Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- 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...
- "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."...
- "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."
- "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.
- Outside Kampot, Cambodia, Chan rides his bike, collecting discarded bottles to earn income to support himself and his six grandchildren. Before surgery, failing vision made the work exhausting and dangerous. He relied on his grandchildren for help, even as he carried the responsibility of keeping the family going. The post A Bike, a Family, a Future first appeared on Seva Foundation.
- On a plumber, a mayor, and the keys to Downing Street
- At SXSW 2026, FLI CEO Anthony Aguirre presented "A Better Path": a new framework laying out how we change course to build AI that works for humanity, instead of replacing us. Read A Better Path: betterpathfor.ai The Pro-Human AI Declaration: https://humanstatement.org/ Read Anthony's proposal to Keep the Future Human: https://keepthefuturehuman.ai/...
- In the wild, life is often far harsher than we tend to imagine. Many animals face constant threats—hunger, disease, injury, predation, and exposure—and a large number die young, often in prolonged and painful ways. Given the vast number of animals living in these conditions, this suffering may exist on an enormous scale, yet it remains largely overlooked. Why is this? Is […].
- 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").
- This is a somewhat technical note. By "software-only singularity", I mean that, after full automation of AI R&D, progress gets faster and faster due to smarter AIs driving increasingly fast rates of improvement in algorithms (overcoming diminishing returns), and that this lasts long enough to yield a large amount of progress (e.g. at least 4 years of progress in 1 year).
- Full automation likely yields a one-time speed-up and higher returns from compute
- This is a somewhat technical note. By "software-only singularity", I mean that, after full automation of AI R&D, progress gets faster and faster due to smarter AIs driving increasingly fast rates of improvement in algorithms (overcoming diminishing returns), and that this lasts long enough to yield a large amount of progress (e.g. at least 4 years of progress in 1 year).
- Current AI risk management relies on qualitative approaches, much like nuclear safety before 1975. We propose a shift to quantitative risk modeling, following the approach that transformed nuclear safety. We propose a methodology and demonstrate it by building nine probabilistic models of AI-enabled cyber attacks. This is a first attempt at AI risk quantification.
- Building the missing data layer for precision medicine delivery
- Your career is not only the biggest use of your waking hours, it’s the the biggest resource you have to make a difference. From an ethical perspective, it matters far more than anything else.
- On April 17, state leaders, local officials, and nonprofit leaders gathered in Seattle’s City Hall for the “WA Nonprofit Cyber Forum: Research & Resources,” a half-day event aimed…. The post Event Recap: Washington Nonprofit Cyber Forum appeared first on CLTC.
- How to break the delivery bottleneck in precision medicine
- 80,000 hours has a new book, innovatively named "80,000 hours.". You should probably read it.
- For all the good in Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, it failed to grapple with the biggest questions...
- Do the numbers hold up to scrutiny? This explainer, the second in a two-part series, examines Rethink Priorities’ welfare range findings, addresses common objections, and highlights the implications for animal advocates working to reduce animal suffering at scale. The post The Moral Weight Project Explained: Part 2 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Notes on a concept we've been exploring together
- ACE's Greatest Need Fund, launched December 2025, has made its first distribution of $357,254: $243,681 to the Recommended Charity Fund, $110,000 to Movement Grants, and $3,573 to ACE operations. The flexible fund directs donations where they'll do the most good as philanthropic conditions evolve. … Read more...
- Explore ACE’s evidence review on popular initiatives in animal advocacy, including ballot measures, policy impact, effectiveness, and risks. … Read more...
- We intend to mobilise $100m of philanthropic capital towards export manufacturing and international labour mobility to double the lifetime incomes of 250,000 low-income people in Africa (creating 10m DCYs). (This launch article is cross-posted, with some edits, from our Substack.).
- EA Forum Digest #293 Animal welfare, meta-traps, and new ways to give Hello!. 80,000 Hours’ book is out in the US today. And EA Forum readers might be particularly interested in the Cause Prioritization Researcher role on the Rethink Priorities Worldview Investigations team — a role where can think about cause prioritisation all day.
- This post records what I've learned while studying a bit of Fourier analysis. I used this PDF, which is the lecture notes for this Stanford course. The only thing in here that is really changed from there is the derivation of the Fourier transform, where I tried to explain the way I made sense of it. (That explanation may or may not make sense.) . Fourier Series.
- Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and […]...
- Disclaimer: This is a huge topic, and I’m barely scratching the surface here. I’m not an expert on these subjects, and am mostly trying to summarise the work of experts in an accessible way. All writing is my own. Introduction: One of my chief complaints about the field of existential risk prevention is that it often relies on estimates that are not well-grounded in empirical evidence.
- William Sealy Gosset was great. He improved beer at Guinness by using the statistics that existed at the time. Not happy with that, he invented new statistics to brew even better beer. The things he invented are used all over the place now, but Guinness wanted to keep him a secret weapon, so they made him publish his results under the fake name Student. One thing Gosset realised is that it is...
- what is Stuff for? Stuff is where we live.
- People believe that sex is binary: a human is either male or female. Others reply that sex is a spectrum, with a continuum of intersex conditions. Here I present a logical argument that if one wants to define sex in … Lees verder →...
- Malaria is caused not by a virus or bacterium, but by a complex, shape-shifting parasite that has evolved alongside us for millennia. This has made vaccine development a brutal challenge.
- We've been using Synthetic Document Finetuning (SDF) quite a bit at Apollo Research lately. This post covers a few tweaks to the standard SDF recipe specific to our use cases, plus some general tips and tricks for getting good results. We’re sharing these notes in case they’re useful to others doing research with SDF. 1. What Is SDF?.
- ➡️ Passez à l'action sur les risques de l'IA : En quelques clics, alertez vos élus et envoyez le modèle de lettre préparé. C’est automatisé pour un minimum d’effort: https://taap.it/TF-PauseIACampagnes ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Infos complémentaires : sources, références, liens... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Dans cet épisode du Podcast La Prospective, Gaëtan Selle de The Flares s’entretient avec Yassine Essifi, chercheur...
- Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom podcast explains the three reasons why a superintelligence would kill you: 1. As a side effect. It's building factories to build more factories, power plants to power the factories, and Earth runs too hot for humans. Nobody dies on purpose. Nobody is left alive on purpose either. 2. You're made of atoms it can use.
- This is a response to John Wentworth’s recent article, Why Physical Attractiveness Matters for Men’s Dating Prospects. I have no quibble with the thesis stated in the title, but a lot of the body of the article struck me as off-base. When John sent me the article, I told him the article seemed “fundamentally confused.” He asked for details, and this article is my answer.
- What global financial markets have in common with necromancers.
- We estimated trends in global inference capacity and found that token demand appears to be growing much faster than supply.
- His holiness has spoken, frequently about AI. At eighty two pages of length. The full Magnifica Humanitas can be found here. I am very happy that Pope Leo takes these issues seriously, and is sharing his views, and bringing a form of moral clarity, even with all the flaws and central errors.
- Produced by UK AISI Model Transparency and Situational Awareness teams. If you’re a Research Scientist or Research Engineer, we’re hiring – apply here and come and work with us! . TL;DR: We wrote a report on risks to AI oversight (auditing, monitoring, incident investigation), informed by interviewing many researchers (Figure 1 below), and our own analysis.
- “In all fictional work, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the other; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them” - The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges.
- gui2de partnered with Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship to develop culturally grounded instructional materials and an animated video for teachers in Rwanda.
- gui2de researchers Andrew Zeitlin and Arnesh Chowdhury are working alongside Rwanda’s Ministry of Education to strengthen teacher incentives and improve learning outcomes.
- GiveWell has granted $5 million to the DIV Fund to identify and support promising water quality and access innovations. Our grant aims to build a pipeline of high-potential, cost-effective opportunities that GiveWell could consider for future funding.
- State Reforms Target Construction Defects, Building Codes, Financing “Like All Californians, Angelenos Deserve A Shot at the California Dream” LOS ANGELES – Today, the Los Angeles City Council voted to support a package of housing legislation currently proposed in the….
- The post Benjamin Todd on why we’re updating our career advice for the strangest time in history appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- A new version of Huemer's paradox of deontology poses a big challenge to deontology
- Michael Toscano is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Director of its Family First Technology Initiative. He joins the podcast to discuss family-centered AI policy. The conversation covers AI companions, self-harm risks, sexualized chatbots, education, smartphones in schools, and why "infinite patience" can harm children's growth.
- Researchers compared mice housed in enriched companion-style cages to those kept in standard laboratory cages, finding that lab conditions fail to meet their basic behavioral needs. The post Do Laboratory Mice Get What They Need From Their Cages? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Reflections from a graduating leader on what it means to create lasting change as a student and an alumni
- Editors’ Note: Katherine Badertscher introduces a recent article she published with Huitan Xu in The Foundation Review on “Philanthropic Archives and Legacy.” In 2024, my colleague Huitan Xu and I investigated the feasibility of creating a single “legacy library” to house archival material of individual philanthropists and foundations—a single repository for scholars, practitioners, donors and...
- In this diary, Samuel Hughes visits Washington, DC, the world’s imperial capital, and reflects on a national style hiding in plain sight.
- Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can. Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending: .
- Let us derive the moral theory that includes every valid thing (principle, law, value) in normative ethics. Welfare as the only valid intrinsic value Consider ecocentric values, such as biodiversity, integrity, stability or naturalness of an ecosystem. The ecosystem itself … Lees verder →...
- Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can: “If you combine the head and the heart, you have these opportunities that can be 100 times more effective” See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #effectivealtruism #EffectiveAltruismStories...
- The post How an AI-powered app is helping Busia track missed visits, flag underperforming CHPs and keep mothers on care appeared first on Living Goods.
- TL;DR: GiveWell has published a podcast, looking back on their investments in iron fortification and their $8.2M grant to Fortify Health in 2021. When the grant was made, the projected cost-effectiveness was 5x cash transfers we delivered and estimated 12x.
- TL;DR: GiveWell has published a podcast, looking back on their investments in iron fortification and their $8.2M grant to Fortify Health in 2021. When the grant was made, the projected cost-effectiveness was 5x cash transfers we delivered and estimated 12x.
- What AI-driven miracles will happen this year?
- In addition to LessOnline and Summer Camp, I will be attending Manifest!
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Continuous distributions are everywhere - for virtually everything we care about, a little more is a little better (or worse), and a lot more is a lot better (or worse). This presents a problem - we need to create rules that reasonably and fairly apply across these continuums, where the degree to which a thing possesses a trait makes a difference to the reasonable treatment of it.
- Product quality over time
- The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of […]...
- Aligning Food Systems with Net Zero Ambition through Sub-National Food and Nutrition Action Plan gloireri Tue, 05/26/2026 - 10:55 Aligning Food Systems with Net Zero Ambition through Sub-National Food and Nutrition Action Plan. Trenggalek, East Java (May 19–20, 2026), Indonesia.
- We need to investigate how we can assess which problems should be prioritized. In this piece, we’ll first look at some priority criteria. Then, based on those criteria, we’ll investigate which of the world’s problems should currently receive priority. Read more...
- Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘ encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics.
- Rethink Priorities just opened three positions: Researcher, Worldview Investigations Team. Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Technical Focus). Researcher, AI Cognition Initiative (Economics Focus). We're excited to expand our team and we look forward to reviewing your application. Discuss...
- I've spent the last couple of years working on AI risk at Coefficient Giving, but it’s only in the last few months that I’ve started to feel more viscerally that transformative AI is likely to happen and potentially very soon. To be honest, it probably took me longer than it should have. This shift has been a really difficult emotional experience and I've been struggling at times.
- Yes — but whether they’re making roads safer is a much more complicated question.
- Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘ encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics.
- Why moved from global health to AI and pandemics ten years ago, and what we're focused on today.
- As AI systems become more capable, the cognitive security of humans will be increasingly at risk. By cognitive security, I mean the ability of humans to maintain control over their beliefs and actions. Cognitive security could be compromised in several ways: AI could become very good at persuading people of arbitrary positions; interacting with AI could lead humans to lose touch with reality;...
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