Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- On what individuals can do
- Originally intended as a quick take, but got a bit longer, so why not turn it into a post. Just sharing my observations & assumptions here about the state of software automation. Happy to hear thoughts on where you think I'm off.
- Here, I summarize the failings of democracy. *
- In their new post on recursive self-improvement, Anthropic argues that a pause in frontier AI development is needed, but unfortunately, they can't pause on their own, because of less cautious actors: We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance...
- In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, […]...
- This post covers key insights for pandemic risk reduction from our Risk Analysis paper, which was awarded ‘Best Paper of 2025’. . Global pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and most recently, COVID-19, have brought hardship and loss: from global famine to loss of life, from deepening inequality to overwhelming health systems, and more. An important lesson arises: the more...
- Summary: This is a write-up on preparing for warning shots to catalyze international cooperation on AGI risks, and the corollary list of projects one could pursue. We argue we must first (1) understand types of warning shots, then (2) prepare to catch them.
- ➡️ 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... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Le contenu vous intéresse ? Abonnez-vous et cliquez sur la 🔔 Vous avez aimé cette vidéo ?
- This is a description of the methodology behind the latest iteration of my Targeted Personality Test. Feel free to take it either before or after reading the article. This post can also be read at my Substack. Thanks to Justis Millis for providing feedback and proofreading on this post. In my prior post “Which personality traits are real?
- Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that gives special priority to reducing suffering. As you might know, we at CRS find SFE deeply compelling—it is, after all, the backbone of our work. Part of our mission is to research and build a field around SFE. Unfortunately, SFE remains highly neglected in both academia and […].
- Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause. I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thing to bring up. Many people in the animal welfare space are working really hard, and this post might leave some feeling defeated.
- This is a summary of the work I've done and work I plan to do, and the theories of change and AI progress that motivate my work. I've been working full-time on alignment for three years and change, and thinking about brainlike AGI and its alignment increasingly often since 2004.
- On the mass extinctions that came before, the one we were already in before generative AI, and how humanity could easily be outcompeted.
- Purveying high quality decorrelated tokens
- About one year ago, I started spending most of my time organising PauseAI UK. At that time our largest protest had seen fewer than 50 attendees, no prominent politicians or scientists were associated with PauseAI, and I largely ran the UK chapter by myself.
- Join our team! We’re hiring for 3 open roles—apply by July 5 ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately $200k for prizes.
- This post’s goal is to distill our takeaways from building a new research team over the past four months. We describe some context about our team, how it came about, and then describe the lessons learned. Since AI safety is becoming more and more entrepreneurial, we hope this is helpful for others trying to do the same. 1. The team.
- TLDR: We study the shortcomings of existing helpful-only models. We find that some show emergent misalignment, others have residual refusal behaviors, and most show poor steerability, sycophancy, and incoherent character. None of these problems are a necessary consequence of helpful-only training, though: we show that synthetic document fine-tuning and adding character-related questions to...
- These days, I often run across whippersnappers excited to do something for AI safety — but aren’t quite sure what. One of the fun things about the Future Fund era were the big lists of project ideas; as we enter a new era of crazy money sloshing around, it might be time to bring back the lists!.
- A year of building reach and proving impact This is a preliminary review. Treat it as an imperfect, internal analysis that we share publicly for transparency and in case it’s useful to others. We’ll keep improving it over time, and feedback is welcome. Because most of our programmes have a lag between the work and […]...
- In 2021, our primary goal was to learn about which services will be most cost-effective for us to run in future years in order to help animals. As part of our learning process, we had committed to try out at least one service type that we had not yet tested and to offer an improved version of at […]...
- Empowering Individuals To Make a Change for Animals At AAC, we believe in the power of long-term change, and our positive impact often unfolds gradually as individuals take time to transition into new roles and discover opportunities months after engaging with our services. With this in mind, we are excited to present our impact report […]...
- If we can replace the factory farms that torture animals by the billions, we should!
- Transformer Weekly: The Obernolte-Trahan AI Act, Trump’s executive order, and Anthropic discusses a pause...
- When people mourn the loss of an animal, their grief often goes unrecognized and unsupported — even more so when those animals live on factory farms or in the wild. The post Animal Ethical Mourning: Why Animal Grief Is Disenfranchised appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.
- A1: Transforming Food Systems To Improve Diet Quality and Resilience For The Most Vulnerable GAIN programme A1. Transforming Food Systems. Market-based solutions for better nutrition outcomes. For millions of people, nutritious foods such as vegetables and animal-source foods remain out of reach they're either too expensive, difficult to access, unsafe, or not appealing enough to...
- Transforming Food Systems To Improve Diet Quality and Resilience For The Most Vulnerable (“A1”) Country programmes. Explore how A1 is working across six African countries to make nutritious foods more desirable, affordable, accessible, and sustainable for low-income consumers.
- This is a summary of the work I've done and work I plan to do, and the theories of change and AI progress that motivate my work. I've been working full-time on alignment for three years and change, and thinking about brainlike AGI and its alignment increasingly often since 2004.
- How can you identify high-impact, underrated policy opportunities before they become obvious?
- We, the Center on Long-Term Risk, are looking for Summer Research Fellows to explore strategies for reducing suffering in the long-term future (s-risks) and work on technical AI safety ideas related to that. For eight weeks, fellows will be part of our team while working on their own research project.
- GiveDirectly’s work is rooted in integrity and focused on safety. We deliver unconditional transfers to people in poverty while managing the risks this creates, including fraud, abuse, and safety threats. Our code of conduct and values, along with national laws, guide staff conduct and set clear standards. We continuously improve safeguards to protect both recipients […]...
- The post Overview appeared first on Center on Long-Term Risk.
- This page gives an overview of our research at the Center on Long-Term Risk. For published work, see our Publications page and Blog. Current focuses Our two primary research agendas are: Model Personas. This agenda studies and steers the emergence of malicious propensities in LLMs — traits like spitefulness, sadism, and punitiveness.
- possibly the most on-brand post I've ever written?
- There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which of these theories are correct (or which elements of them are) may matter a lot if we're seeking to change society for the better.
- a thing I don't exactly recommend but also still think about
- The arbitrariness detector is an online tool that helps you make choices that avoid problematic, irrational or unwanted types of arbitrariness. The tool is a quiz with 11 questions. Each question represents a case of a person who makes a … Lees verder →...
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29601. Thread: https://x.com/aksh_n0/status/2062568855814193497. TL;DR: Training small open-weight monitors provides a cost-effective alternative to prompted frontier monitors. Applying our training recipe to Qwen3.5-27B results in a monitor better at scheming detection than all smaller prompted monitors (Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, GPT-5.4 Nano, Claude Haiku 4.5)...
- FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately $200k for prizes.
- testing beliefs against reality
- About a year ago, in my article The Grisly Return of Holocaust Denial, I stated that Eric Hunt kidnapped Eli Wiesel.
- Rohin Shah recently had an interview on 80000 hours on his views on AGI Safety and his work at Google DeepMind. I'm posting the transcript below to encourage further discussion. I think the interview is interesting though I disagree on a bunch of topics, especially on alignment difficulty and CoT monitoring. Transcript. Who’s Rohin Shah? [00:00:00].
- Work done for our MATS 10.0 Sprint project - mentored by Neel Nanda and Adam Karvonen. Huggingface, Github. TL;DR: We have improved the original Activation Oracle (AO) training regime by training on on-policy rollouts, improving the conversational dataset, feeding more layers (following the approach by Niclas Luick) and making a small change to the injection formula.
- Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches.
- Star Trek futures >> Singularity futures
- FERC can accelerate interconnection and harden the grid
- In September 2025, we created a livelihoods research subteam to specifically focus on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. While we have evaluated and funded livelihoods programs throughout GiveWell’s history, we now have a dedicated program officer overseeing this portfolio, which has allowed us to build on and deepen that work.
- “One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”...
- On thought being a vehicle for language rather than language being a vehicle for thought
- Democrat Mallory McMorrow has released an unusually detailed AI agenda. Will it be a vote winner?
- Michael Thatcher, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: “There are a lot of problems in the world, and so figuring out where you can have the highest level of impact with the resources that you have is actually the smartest thing you can do.". See more impact stories at 👉 effectivealtruism.org/stories #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories
- Several U.S. states have banned cages for egg-laying chickens. How much would consumers have to save to be willing to reverse this policy?. The post Are Consumers Willing To Give Up Animal Welfare Regulations? appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A study of koalas treated during Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfires identifies key clinical factors that predict survival, helping responders allocate limited resources more effectively. The post Bushfire Survivors: What Determines Whether A Koala Recovers appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Meet the winner of the Q1 2026 “Right!” said FRED Challenge Marco Gerleit von Eynatten, known as MarcoGvE on GJ Open, won the Q1 2026 “Right!” said FRED Challenge. In this interview, he discusses how Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise drew him into forecasting a decade ago, how he approached our challenge, and why […].
- Editors’ Note: Andrew Fisher shines light on a lesser-known philanthropic titan of the turn of the last century, Nathan Straus. This post is adapted from the prologue of Fisher’s recently published book, Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian (Rutgers University Press, 2026). It is reprinted with the publisher’s kind permission. I came to … Continue reading →...
- A field guide for policymakers, founders, and funders
- CGD's David Evans speaks with Dipak Naker of the Coalition for Good Schools and CGD's Gabriela Smarreli on what the data shows about school violence (and what data is missing), how to conduct such research accurately and safely, and effective strategies for changing attitudes and practices around the world.
- In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off […]...
- everything / nothing, again
- Hartek Foundation partners with Punjab Police and J-PAL for gender-sensitivity training With a focus on skill building, the Foundation conducted statewide training programmes for over 2,000 Punjab Police officials on gender sensitivity and mainstreaming women in policing, in collaboration with Punjab Police and J-PAL. spriyabalasubr… Thu, 06/04/2026 - 04:23...
- This is a crosspost from the Forward Pass substack with the author's permission. What should you expect your life to look like in the future? Almost everybody is overconfident about what their life will look like in the next 30 years.
- Some UAE schools to get new Arabic programme: What parents need to know A new Arabic programme will be introduced across private schools in Ras Al Khaimah from September 2026. Called IQRA, the Arabic word for "read,” the programme was developed by the Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation for Policy Research.
- World Bank: Morocco’s 'pioneer schools' program shows early gains in student performance According to the World Bank, students enrolled in Pioneer Schools scored 82% higher in learning outcomes than students in comparable public schools outside the program after just one year.
- Where international finance meets development: The role of currency risk Currency volatility in African markets shapes development outcomes by determining who can access capital and on what terms, with firms in shallow financial markets often forced to choose between expensive local-currency finance and exchange-rate risk from foreign-currency debt. spriyabalasubr… Thu, 06/04/2026 - 03:28...
- More than a monthly cycle: Why menstrual health is a human right In Madagascar, the KILONGA project worked with 250 schools to improve menstrual health through clean restrooms, locally produced reusable pads, and training for “Young Girl Leaders” who can help break down stigma among their peers.
- Mizoram records sharp increase in crimes against women: Minister Lalrinpuii Speaking at the launch of the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Solve Project at her office in Aizawl, Lalrinpuii said the problem has raised serious concern, necessitating an urgent mechanism to address it.
- AI companies face a tangle of competing considerations when deciding what goes into a model spec. Should the AI be completely honest in every circumstance? Take proactive prosocial actions? Engage in whistleblowing? And so on.
- Crosspost. (I think this is one of the most important things I’ve written, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it. And if you know what’s at stake, and just want to know what to do, skip to the end). What’s at stake. Sometimes, the operations of factory farms are so wicked that if they were described in a work of fiction, you’d think it was a cartoonish caricature of evil.
- "Just because you can't predict when something will happen doesn't mean it's far away.". Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom, on why uncertainty about AI timelines is not the same as having a lot of time. Two years before Enrico Fermi oversaw the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, he said it was 50 years off, if it was possible at all.
- Abundance would hit its limits pretty quick. When it comes to relating with other people, the Singularity would be same shit, different day.
- These days, I often run across whippersnappers excited to do something for AI safety — but aren’t quite sure what. One of the fun things about the Future Fund era were the big lists of project ideas; as we enter a new era of crazy money sloshing around, it might be time to bring back the lists!.
- Building homes near jobs, transit, and stores costs governments roughly $21,000 less per unit in upfront infrastructure than building at the suburban fringe — and that gap widens over time. America’s housing shortage is well-documented, but policymakers have rarely accounted….
- America’s most sprawling metro areas cost their residents thousands more per year in transportation and energy expenses, produce worse health outcomes, and leave young people cut off from economic opportunity, according to a sweeping new national study. Urban sprawl, the….
- Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s plenty of low hanging fruit for the fixing. Nobody wants to create flawed work.
- Please steal these ideas
- There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. These theories are often hard to understand - you may need to read an entire book (or dozens of articles) to feel like you get the key claims of a single theory.
- TLDR: The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) just launched a global cage-free campaign against the largest Korean food multinational, CJ Group. Thanks to a once-in-a-generation alignment of factors, any action you take to support this campaign is likely to have an unusually high expected value, easily as high as the recent Ahold Delhaize campaign. I'm the Data and Insights Lead at The Humane League.
- I used AI in this post. >30% is AI-generated text (everything that appears in quote blocks)... . Google's Debug Project has been releasing mosquitos infected with bacteria that stop them from breeding in the wild, as a way of reducing mosquito populations.
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- The factory farms are trying to keep pigs in cages so they don't have to feed them as much. It's up to us to stop them.
- Grady Killeen explains that the most consequential takeaway from his working paper isn't just for the retailers — it's for the manufacturers.
- Grady Killeen explains his working paper, "Risk Aversion and Barriers to Firm Growth: Experimental Evidence from Small Retailers", for The World Bank.
- Air Filters for Infection. Air filters are often proposed as a simple, scalable way to reduce the spread of respiratory infections. The underlying logic is simple - respiratory pathogens can be transmitted through the air in aerosol form, and air filters are capable of removing these particles before they are inhaled and go on to cause infection.
- Episode 18 is about Victorian urbanism
- This month’s Faunalytics Index provides facts and stats about calves made to participate in rodeos, the effectiveness of plant-based nudges in foodservice settings, abnormal repetitive behaviors in rhesus macaques used for research, and more. The post Faunalytics Index – June 2026 appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Don't let reality reject you
- In this newsletter:
- It seems to me accepted wisdom in the West that the US owned labs must “beat” the Chinese labs in the race for AGI/ASI. Even those who don’t think there will be a winner, that essentially the race is to see which country’s AI will kill/disempower us first, seem to believe that if there has to be a winner then better it be the US labs. (I haven't seen a survey, so I could be way off here.).
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