Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The post Expression of interest: Contracting for Video Work appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- TL;DR: We've updated the EA Opportunities Board and migrated it over to effectivealtruism.org! 🙌. Check it out hereFor organizations: submit opportunities to add to the board. For group organizers: request a Slack integration. For people interested in opportunities: sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter.
- I’m a long-time GiveWell donor and an ethical vegan. In a recent GiveWell podcast on livelihoods programs, providing animals as “productive assets” was mentioned as a possible program type. After reaching out to GiveWell directly to voice my objection, I was informed that because GiveWell’s moral weights currently don’t include nonhuman animals, animal-based aid is not categorically off the...
- A deeply unhinged poem about those who object to arguments against causing suffering on grounds that they assume utilitarianism
- How it came together in 3 weeks
- As public attitudes shift and recognition of animal sentience deepens, veterinarians increasingly face ethical dilemmas. Providing care for a beloved 800-pound pig poses vastly different challenges than treating a family dog — but to their guardians, there’s often no difference. The post No Longer Livestock: The Changing Face Of Rescued Large Animal Medicine appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph
- The post Early warning signs that AI systems might seek power appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Beyond Meat is undergoing a makeover. Last month, the popular plant-based meat company announced a new product — Beyond Ground — that, unlike its signature plant-based burger, sausage links, and chicken nuggets, isn’t meant to directly imitate meat. Instead, it has a neutral flavor that “serves as a blank canvas,” according to the company, for […]...
- CGD’s Rachel Glennerster speaks with Lord Jim O'Neill and Dr. Akhil Bansal on the nature and scale of the problem of neonatal sepsis, how an advance market commitment could help incentivize the development of a diagnostic, and what steps policymakers can take to help save newborn lives.
- This year I’ve had so many amazing highlights including graduating from University, turning 21 and getting the opportunity to learn and grow under the guidance of the Target Malaria Global Communications team. Over the last 10 weeks, I’ve gained invaluable skills, developed my confidence in professional environments, and had countless meaningful experiences to reflect on. […].
- Target Malaria Uganda participated in the External Validation and Dissemination of the Uganda Malaria Programme Review (MPR) Report and Signing of the Aide Memoir. The meetings, hosted by the WHO Uganda Country Office in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, brought together technical experts, development partners, and stakeholders to validate the MPR findings and shape […].
- Nutritious Khichuri: The Boy from Lalmonirhat Feeding Hope gloireri Thu, 08/14/2025 - 08:53 . In the quiet riverine village of Khedabagh, nestled within Lalmonirhat Sadar in northern Bangladesh, every morning begins with the sound of boats on the Teesta River and the determined footsteps of a young boy named Minhajul Islam Bappi, making a difference in the lives of young girls and boys in...
- Youth from Lalmonirhat Serving Hope, one Nutritious Kichuri at a time gloireri Thu, 08/14/2025 - 08:53 . In the quiet riverine village of Khedabagh, nestled within Lalmonirhat Sadar in northern Bangladesh, every morning begins with the sound of boats on the Teesta River and the determined footsteps of a young boy named Minhajul Islam Bappi, making a difference in the lives of young girls...
- With $1K in cash aid, he built a life-changing barbershop. Now cash aid is under fire A man in rural Mozambique used a USD 1,000 unconditional cash grant from USAID, delivered through GiveDirectly, to establish a barbershop—doubling his income and improving his livelihood.
- (1) My 8-year-old son asked me last week, “daddy, did you hear that GPT-5 is now out?” So yes, I’m indeed aware that GPT-5 is now out! I’ve just started playing around with it. For detailed reports on what’s changed and how impressive it is compared to previous models, see for example Zvi #1, #2, […]...
- Note: I work at MIRI, but not on the comms team. I don’t work on the book directly and am writing this post in my personal capacity, but do think it would be great if a lot of people read the book. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have written a book about why artificial superintelligence might cause human extinction. The book is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
- Giving What We Can has reached 10,000 🔸10% pledgers! We see this as an important milestone on the road to a cultural norm, and we’ve made a video to celebrate: If you’re a 🔸10% or 🔹Trial pledger, we’d love for you to post about the 10k milestone on your social channels! You can find templates here. And if you are a 🔸10% pledger, a sincere thank you for being part of the first 10,000!
- Thanks to the generosity of more than 30,000 donors, GiveWell raised $415 million and directed $397 million to cost-effective programs in metrics year 2024 (February 2024 to January 2025). We approved 55 grants to 34 organizations working in 22 countries.
- 10,000 people from 116 countries have pledged to give 10% of income to the charities they believe can best use it to improve the lives of others. 🔸 Learn more about the 10% Pledge: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge 🔹 Check out the Trial Pledge: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/trial-pledge...
- Separate people have independent value
- The wrongness of public abortion talk
- Building an Epistemology Tier List
- With increasing urbanization, human-wild animal encounters are inevitable. People tolerate these interactions to different degrees, posing a challenge for wildlife conservation. The post Friend Or Foe? Human Tolerance For Wild Animals In Urban Spaces appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Hello FAST members. . Two months ago we submitted to the Servicio Nacional de Sanidad Agraria (Senasa), an agency attached to the Ministerio de Desarrollo Agrario y Riego (Midagri), a regulatory proposal aimed at incorporating specific provisions of Animal welfare in the land transport of farm animals.
- Essentials for understanding the new AI models, continued
- Join the next cohort of charity entrepreneurs—apply now! | Job Blast 🚀 Explore 10 standout roles from SecureBio, 80,000 Hours, and the UK Government ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏...
- Those who would give up essential Security, to purchase a little temporary Convenience, are me, basically.
- EA Forum Digest #253 Hello!. The EA Forum user survey is open. Your input helps us form our strategy, and make the Forum a better place for impactful discussion. It should take 10-20 minutes to fill in. Take the survey — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Not inevitable, not impossible (LewisBollard, 4 min).
- Ideas worth building the future around.
- We are pleased to announce that our new Executive Director, Attila Ujvari, has started work. Up until now, CEEALAR has been led by Greg Colbourn, our Founder. Greg has been in the role of Executive Director in a part-time*, unpaid capacity from the start.
- The fact that the ITN framework can help us prioritize between problems feels almost magical to me. But when I see ITN BOTECs in the wild, I’m often very skeptical. It seems really easy for these estimates to be inadvertent “conclusion-laundering” — regurgitating the author’s opinions in a quantitative or more robust-seeming form without actually providing any independent signal.
- Crosspost of my blog post. Factory farming is evil. I know, I know, I’ve made this point before. I’ve described, in depth, the way we treat animals. I’ve described that we stuff billions of chickens into tiny cages where they can’t turn around or flap their wings—where their frail bones are broken three times on average over the course of their brief lives, where they inhale nothing but...
- Are you passionate about making a difference for animals and the environment? Do you thrive on transforming raw data into actionable insights? Northwest Animal Rights Network (NARN) is seeking a motivated and detail-oriented Data Analyst to join our team. In this role, you will play a crucial part in our mission by aggregating and organizing vital data from animal agriculture farms.
- AIM is looking for people to start a field-leading climate organisation. Training, funding, and ideas are provided.
- Key takeaways Evidence about our ancient ancestors’ behaviors can’t tell you what you ought to do today. It can hint at behaviors that...
- The crime committed daily and what you can do about it
- Invertebrates aren’t given the same level of ethical or regulatory oversight as vertebrates in research experiments. This moral blind spot threatens to weaken the public’s confidence in scientific research. The post Mind The Spineless: Invertebrate Welfare In Scientific Experiments appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Misadventures in Alternative Data
- Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: “the good old days.” Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It’s called “nostalgia bias,” and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, […]...
- When writing our recent paper, Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity, we thought hard about how to clearly communicate our results, given the surprising nature of the finding. We feel this is a good opportunity to share some thoughts about how we think about scientific integrity and communication. Communication Strategy Considerations.
- People say ‘money can’t buy happiness’. Other people offer the reply that “the people who say ‘money can’t buy happiness’ just don’t know where to shop”. Our response is that money definitely can buy happiness. We think that’s so obvious it’s a boring question to ask. A better question is “how much happiness can money buy?”.
- TL;DR: On 18 real tasks from two large open-source repositories, early-2025 AI agents often implement functionally correct code that cannot be easily used as-is, because of issues with test coverage, formatting/linting, or general code quality. This suggests that automatic scoring used by many benchmarks 1 may overestimate AI agent real-world performance. . Background.
- A long-form salon hosted by ekkolápto with researchers from the Qualia Research Institute and FAU’s Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics Lab. Is consciousness best understood as a hologram our brain computes in real time? In this salon, researchers from the Qualia Research Institute and FAU’s Machine Perception & Cognitive Robotics Lab explore how qualia, computation, and “digital...
- This is a link-post for METR's CoT May Be Highly Informative Despite “Unfaithfulness.” I recommend viewing the post on METR's website, since it contains interactive widgets. Recent work [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] demonstrates that LLMs’ chain of thoughts (CoTs) aren’t always “faithful”: they don’t contain an accurate representation of every cognitive step the LLM used to arrive at its answer.
- Is there anything we can do to make the longterm future go better other than preventing the risk of extinction?. My paper, Persistent Path-Dependence, addresses that question. I suggest there are a number of mechanisms that are fairly likely to be developed within our lifetimes that would result in extremely persistent path-dependent effects of predictable expected value.
- With Gather Town announcing a sharp price hike and removal of their free tier, we wanted to remind both organisations and remote-workers/students/anyone individually interested that the EA Gather is still available - and currently free for marginal use. Individuals.
- The “hard costs” of building new homes — materials, labor, and builder profit margins — have a weak relationship to home prices across American cities. New research analyzing 75 years of data reveals that the cost of building new housing…. The post Construction Costs Should Predict Housing Prices Across Cities. They Don’t.
- New York City could add 71% more residential floorspace by 2060, and reduce rents by 18% over the next 40 years, if it removed certain restrictions on home building. In “Can We Rebuild a City? The Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment,”…. The post This One Weird Trick Could Could Cut NYC Rent <span class="dewidow">by 18%</span> appeared first on California YIMBY.
- The global metaresearch community marked a significant milestone last month with Metascience 2025, the fourth event in the Metascience biennial conference series presented by the Research on Research Institute (RORI) and the Center for Open Science (COS).
- How to ensure American AI models are robust and reliable via a DOD-led red- and blue-teaming effort
- Status: green
- I’m in Asterisk reporting on rationalist cults.
- Qf2ryKbykpiW/what-is-the-admissions-bar-for-ea-global">admissions, and professionally managed production. EAGx events are community‑organised regional conferences with support from CEA; you can think of them as TEDx equivalents. While CEA provides funding and logistical support, local organisers manage their own content, admissions, and event execution.
- More people should try this
- L'épisode complet : https://youtu.be/XGncGQt54Pc
- Another thing that bothers me
- More delays, fewer accidents, and lower prices
- Are you living as though the singularity is imminent?
- Giving China access to advanced chips for a $2bn payoff is a bad deal for US security
- Why are Chinese tech giants spending so little on AI Capex?
- What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text? In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. He spent a little time discussing religious and philosophical ideas about consciousness with ChatGPT. Then he invited the chatbot to imagine that it’s meeting a future […]...
- On International Youth Day, Sightsavers’ Rasak Adekoya highlights why it’s important to include and empower young people with disabilities.
- Punjab to launch ‘evidence-based’ anti-drug school curriculum in govt schools on August 1 The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led Punjab government is set to roll out an anti-drug school curriculum, developed by Nobel Laureate Prof Abhijit Banerjee-led organisation J-PAL South Asia, for Classes IX to XII in government schools to empower around eight lakh students with prevention-focused skills to combat...
- Understand this to see behind the curtain of AI's appearance of intelligence
- In June 2025, the World Bank increased its extreme poverty estimates by 125 million people. This doesn’t mean the world has gotten poorer: it reflects a new, higher International Poverty Line of $3 a day, up from $2.15.
- An introduction to The Launch Sequence: Why shaping AI progress matters, and how to go about it
- Maybe my favorite quote ever is from a recent Scott Alexander article, but in order to explain it, I will have to provide some context. Scott’s recent piece, My Heart of Hearts, is broadly about why we should value ethical consistency. In it, he described his emotional reaction to the Gaza conflict in the following way:
- The electrical power required to train individual frontier AI models has been growing rapidly over time, driven by the growth in total training compute and the size of training clusters. Previously, we found that the power required to train a frontier model has been more than doubling every year. If trends continue, how high could these power demands become?
- Moving away from despair. The post Don’t make kids miserable about the news appeared first on Otherwise.
- How long should you think about a problem that could determine the future of all existence? A mathematical journey from simple bets to existential risks. Imagine a simple game. There’s a jar full of pebbles, and you’re offered a bet. If you can estimate the number of pebbles to within 10%, you win $100,000. If you’re wrong, you lose $100,000. You have as much time as you want to think.
- First off, every ethical argument for having children is dominated by other options that are more effective. 1) If you’re worried about population issues, just donate $10k to bednets. That’s roughly the equivalent of two extra children existing in the world.
- This is a link post. This is a personal essay about my failed attempt to convince effective altruists to become socialists. I started as a convinced socialist who thought EA ignored the 'root causes' of poverty by focusing on charity instead of structural change.
- #ai #artificialintelligence #alignment #superintelligence #animation #agi
- Why have so many academics believed such insane things?
- To what extent, in the future, will we get widespread, accurate, and motivational moral convergence - where future decision-makers avoid all major moral mistakes, are motivated to act to promote good outcomes, and are able to do so?
- this week in security — august 10 edition Black Hat and Def Con 2025, Google and Cisco disclose Salesforce data breaches, U.S. Courts' PACER hacked (again), and more. ~this week in security~.
- Are Reddit mods abusing their power?
- Over the past week or so, the US economy took a major hit, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was no longer in the business of caring about the environment, and the only thing the internet can talk about is Sydney Sweeney. But here’s the thing: Even amid the constant deluge of news that […]...
- (I wrote this quickly for my own edification. It isn't original thinking; it condenses takes I’ve read on X over the past few days. Where relevant I’ve linked tweets. I hope it’s helpful for people.). Watching an OpenAI launch now feels like watching an Apple keynote in the early 2010s. As a kid, I was giddy about which new, unaffordable iPhone would drop.
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a […]...
- To prevent potentially misaligned LLM agents from taking actions with catastrophic consequences, you can try to monitor LLM actions - that is, try to detect dangerous or malicious actions, and do something about it when you do (like blocking the action, starting an investigation, …).
Loading...