Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- We’re excited to release a new AI governance research agenda from the MIRI Technical Governance Team. With this research agenda, we have two main aims: to describe the strategic landscape of AI development and to catalog important governance research questions. We base the agenda around four high-level scenarios for the geopolitical response to advanced AI development.
- The 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity is hard for me to understand, but I’ve been trying to figure it out, as the concepts it considers seem interesting and important:
- Clarifying ways in which faking alignment during training is neither necessary nor sufficient for the kind of scheming that AI control tries to defend against.
- Also staring into the abyss, robots with guns, and Peter goes to Washington
- There’s no better way to honor Mother’s Day than to show our love and respect for mothers of all species. Let’s celebrate with these compassionate vegan-friendly recipes that uplift and cherish all nurturing beings. From savory eggless omelets to fluffy pancakes and delightful churros, these eight inspiring vegan brunch ideas are sure to be a […].
- Plans for a new (old) prison, and turmoil in the non-profit world
- Yesterday, the Texas State Legislature heard public comments about SB37, a bill that would give a state board direct oversight over course content and faculty hiring at public universities, perhaps inspired by Trump’s national crackdown on higher education. (See here or here for coverage.). So, encouraged by a friend in the history department, I submitted […]...
- We’re proud to highlight what our 2025 Winter Fellows have been working on.
- Help end factory farming through powerful digital storytelling. Compassion in World Farming International is a leading global organisation dedicated to ending factory farming worldwide. We were founded in 1967 by Peter Roberts, a British farmer alarmed by the rise of factory farming.
- Hounding people for mere thoughts is deranged
- Political leaders are in a unique position to model low-carbon behaviors in their own lifestyles. Yet, for some, fear of public criticism — especially in the media — holds them back. The post U.K. Politicians Hesitate To Show Off Low-Carbon Behaviors appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Introduction. As a community builder, I sometimes get into conversations with EA-skeptics that aren't going to sway the person I'm talking to. The Tree of Questions is a tool I use to be more sure of having effective conversations, faster identifying the crux. Much of this is inspired by Scott Alexander's "tower of assumptions" and Benjamin Todd's ideas of The Core of EA. The Tree.
- Tariffs, Trade & USAID replacements
- Editors’ Note: Ian McShane introduces his new book, The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge, 2024). The focus of Andrew Carnegie, and the foundation he established, on public libraries as agencies of personal development and civic uplift is well known.
- True functionalism combines utility and beauty
- The future is available in your browser
- The post Nigeria Launch appeared first on Precision Development.
- The basic situation. The world is wild and terrible and wonderful and rushing forwards so so fast. Modern economies are tremendous things, allowing crazy amounts of coordination. People have got really very good at producing stuff. Long-term trends are towards more affluence, and less violence.
- Diagnosing Food Systems Policy Coherence: A Toolkit Supporting the design of more coherent food policies gloireri Tue, 05/06/2025 - 07:16 Diagnosing Food Systems Policy Coherence: A Toolkit Supporting the Design of More Coherent Food Policies . Access Toolkit Now.
- Diagnosing Food Systems Policy Coherence: A Toolkit Supporting the design of more coherent food policies gloireri Tue, 05/06/2025 - 07:16 Diagnosing Food Systems Policy Coherence: A Toolkit Supporting the Design of More Coherent Food Policies . Food systems policy coherence is the alignment of policies that affect the food system with the aim of achieving health, environmental,...
- Hello everyone! Here you can find the April updates from Animal Equality in all the countries in which we operate. We hope that you find it helpful and inspiring. We will also include our current job openings, knowing that we can count on your support to share them with the people you think might be a perfect fit for the role!. Below you will find the updates: . Animal Equality - Mexico.
- Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do.
- A nurse’s devotion, a woman’s second chance, and how you can help more mothers heal. In a quiet hospital ward in Angola, Nurse Miguel Panzo Pedro leans beside a patient’s bed. The woman lying before him is elderly and tired—she hasn’t smiled in years. Then, something remarkable happens. As Miguel gently explains that her surgery … Continued.
- Mother’s Day is a time to reflect on the women who shaped us—those who lifted us up, loved us fiercely, and sacrificed so much to give us a better life. We asked members of our community to share what they love most about their mothers, and the responses were a moving reminder of just how … Continued. The post What Do You Love About Your Mom? appeared first on Fistula Foundation.
- An apparent victory for opponents of the company's for-profit ambitions may be more complicated
- Rob Henderson has a great essay summarizing the expert vs elite distinction I discussed in 6 prior posts (1 2 3 4 5 6):
- A corollary of Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that solutions to AI safety should scale with compute. Let's consider a few examples of research directions that are aiming at this property: Deliberative Alignment: Combine chain-of-thought with Constitutional AI to improve safety with inference-time compute (see Guan et al.
- Why are world-leading scientists so worried about AI? Discover it in our new video! #ai #artificialintelligence #animation #science #extinction #rationalanimations #singularity...
- Shortages of some goods expected in the US starting later this month, because of tariffs.
- In the words of BARPOD, "the unfuck America tour gets fucked"
- two half-posts make a whole
- Vetted Causes is excited to announce our 2025 charity recommendations: Animal Legal Defense Fund. Fish Welfare Initiative. Shrimp Welfare Project. Each of these recommended charities has received a published review (linked above), and a $1,000 donation in support of their work. Please join us in recognizing these organizations for their outstanding contributions!. Discuss...
- How to overcome physical, economic and regulatory barriers and build taller
- ‘Normal’ people - like you - can save lives. Imagine being able to prevent the deaths of several people over your lifetime, and preventing illness in thousands more, by giving away a % of your income. You can have up to 100x more impact with your donations when you give to carefully chosen charities that are backed by research. Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/ekIRVhbpiQw...
- I very frequently hear the statement "the best charities are over 1000x more cost effective than the average". This is often alongside the accompanying graph. Where does this figure come from? Most sources link it to Toby Ord's 2013 paper "The Moral Imperative toward Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health".
- Would you like to make a difference in how open science is implemented? The Center for Open Science (COS) is currently seeking volunteers to be our colleagues and join the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines Advisory Board.
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity: I have family and friends who are relatively well-off but don’t spend much time thinking […]...
- It'll happen to you, probably
- There’s something extremely odd about wisdom: nearly all of us aspire to have more of it, but few people agree on what it is. Many view...
- In most rich countries, child mortality has more than halved in the last thirty years; we know we can go further.
- Discuss...
- Disclaimer: Post written in a personal capacity. These are personal opinions and do not in any way represent my employer's views. TL;DR: I do not think we will produce high reliability methods to evaluate or monitor the safety of superintelligent systems via current research paradigms, with interpretability or otherwise. Interpretability still seems a valuable tool and remains worth...
- this week in security — may 4 edition UK retail giants hacked, RSA Conference 2025, Signalgate gets so much worse, and more. ~this week in security~. a cybersecurity newsletter by @zackwhittaker volume 8, issue 18 View this email in your browser | past issues | RSS ~ ~ BEFORE WE START... Hello cyber friends!
- Economic growth stands as a central theme in global development.
- Why don’t AIs automate more real-world tasks if they can handle 1-hour ones? Anson Ho explores key capability and context bottlenecks.
- TL;DR: NGOs have a unique advantage over for-profits in their ability to cooperate and build common goods, yet few fully leverage "ecosystem thinking.". This approach extends beyond an organization's direct impact to consider the entire field's health.
- Advice for improving well-being
- I have some bad news: You are almost certainly a worse driver than you think you are. Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry. And, worst of all, they drive impaired far more often than they should. Even when we’re firing on all cylinders, our Stone Age-adapted brains are often no match for […]...
- Tl;dr: Over the past few months, the EA Infrastructure Fund’s (EAIF) grantmaking has increased significantly, and funding has become more of a constraint. Your donations would help us continue supporting impactful projects. The situation.
- My views on what's driving AI progress and where it's headed.
- People complain about the “voice in their heads.” Often, advanced meditators say they’ve lost it, and their life is better for it. But more recent research shows a large percentage of the population doesn’t have it anyway (a case where natural variance combined with the typical mind fallacy makes things extra confusing). But you know […]...
- More in the anti-Lyman saga
- Trade is in the news because of the Trump tariffs.
- You might expect us to understand our romantic couple breakups very well.
- Introduction. This post is intended to be read after reading our previous post outlining Shrimp Welfare Project’s 2030 Vision & Absorbency Plans. This post therefore assumes some baseline knowledge of our Humane Slaughter Initiative, which can be found in that post. Problem(s). Market Incentives. How do we create the incentives for the market to shift to pre-slaughter stunning?.
- Introduction. ~440 billion shrimps are farmed each year . This is over 5x the total number of all farmed land animals put together . Many farmed shrimps suffer from conditions that can and should be addressed, such as poor water quality, high stocking densities, inhumane slaughter methods, and avoidable mutilations (such as eyestalk ablation) . Shrimp Welfare Project is an organisation of...
- In this episode of our podcast, Elizabeth Van Nostrand and I talk to Oliver Habryka of Lightcone Infrastructure about his thoughts on the Open Philanthropy Project, which he believes has become stifled by the PR interests of its primary funder, Good Ventures. Oliver’s main claim is that around mid 2023 or early 2024, Good Ventures founder Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his...
- The Pugwash Council and community are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Ambassador Wael Al Assad, a Pugwash … More...
- Summary: Reproducing a result from recent work, we study a Gemma 3 12B instance trained to take risky or safe options; the model can then report its own risk tolerance. We find that: Applying LoRA to a single MLP is enough to reproduce the behaviorThe single LoRA layer learns a single additive steering vector.
- AI progress is driven by improved algorithms and additional compute for training runs. Understanding what is going on with these trends and how they are currently driving progress is helpful for understanding the future of AI. In this post, I'll share a wide range of general takes on this topic as well as open questions. Be warned that I'm quite uncertain about a bunch of this!.
- Dr. Elaine Sedenberg, an alumna of the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School) and a longtime contributor to the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, has been honored with…. The post UC Berkeley Honors CLTC Alum/Advisor Elaine Sedenberg with 2025 Mark Bingham Award appeared first on CLTC.
- Animal Outlook appealed the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Civil Division's dismissal of its lawsuit against the American Heart Association under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, alleging that, in exchange for a fee, AHA allows companies to display its "Heart-Check" mark on certain meat products and market them as “heart healthy”--counter to its own prior statements...
- Introduction. I have been writing posts critical of mainstream EA narratives about AI capabilities and timelines for many years now. Compared to the situation when I wrote my posts in 2018 or 2020, LLMs now dominate the discussion, and timelines have also shrunk enormously. The ‘mainstream view’ within EA now appears to be that human-level AI will be arriving by 2030, even as early as 2027.
- As the Animal Policy Alliance Program Lead, you will play a key role in supporting the growth and operation of the APA. You will be accountable for developing and implementing member support and recruitment strategies, creating and implementing resources and trainings, coordinating APA members around strategic policy objectives, and publicly representing the Alliance.
- Los Angeles voters passed Measure ULA in 2022 to tax real estate sales over $5 million in order to fund subsidized housing programs. But new research from UCLA and RAND finds that the policy may be slowing the growth of…. The post If You Tax the Things You Want Less <span class="dewidow">of …</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- New research reveals that Los Angeles Measure ULA, which imposes a 4% tax on property sales over $5M (5.5% above $10M) and allocates the revenue to affordable housing, has significantly reduced property transactions needed for housing development, undermining its own….
- Summary Initial research conducted by Charity Entrepreneurship suggested that one of the most promising interventions that a new organisation could do would be to experiment with methods to address the talent gaps in the farmed animal movement. The first objective of Animal Advocacy Careers (AAC) is to conduct some deeper research into this and try to analyse […]...
- (This essay by Kelsey Coolidge was first published on PeaceVoice, here.). At his inauguration in January, President Trump suggested that his greatest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and uniter. Many Americans voted for the President because they believed he would end U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Exit polls show that foreign policy issues... Read more.
- A Conversation with Astera Resident Thomas Teisberg on breaking the silos limiting action on sea level rise
- Dear Friends,. You are invited to a landmark animal protection and law event in South Africa (and online)!. Join us for a first-of-its-kind event in South Africa, a Colloquium on ‘Transforming Animal Protection Legislation in South Africa: A Constitutional Imperative’. 📅 Dates: 5 & 6 May 2025 🕘 Time: 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM SAST (both days) 📍 Online & In-person [Zoom & @University of...
- Improve your writing skills, learn from leading progress builders and intellectuals, and publish essays about progress Applications are now open for the 2025 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, a 10-week program for aspiring progress writers. Last year, 24 fellows, selected from well over 300 applicants, completed the program. They have sung the […].
- Skeptical about charity? Concerned it doesn’t work? There are actually many really well-studied and cost effective interventions that improve and save the lives of people around the world, including charities that have been rigorously studied to check their programs are working. Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/ekIRVhbpiQw Learn more about how to find the best charities at gwwc.org...
- My Ph.D.
- Following a tip from a concerned supporter, our Freedom of Information Act request uncovered grim details of the mass culling of 100,000 birds killed with carbon dioxide foam and survivors having their necks broken with a "Koechner Euthanizing Device.". The story was published this week in The New York Post.
- Be pessimistic about nature not people
- Regular announcements: did you know you can hire me for life coaching and general consulting? You can also buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record wherever fine ebooks are sold (except Google Books).
- Animal welfare in film, television, and advertising raises significant concerns among U.K. residents, yet many feel powerless to report issues they observe. The post Public Concern For Animals In Entertainment appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Over 20,000 people from 23 countries shed light on what influences human views on non-human animals across identities and cultures. The post Views On Animals Shaped By Cultural And Personal Factors appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A study of nearly 5,000 Facebook comments reveals why many Canadians resist plant-based diets despite their benefits for health and the environment. The post What Canadians Really Think About Plant-Based Eating appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The post Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can’t get anything done – and how to fix it appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- GCRI has launched a new website at gcri.org. Please go there for the latest in GCRI activities. This website, gcrinstitute.org, is being transitioned out. We expect that it will no longer be active soon. The post New Website At gcri.org first appeared on Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.
- Return of the screwworm, new DNA vaccines, gene editing at scale, and more
- As consumer products, combustible cigarettes are looking like more and more like videocassettes, encyclopedias and Kodak film. In the US, they are being displaced by superior technologies, including e-cigarettes, oral pouches and devices that heat tobacco without burning it. Tobacco markets in other countries, notably Sweden and Japan, are moving away from cigarettes even faster.
- Transformer Weekly: GPT-4o rollback, changes to the diffusion rule, and the US fights the EU AI Act
- post about posts
- Join the movement to protect humanity’s future: https://controlai.com/take-action In this video we extrapolate the future of AI progress, following a timeline that starts from today’s chatbots to future AI that’s vastly smarter than all of humanity combined–with God-like capabilities. Such AIs will pose a significant extinction risk to humanity.
- Malaria No More UK held a reception at the House of Commons in the UK to ring in World Malaria Day. Since 2000, global progress against malaria has been remarkable. Global contributions have helped deliver life-saving tools to communities around the world, halving malaria deaths and protecting millions. Yet the fight is far from over. […].
- A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Last week, OpenAI released a new update to its core model, 4o, which followed up on a late March update. That earlier update had already been noted to make the model excessively flattering — but after the latest update, things really got out […]...
- Illustration by James Daw. This week we did a flash forecast on the likelihood of escalation of the India-Pakistan conflict and potential ramifications. Here we have the straight forecasts along with our forecasters’ comments. Comments are viewable by hovering over the pill shapes underneath the charts which indicate that a forecaster has made a forecast within that range.
- Who makes the rules for AI? Right now, a handful of companies and governments are shaping its trajectory – but what happens behind closed doors? . Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at Georgetown’s CSET and former OpenAI board member, has been inside some of the biggest AI governance conversations.
- How I think about the situation with AI
- An obscure arm of the federal government killed almost 2 million wild animals last year using a variety of methods, including firearms, poisons, and traps that ensnare an animal’s neck, feet, or entire body. Carried out by the US Department of Agriculture’s euphemistically named Wildlife Services department, the 2024 body count included over 2,000 green […]...
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