Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- #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.).
- EA Forum Digest #294 Bugs, bednets, and big disagreements Hello!. No news this week, enjoy the digest. — Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Burying ebola, and other emergent disease (Tom Stocker, 7 min). Philanthropy Needs Ambitious Projects Immediately (Bentham's Bulldog, 5 min).
- Sufficiently capable models force national security responses — turning even the most ardent opponents of regulation into begrudging regulators...
- The housing abundance movement has won more of the intellectual argument than anyone might have predicted a decade ago. Across much of American politics, even in Zohran Mamdani’s New York (listen, I love the guy), it is now at least possible to say out loud that we have too many pointless rules making it impossible […]...
- Recent fiction publications: four sex stories; I don’t love you in New York City.
- "This is an important step in the right direction... but voluntary frameworks are not enough"
- but also, maybe they're not
- “Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.” It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket […]...
- For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.
- And why we only talk about looming catastrophe
- Crosspost. Billions of dollars in philanthropic funding is coming down the pipeline, and we’re not ready for it. Nan Ransohoff recently released a hugely important piece titled The third wave of American philanthropy. In the relatively near future, three philanthropic behemoths will have a huge influx of liquid cash: the OpenAI foundation, Anthropic’s founders, and Anthropic employees. A...
- For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and where it's likely to fall short. To that end, some have helpfully written depictions of utopian (or utopia-adjacent) worlds: The Adventure, Just another day in utopia, The Culture, The Gentle...
- Just sticking human and machine together will not align them.
- For health hackers, the risk is not experimenting.
- AI Safety veteran Holden Karnofsky thinks there’s a 49% chance his actions are making things worse. In 2025, Jesse Clifton even stepped down as the executive director of the Center on Long-Term risk because of similar reasons. Even top AI Safety strategists don’t know what will make things better, and what will make things worse. Why is it so hard to improve humanity’s odds?.
- Arguably the second most important election day of the year
- The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the future of humanity. All this in a post that I saw as relatively nerdy and anodyne, goring few oxen, when […]...
- Nevertheless, I shall take advantage of your kindness in assuming we agree that a science cannot be conditioned upon empiricism. — Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” . Freud developed the first modern theory of the unconscious.
- ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total prize pool of at least $100,000. We are very grateful to Sharada Mohanty, Sneha Nanavati, Dipam Chakraborty and everyone else at AIcrowd for working with us to host this...
- ARC has teamed up with AIcrowd to launch the ARC White-Box Estimation Challenge, a contest to improve upon our estimation algorithms for random MLPs. The warm-up round begins this week, and later rounds will have a total prize pool of at least $100,000. We are very grateful to Sharada Mohanty, Sneha Nanavati, Dipam Chakraborty and everyone else at AIcrowd for working with us to host this...
- #AISafety #superintelligence #animation #indieanimation
- Tens of billions of philanthropic dollars are coming, but we don’t know how to spend them well.
- The post Rohin Shah on what it’s really like to run AGI safety at Google DeepMind (and where I disagree with ‘doomers’) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Animal Welfare Act enforcement may be at its lowest point in years, driven by a Supreme Court ruling, presidential administration changes, and a shrinking federal inspection workforce. The post Trends In Animal Welfare Act Enforcement In The United States appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Michael Thatcher's career has been guided by a simple formula: "Follow your heart, use your head, and then go make a difference.". This has taken him from professional musician and dancer, to oceanographic researcher, to tech executive. Today, Michael is the President and CEO of Charity Navigator.
- FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026 gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 12:46 FreshValue Uganda Innovation Challenge 2026. Innovation for Healthier Diets in Uganda. Apply Now. Date 02.06.2026 Image Thumb (540x337px) The FreshValue Uganda Challenge 2026 is an innovation challenge organized by GAIN Uganda in partnership with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives...
- life is not a spectacle
- The welfare impactor is an online tool that helps you make important decisions based on your reflections on the welfare of humans and animals. The tool is a survey with around ten questions, and takes only a few minutes to … Lees verder →...
- On its surface, the national revolt against data centers seems simple: They are a nuisance, and people do not want them in their proverbial backyards. But I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that there must be something much deeper driving the backlash against them, and few other subjects have confounded me […]...
- Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs gloireri Tue, 06/02/2026 - 09:41 Strengthening Family-Led Business Governance: Lessons from Two N3F African Poultry Portfolio SMEs. Blog, 2nd June 2026. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, most SMEs producing nutritious foods are family-owned enterprises.
- I am thrilled to officially be joining the team at Target Malaria as a Communications Assistant Intern! I recently graduated from the University of Nottingham with an International Media and Communications B.A. (Hons) degree, where I developed a strong understanding of how powerful media can be in communicating with different audiences and driving meaningful change. I became […].
- I’m a fan of people trying things, even if they seem silly. Dismissing risky ideas misses the point of research. But thoughtful criticism can direct effort to more promising fields. To that end, I’m going to try to make my criticism as constructive as possible, with concrete reasons for my pessimism and closely related research areas which are promising (and stand to benefit even from...
- The answer is immortality and world domination, but not for you. If you think that's silly, then don't let a handful of billionaires and zealots kill us for it.
- Seeking out the worst parts. The post Spider shopping appeared first on Otherwise.
- As a bureaucrat, my role is to annoy my friends. Someone voices an idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” or “I wonder if we could…” I make a note. I do some estimates. If it pencils out, I’ll bring it back up, week after week. The discussions are fun, but also practical. We’ll test the waters, what would be a minimum viable scheme? What’s easy, what’s hard? Who could do the hard parts?
- I first encountered LessWrong a couple months ago, and since then I've been a regular reader of posts here, including parts of the Sequences. Bayesianism is a major topic in them, and I wanted to try it myself. An ideal candidate was the Flemish TV show ' The Mole' (Dutch: 'De Mol'). In this post, I want to share my methodology & results, but I also want to ask for advice.
- I am going to talk about my experience in the Jane Street LLM backdoor challenge. I am sharing partial results. I managed to crack some of the models using white-box methods, after the activation/prompting approach didn't pan out. Happy to discuss better or more promising approaches. Introduction. A few months ago a Dwarkesh Patel podcast episode advertised a Jane Street backdoor challenge:
- Around July last year I decided I was going to go all in on technical AI safety research. To do that I’d need to get into an AI safety fellowship, quit my job, and sell everything that was in my flat in South Africa (hopefully in that order). I applied to every fellowship that was open , and got rejected from several of them before being accepted into MATS on Team Shard around mid-November.
- I've been a toe-in rat and existed on the outskirts of the social scene for approaching a decade now, and I can confidently say (with love) that rationalist men rarely dress well. I am drowning in a sea of reasonably-attractive men diminishing themselves in skinny jeans and free t-shirts from random events three years ago. But you can do better. I believe in you.
- Thirty years in marketing, one conversation that changed everything: Helen’s story Helen Farrell had spent thirty years in marketing, communications, and PR. She was experienced, dedicated, and good at her craft, most recently as Senior Content Executive at a software company where she’d been for many years. She wasn’t desperate to leave. She just knew, […]...
- 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...
- Roman Catholics can, and do, take AI welfare more seriously than the encyclical does
- 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...
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