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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

8:29

“Why Forecasting Fails Decision Makers” by JamesN

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/25

The forecasting community is failing because it is not focused on how the world actually works. This post has been written in response to the Manifund Essay Prize which asks “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” Who am I to make such an outlandish claims? I worked at HM Treasury as senior policy advisor across multiple policy areas, including international development, relations, and I led the team for HMTs economic and financial response to the war in Ukraine. I have an MSc in

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8:30

“What does EA UK do?” by gergo

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/25

Since I took over EA UK in January, many people have understandably asked what EA UK actually does. Building on an older post, I wanted to share a new update on where we are now, how we can help you, and how you can help us. This post does not mean to serve as a strategy document. We are still in the early stages and are actively experimenting, so our activities may change significantly over the coming months. With that in mind, what does EA UK do?Career advice and coaching We act as a contact

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8:05

[Linkpost] “Manifund’s Falcon Fund” by Marcus...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/24

This is a link post. Manifund is launching a new animal welfare fund, led by regrantor Marcus Abramovitch. We make rapid (<1 week), early-stage ($25k–$150k) grants across animal welfare, with a particular interest in the intersection of animals and transformative AI. Reach out to marcus.s.abramovitch@gmail.com if you’d like to donate! Why AI x animals? Many EAs take seriously both the welfare of animals, and the possibility of short AI timelines. But EA funders currently consider these in

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11:59

“We’re building grantmaking.ai - public funding...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/24

TL;DR The AI safety ecosystem is about to receive billions in new funding but lacks the grantmaker capacity, speed, and infrastructure to deploy it well — especially for smaller, high-impact opportunities. We're building grantmaking.ai, a comprehensive public database of x-risk AI safety funding opportunities with a trust and signal layer on top — think Crunchbase meets GiveWell for AI safety. To test and seed the platform, we're launching a $1M grant roundfocused on rapid distribution of $5K–$50K

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13:20

“300 Pledges: Pitching Effective Giving at Middlebury...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/23

TL;DR. Quantity over quality; table consistently; prioritize a friendly tone based on shared values; pitch the pledge as an accountability mechanism; don't spend too much time on the specifics of effectiveness; maintain a sense of agency and informed decision making; your mileage may vary but give it a try. Since January 2025, the Middlebury EA contingent has secured 300 Giving What We Can (GWWC) 1% Trial Pledges from students interested in giving to highly effective charities. I estimate that we

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14:44

“What are the highest-leverage tactics for US...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/23

Summary Power for Democracies (P4Dem) is trying to develop donor recommendations to most effectively counter 2026 US election integrity threats. To do so, we searched for (and believe we found) all the main categories of threats, identified a fairly comprehensive list of counter-tactics, and then evaluated those tactics based on evidence, a theory of change analysis, and expert interviews. Per our analyses, the following tactics are most promising to address the high-severity threats:

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28:48

“Three necessary pillars for wild animal welfare at...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/23

Cross-posted from Good Structures. COI note: This piece touches on some aspects of Wild Animal Initiative's work, and why I am excited about it. I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative, and while I no longer have any affiliation, my spouse works there. Doing wild animal welfare at scale, in a way we are confident is robustly good, is currently not possible. The primary bottleneck is scientific: we don't have the knowledge to predict what our interventions will do, or to measure whether they work. For

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53:18

“AI safety is maturing. Is its generalist talent...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/23

TL;DR The AI safety field is maturing, but its talent pipelines may be failing to keep pace with the growing demand for operations, organisation-building and research management professionals (further referred to as generalists). Based on eight interviews with AIS organisations plus prior work, we see early signs that entering AIS in these roles is structurally unreliable: personal connections dominate, transition pipeline is not clear and screening criteria are inconsistent. On the organisations

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11:31

“Against Credulous AI Hype” by James Fodor

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/22

I have been increasingly surprised over the past year at what I perceive to be the lack of critical thinking in response to new announcements regarding AI model capabilities. I’ve written about many of these issues before, but as AI hype accelerates the problems seem to be getting worse. Here I want to highlight a few points that seem to be neglected in coverage of the growth of AI capabilities. Advertising is treated as fact Every new model release by a major tech company represents billions of

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14:19

“Does your AI perform badly because you — you,...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/22

Consistent helpfulness for everyone, unless you're a bit of a scumbag Claude really got me lately. I’d given it an elaborate prompt in an attempt to summon an AGI-level answer to my third-grade level question. Embarrassingly, it included the phrase, “this work might be reviewed by probability theorists, who are very pedantic”. Claude didn’t miss a beat. Came back with a great answer and made me call for a medic: “That prompt isn’t doing what you think it's doing, but sure”. Fuuuuck 🔥 (I know we

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8:20

“My Unfiltered Motivations” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/22

I once took a seminar with Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy. He often spoke about the limits of empathy as a motivation — how it misleads us where math wouldn't. It was all very EA-coded (and indeed, he ate dinner with Yale EA once). His class got me thinking about all the different motivations behind EA, from boundless love for the world to a fear of what our friends will think. This is my own list of motivations, no filter. Whether or not I endorse them, they all helped me get here. They

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11:13

[Linkpost] “Why clinical trials are broken & how to...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/22

This is a link post. 12 articles including 4 podcasts EA/LW Intro: I believe clinical trial abundance could be an EA cause area - there's still a lot of disability/disease burden in the world, even in developed countries, and increasing the pace of progress is very tractable. And it's not just a matter of speed/quantity of innovation: the current system selects against ambitious risky bets. It deserves an EA-specific post, but for now here's a curated reading list. Since the 1950s, the cost of

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16:00

“Reflections on PauseCon 2026” by Joe Rogero

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/21

A lesson in courage from Washington, DC Yesterday I described an experience that impressed upon fifteen-year-old me the importance of speaking with urgency and courage when something awful is happening. I lived a fresh reminder of the importance of courage last week at PauseCon, a first-of-its-kind conference in Washington, DC run by PauseAI US.[1] It was really, really good. I’m impressed and I want to see more work like this. I was there in a personal capacity, but since I also work for MIRI, I

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3:00

“Discussions of (p)sentience of small animals miss...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/21

Tl;dr: You need to make specific moral weight assumptions to decide who to prioritize between animals with different degrees of sentience. And the moral weight of a given being is not its p(sentience). One could very well be certain that shrimp and insects feel pain (and are as badly off as they could possibly be), yet believe that they do so to a degree too small for them to be prioritized. Debates about interspecies tradeoffs should outline welfare ranges, over p(sentience), as the relevant crux

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3:21

“What’s your favorite art with EA vibes?” by Aaron...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/21

I made a database for "art with EA vibes" — books, movies, and other works, fiction or nonfiction, that cover topics or ideas related to effective altruism and are aesthetically pleasing or interesting.[1] The second point is key. We already have reading lists for philosophy and such; this database covers content that most of us would read or watch for fun.[2] I've started off with 19 items and will add more, but I need your help to make this a true public resource! (And avoid subjecting everyone

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1:14

“Better Futures Discussion Thread: With Fin...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/21

This week, we are highlighting Forethought's Better Futures series. Fin Moorhouse (@finm), who authored two chapters in the series (Convergence and Compromise, and No Easy Eutopia) along with @William_MacAskill, has agreed to answer a few of your questions about the series. You can read (and comment) on the full series on the Forum. In order, the chapters are: Introducing Better Futures No Easy Eutopia Convergence and Compromise Persistent Path-Dependence How to Make the Future Better Supplement:

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5:55

[Linkpost] “Manifund Essay Prize: on EA funding, the...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/21

This is a link post. Manifund is sponsoring 3 prizes for the best new essays that give us insight into how to navigate the future. Winners receive a $500 cash prize + a bonus prize, and winning essays may be republished (with attribution) on our newsletters. This prize is in partnership with Inkhaven, though non-Inkhaven folks are welcome to submit. Essays due midnight April 24; submit here! Manifund: “What systems might manage the coming torrent of funding?” Funding in EA may soon skyrocket

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6:20

“Trajan House - current goals and updates” by Asher...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/20

Trajan House is an office in Oxford for people working on humanity's most pressing challenges. There have been some changes to the project over the last few years, and it seemed time to give a public update about what we’re getting up to! Here are some quick things to know: The anchor tenants in the space areForethought andCEA. CEA manages the space. I’m the project's manager Over the next year, we are looking to add more: Organisations that can utilise the space indefinitely or on a short-term

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7:02

“Humane Pesticides Are Massively Morally Urgent” by...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/20

I have lots of radical views about insects. I think probably most expected happiness and misery in the world is experienced by insects, and that our actions often have much more significant moral impacts on bugs than on people. But in this article, I’m not going to defend anything radical. My thesis here is very moderate: I think we should try to make pesticides kill insects less painfully. Every year, quadrillions of insects are killed or harmed with pesticides—3.5 quadrillion, according to one

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7:29

“Why we need to resist the idea of net negative lives...

EA Forum Podcast (All audio) ·

2026/04/19

Recently, I have come across a growing number of speculations suggesting that wild animals lead net negative lives. Proponents of this view typically refer to insects, arthropods, invertebrates, or species with r-selective reproductive strategies. The conclusion they draw is usually that we should aim to reduce their numbers in one way or another. Unfortunately, birth control is seldom discussed in this context. Habitat destruction appears to be the preferred method. There is, of course, some value

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2,309 results

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