Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- The post Digital Advisory Service Reaching 20,000 Northern Nigerian Farmers with funding from ACReSAL, to be embedded within the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. appeared first on Precision Development (PxD).
- This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here. This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the next few years.
- Debugging Florida
- Executive summary
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- How far open models lag the frontier, hyperscaler capex growth, and whether a compute crunch is nearing
- New Zealand’s online news media consistently frames brushtail possums as villains deserving violence — and wraps that message in humor. An analysis reveals how this combination desensitizes the public and forecloses compassion. The post How Dark Humor Normalizes Cruelty To Possums In New Zealand Media appeared first on Faunalytics.
- The weaving of a beautiful thing
- Discuss...
- Updates from Active Site, Asia Center for Health Security, IBBIS and SecureBio
- Do you feel as though you are living in a revolution?
- 🚀 Las últimas novedades de la comunidad de AE...
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Reason sells, but who's buying?
- if no-one is around you, etc
- There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech. You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of […]...
- Depth-first plans lay out a path from here to aligned superintelligent AI. We need those kinds of plans. But depth-first plans depend on many assumptions: “We will make AI safe by doing step 1, then step 2, then step 3.” Step 1 only works under condition A, step 2 requires condition B, step 3 requires condition C. If A or B or C is false, the whole plan fails (and there’s a good chance we all...
- Different Catholic perspectives can be, and are, more open to AI consciousness
- Songwriters, shamans, Sabbateans, Samuel Johnson, the Singularity
- I recently read a rather unusual article, discussing the possibility that certain humans may be able to conceive and bear children completely on their own.
- There are many different activities that could be described as "third-party risk assessment". Here are some distinctions that I’ve found helpful thinking about the space over the last few weeks. (Thanks Ajeya Cotra and Paul Christiano for discussions that inspired most of this.). Throughout this, I refer to the actors as: Developers. Stakeholders.
- I’ve analyzed the near-term economic effects of an AI pause, out of concern for my investments, and a desire to predict how strong political opposition to a pause is likely to be. My median estimates: The S&P 500 will drop 27.8%. AI subsectors will drop 34-69%. Interest rates will rise at a much slower rate than would be the case without a pause.
- I. 80,000 Hours recently revised their career guide and published it as a book, also confusingly called 80,000 Hours.
- #AISafety #Superintelligence #Animation #IndieAnimation
- After the cataclysm
- Most evaluations of AI systems focus on their capabilities: how good they are at coding tasks, how effectively they can answer complex scientific questions, and so on. From a safety perspective, capability evaluations have a place: by understanding how close we are to different capabilities, and the rate of progress on them, we can forecast when different risks are likely to occur, as well as...
- Introduction. There are some very nice resources to understand the intuition of Singular Learning Theory. However, I am quite unsatisfied with the current resources online explaining or approaching the subject, as I find them quite concise and brief - skipping many concepts that actually serve to strengthen the intuition to do research in this field, thus being confusing to me.
- An odd aspect of discussing serious threats is the amount of concern people express about you causing other people to be concerned. This kind of makes sense for interlocutors who don’t believe in the threat itself, or think it is overblown (though in that case it is perhaps strange to focus on altruistic concern for potential frightened onlookers rather than the object-level disagreement).
- At SXSW 2026, FLI CEO Anthony Aguirre joined Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris for a conversation about the current state of AI development, and the need for a different, human-centered approach. Read A Better Path for AI: betterpathfor.ai The Pro-Human AI Declaration: https://humanstatement.org/ Read Anthony's proposal to Keep the Future Human:
- Authors: Reilly Haskins*, Bilal Chughtai**, Joshua Engels**. * primary contributor ** advice and mentorship. This is the updated version of our earlier preliminary results post, covering the final results from our paper. The paper extends our preliminary work to eight models, a harder agentic task, CoT controllability analysis, and RL experiments. TL;DR:
- Summary: Safe deployment of an AI system requires that we can make confident claims about its behaviour on out-of-distribution deployment inputs on the basis of only pre-deployment evaluations. One approach to making such claims is to take a cognitive perspective, in which we interpret the AIs behaviour in terms of latent cognitive constructs, such as motivations, intentions, and goals.
- This is a linkpost for my Harvard Crimson op-ed for its commencement issue. I will not reproduce the whole text here, but my advice to the class of 2026 is in the following parts: My advice for the Class of 2026 is to embrace AI as a technology, but treat it critically as citizens. … … Continue reading AI is a Meteor. Don’t be a Dinosaur.
- I. Prologue. "If I Can't Explain It to Said Achmiz, I Probably Don't Understand It". This post isn't really about him, but I'd like to begin with a tribute to my friend Said Achmiz, the wisest person I know. The choice of adjective is deliberately chosen as term of art. Achmiz is not the most quick-witted, nor the most knowledgable, nor the most creative, nor the most savvy.
- TL;DR: You should run a virtual summer Intro Program targeted at incoming freshmen. It's an easy way to boost an existing group or (re)start one. Most of the resources you need are already available, and I am here to help with planning or advice, even if you've never done any community building before!.
- #AISafety #Superintelligence #Animation #IndieAnimation
- The people being snarky on the internet are wrong
- I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals.
- At 16, Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to build a superintelligence as fast as possible. He assumed a systeAt 16, Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to build a superintelligence as fast as possible. He assumed a system smart enough would simply perceive the right thing to do and do it. How could something so capable fail to see what was good? Then he studied the problem, and the assumption fell apart.
- As AI models become increasingly capable and autonomous, keeping them safely aligned with human intentions is critical. Extending our previous work on evaluating scheming capabilities, we introduce complementary approaches to test whether AI models would sabotage their own safeguards, if given the opportunity. Our new papers focus on propensity for scheming: when models are deployed as coding...
- Several jurisdictions in California have passed poorly-designed tax measures that are hindering housing production while threatening to severely harm the state’s ability to fund vital services like housing, schools, public safety, and fire protection. The California legislature and Governor’s office….
- We’ve just released a new paper: Retrying vs Resampling in AI Control. We revisit the resampling protocols introduced in Ctrl-Z with an up-to-date setting and much stronger models, and compare them against “retrying” protocols similar to Claude Code auto mode or Codex Auto-review. Motivation. Roughly a year ago we released Ctrl-Z, the first paper to study control techniques for agents.
- By Max Tegmark & Meia Chita-Tegmark. Of course you have moral principles – but how often do you use them? . I, Meia, am a professor doing psychology research, and I can tell you that most bad outcomes are caused not by lack of moral principles, but by them not being activated.
- We’ve just released a new paper: Retrying vs Resampling in AI Control. We revisit the resampling protocols introduced in Ctrl-Z with an up-to-date setting and much stronger models, and compare them against “retrying” protocols similar to Claude Code auto mode or Codex Auto-review.
- TLDR: The persona-selection alignment approach — selecting a warm, caring persona from the pretraining distribution and reinforcing it — looks successful in the current regime, but probably won't extrapolate to more powerful, less constrained settings.
- Utilitarians are right about footbridge, transplant, etc
- Transformer Weekly: SB 315, Anthropic’s mega valuation, and the Pope talks AI...
- Industry-led dairy welfare programs in Canada and the U.S. have strengths, but serious gaps in representation, transparency, and accountability remain. The post Industry-Led Dairy Welfare Programs: How Legitimate Are They? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- This is an edited version of a LW shortform. Superintelligence will likely be developed by US companies; run on US data centres; and be under the jurisdiction of the US government. This will massively boost US military power and make the US economically dominant (e.g. US producing 99% of world GDP). By default, middle powers will be left in the dust. How can middle powers avoid this fate?
- In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.
- The post Open position: Marketer appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- My guess is that, among the men I know who lost their virginity after their mid-twenties, more than half deal with serious erectile dysfunction or delayed ejaculation.
- CLTC is pleased to announce that Nada Madkour, Ph.D., will serve as Director for our AI Security Initiative (AISI), a premier academic program dedicated to shaping standards and…. The post Dr. Nada Madkour to Serve as Director of CLTC’s AI Security Initiative (AISI) appeared first on CLTC.
- taking the reality out of reality tv
- At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot about Roman history. Emperors, internal politics, Caesar, etc. I was always learning some random bag of facts about Roman history.
- During Africa month, global leaders will gather at high-level platforms like the Africa CEO Forum and the World Health Assembly to discuss the continent’s economic future. Yet one of the most persistent barriers to that future remains underfunded – malaria. Despite decades of progress, malaria continues to place a heavy burden on African economies, health systems and families. It […].
- AI Philanthropy, AI Foundations and African Jobs
- Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines gloireri Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:35 Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines. A landmark four-day workshop in Nakuru brings 29 technical experts together to shape what Kenyans eat — for generations to come.
- The post How a Community Health Worker Helped Save a pregnant mother in Burkina Faso appeared first on Living Goods.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- Follow-up to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-knows-who-you-are after the release of Claude Opus 4.8. Claude Opus 4.8 refuses to do the stylometric identification task at a much higher rate than Claude Opus 4.7 did. More interestingly, when it does take a guess, it is consistently unable to identify me from my writing, from prompts as close as I could get to those 4.7...
- Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics: JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far rostral region of of the cerebrum, but after binding with a leukocynoid it takes a role in maintaining the blood-brain barrier – in particular guiding the movements of lipid molecules.
- How the first week has gone
- [Cross posted from my substack]. In their EA Forum post last year, CEA described their ‘principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community’. I'm a big fan of principles-first stewardship in principle. I think EA needs a steward, and I think that stewardship should be organised around EA's core principles.
- Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like...
- I have linked below my recent version of my research compilation on Profit for Good businesses and the Charitable Ownership Advantage thesis. I have spent several hundred, if not over a thousand hours, compiling the evidence supporting the thesis that, given our modern economy in which ownership is typically practically separate from business management and governance, Profit for Good...
- ☀️Join the Summer Impact Cohort 2026 - EA Switzerland Turn your ambitions into action! 🚀 View this email in your browser Sign Up Impact Cohort - Summer 2026 ☀️ From Ambition to Action Want to do good and act on it in 2026? Join the Effective Altruism Switzerland Impact Cohort 2026!
- Reading the first post of the sequence (Probabilities are not the right concept) is recommended but not required for understanding this post. Infinite ethics. Once you start looking at infinities, all ethical systems get confusing. Intuitively, it's good to plant an apple tree. But if the universe already has infinitely many apple trees, why bother? Infinity plus one is still infinity.
- Anthropic employees in particular are giving directly to political campaigns at an unusual clip
- On leftist smart
- TL;DR: Anthropic restricted access to Claude Mythos Preview, citing a major leap in vulnerability discovery and exploitation capability. I review the 3 most common arguments from skeptics: (1) AISLE Security’s paper showing cheaper models can identify the same bugs as Mythos, (2) benchmark comparisons showing GPT-5.5 performs comparably, and (3) Mythos finding only one low-severity bug in...
- [content note: frank discussion of war and war crimes]
- A survey of adults in the United Arab Emirates finds strong public support for farmed animal welfare laws and advocacy groups, even as most people eat predominantly animal-based diets. The post Where The United Arab Emirates Stands On Protecting Farmed Animals appeared first on Faunalytics.
- We asked attendees at EA Global about effective altruism. Here is what Kennan said. Find an upcoming conference at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/ea-global #EffectiveAltruism #EAVoxPop #EAGlobal...
- Recent work led by the Center for Open Science (COS) found that papers published in journals with strong data and code sharing policies were more readily reproducible. COS has long advocated for policies that increase the openness of research through our Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, which were recently updated in 2025 with leadership from TOP Advisory Board Chair Sean...
- How a grasshopper caused the 1873 panic, and why recessions are usually just bad luck.
- it comes for almost-all of us
- “I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.” This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea […]...
- Eindhoven – the Netherlands’ “City of Light” – grew from its 19th-century industrial roots, when Philips sparked new lightbulb technologies. From there, it developed into a thriving ecosystem for communications, medical systems, and advanced electronics, drawing in talent and industry along the way.
- When Faith Meets Food: Lessons from the Food Culture Alliance Indonesia's Collaboration with Catholic Institutions gloireri Thu, 05/28/2026 - 07:35 When Faith Meets Food: Lessons from the Food Culture Alliance Indonesia's Collaboration with Catholic Institutions. Indonesia, 28th May 2026. T here is something quietly powerful about institutions that have spent centuries mastering the...
- "and you build something that you can't control, you haven't really won anything." "So I think the real misguided part of this race for superintelligence and power is that it simply isn't going to work." "The power is going to end up in the AI system rather than in any of the people who are developing."
- "The reason that we're in a difficult spot is because we've made the goal to full human replacement instead of human augmentation or empowerment." "So if there's a $50 trillion human labor market, you only have to capture 10 or 20% of that to be making many, many trillions of dollars."...
- "There's a story that if we're the US and China builds superintelligence first, we're screwed." "So this becomes a geopolitical competition for geopolitical power." "And indeed, we've ended up with the races and not the good intentions for the most part."
- An attempt to improve a viral chart.
- As most readers have presumably heard by now, Paul Erdös’s Unit Distance Problem from 1946—one of the central open problems from the field of discrete geometry—has been solved by an internal OpenAI model. Erdös had conjectured that, given n points in the plane, at most n1+o(1) pairs of them could be unit distance apart. Using […]...
- There exist drug classes that seem, in retrospect, cursed. As these chemicals worm their way through the clinical trial system, they consume billions of dollars along the way, and squelch through thousands of sick patients. When finally it dawns on everyone how useless the whole endeavour was, the drugs life is at last cut short, nothing useful left in its destructive wake.
- Behavioral evaluations may become worthless, which we think would be a disaster. Smart misaligned models may realize they are being evaluated ("eval awareness") and then act to look good to us so we don't realize they're misaligned ("eval gaming").
- For the last few months, I’ve been re-reading some of my favorite novels. Recently, I went through Vinge’s Zones of Thought series: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and The Children of the Sky. And what struck me reading them is how much Vinge wrote about a world filled with LLMs without ever having seen one. Now perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.
- ACE spotlights Africa Network for Animal Welfare (ANAW), an ACE Movement Grant recipient working to enhance the chicken welfare standards in Nakuru County, Kenya through policy advocacy and targeted stakeholder outreach. … Read more...
Loading...