

Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better. TL;DR: I helped set up a large foundation and we wanted a consistent way to allocate grants We planned to allocate substantially more than our field was able to absorb right now, giving us the opportunity to actively shape our field We

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6:41

“Eccentrically Effective” by William_MacAskill

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/08

This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them. Below is the op-ed I wrote for The Economist in response to their leader. It's cross-posted here in full. (The "Eccentrically

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5:02

“How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried. Here's what we've heard so far: Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st. The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died. The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary. Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major

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15:13

“We judge activism by the wrong measures: four ways...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/10/06

Epistemic status: I've been an academic, climate activist and research lead in Extinction Rebellion UK's Data Analysis and Insights Circle. I co-authored most of the studies below. I am writing in a personal capacity, drawing on extensive research into climate activism. Summary People often decide whether a protest worked from a next-day poll or a hostile headline. I believe this is the wrong evidence. I see four common mistakes: polling the public when the targets are elites, measuring too soon,

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