Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- “Read this book. It may change your life.”— Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation What if the point of self-improvement were not just to feel better or get ahead, but to become more capable of helping in a hurting world? In Compassionate Purpose, Magnus Vinding bridges self-help and ethics with a framework for personal development... Continue Reading →...
- Subtitle as H4 It is with great pleasure that I announce that my colleague Krystal Birungi of Target Malaria Uganda at the Uganda Virus Research Institute has been awarded the 2026 Global Citizen Prize. The Global Citizen Prize seeks to identify and celebrate grassroots activists in local communities who are fighting for social justice, championing […].
- What share of electricity is consumed by data centres? What's the energy footprint of ChatGPT and other chatbots?
- (Crosspost). If you’re young and online, you’re probably maxxing something. Maybe you’re looksmaxxing: trying to maximize your hotness (e.g. by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer). Maybe, like Clavicular, you do it just to mog other people—to look better than they do. But good looks reach diminishing marginal returns.
- In Battambang, Cambodia, three generations of women run a family car wash. It’s a life built on grit, love, and long days, but for 20 years, there was a missing piece at the center of their home. At 74, Phen Mao lived in a blur. After she lost her sight, her daughter, Lorb, carried the …. The post May is Healthy Vision Month. This is how sight united three generations of women.
- I have two shameful secrets that I probably shouldn't talk about online: I love my family. I enjoy my hobbies. "What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job interview, HR will probably use an AI that can match his online writing based on a short sample of written text, and when they ask 'hey AI, is this guy really 100% devoted to his job, and does he spend...
- Example 1: The Viking 1 lander. In the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions. Total cost of $1B (1970), equivalent to about $7B (2025). The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's surface for six years, before its battery began to seriously degrade. One might have thought a battery problem like that would spell the irrevocable end of the mission.
- 0. I don't work at AIM. why care about this?. This taxonomy is written from AIM's perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly: If you're starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea needs.
- There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary: The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how farmed animals are raised and...
- How fast could an AI-driven economy grow? Most economists expect a few percentage points at best, comparable to previous general-purpose technologies (Acemoglu (2024)). Those closer to AI development tend to imagine something much more radical (Shulman (2023); Davidson and Hadshar (2025)). This series aims to ground growth rates in how physical production works.
- A letter to Gen Alpha
- How fast can an AI-driven economy grow? Economists expect a few percentage points; at best those closer to AI development imagine Dyson spheres within years. Who is correct?
- Editors’ Note: Carmen Rojas continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund (Simon & Schuster, 2025). John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America is one of the best books I’ve read about the perils and promises of philanthropy in the United States. It … Continue reading →...
- I think that a lot of “woo” - a broad term that includes things like chakras, energy healing, Tarot, various Eastern religions and neopagan practices, etc. - consists of things that have real effects and uses, even if many (though not all) of their practitioners are mistaken about the exact mechanisms and make unwarranted metaphysical claims. Now, a woo practitioner might explain what’s...
- The first step towards recursive self improvement
- Effective Altruism
- just show you care
- Greetings from a world where…...
- Podcast | How will falling fertility rates hurt the economy? With Melissa Kearney Typically, a society’s population remains stable if women have about 2.1 children each. By that metric, the word has a big problem. In developed countries the total fertility rate is well below that figure. So what are the economic consequences of that shortfall?
- Can putting a price tag on ending poverty unlock billions in giving? New research from J-PAL affiliate Paul Niehaus, cofounder of GiveDirectly, reveals ending extreme poverty may be more achievable than many assume. The question now is whether that kind of clarity can mobilize philanthropic money sitting on the sidelines... . spriyabalasubr… Mon, 05/04/2026 - 07:26...
- Podcast | Boosting farmers' profits In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Craig McIntosh discusses a recent J-PAL policy insight that takes stock of the evidence from randomised controlled trials on credit, subsidies, and cash transfers for smallholder farmers, arriving at conclusions that challenge some of agriculture's most persistent development assumptions. spriyabalasubr… Mon, 05/04/2026 -...
- Opiniestuk in De Standaard (04-05-2026) Eén geredde bultrug toont hoe onbetrouwbaar onze morele radar is Het was ontroerend mooi om te zien: bultrugwalvis Timmy die na een reddingsoperatie terug vrij rondzwom in de open zee, nadat hij eind maart in … Lees verder →...
- TLDR: I basically don’t. Contents. Contents. Ethical concerns. Thoughts on how to avoid becoming corrupted. Future worlds What happens in the lead-up to ASI?. Predictions are hard, especially about markets. Trend-following. The EA portfolio. Leaning my investments in the right direction. Appendix: Some specific predictions. Notes. Ethical concerns.
- One time my friends and I made a fire on the beach.
- How much do cows suffer in the production of milk? I can’t answer that; understanding animal experience is hard. But I can at least provide some facts about the conditions dairy cows live in, which might be useful to you in making your own assessment. My biggest conclusion is that cows made better choices than chickens by making their misery financially costly to farmers. Life Cycle.
- We empirically investigate exploration hacking (EH) — where models strategically alter their exploration to resist RL training — by creating model organisms that resist capability elicitation, evaluating countermeasures, and auditing frontier models for their propensity.
- Plus other madness
- Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head
- Most public commentary is debating whether AI has hit a plateau.
- Engagement, bridging, and the design of digital platforms which don't pander to our weaknesses.
- Soon, if not already, established authors of mass-market fiction will publish AI-assisted writing.
- Sentience is hot these days. Partly because of the development of impressive new AI systems, everyone seems to be asking: How do we know if something is sentient? While consciousness means simply having a subjective point of view on the world — a feeling of what it’s like to be you — sentience is the […]...
- We measure the ability of Opus 4.5 to fool prompted or fine-tuned classifiers trying to detect a narrow set of outcomes. We find that: The Opus 4.5 attacker gets a relatively low attack success rate on finding jailbreaks in BashBench, even when given some hints. Performance is especially low against a prompt Opus 4.5 classifier with a CoT and a fine-tuned Haiku 4.5 classifier.
- I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference. It’s hard to convey in words.
- I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach.
- TL;DR. OpenAI's "Critical" threshold for AI self-improvement in the Preparedness Framework v2 has three structural problems: It fires too late. The lagging indicator, 5× generational acceleration sustained for several months, lets ~3 years of effective progress accumulate before triggering. Anthropic used a 2x threshold instead of a 5x. It's self-certified.
- I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist/evidence oriented approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach.
- The post Open position: Web Product Lead appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- The post Open position: Product and Growth Manager appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- “Mode collapse” is a few things. First it was an observation about how early image generating AIs often collapsed to producing just the modal output from their training distribution (something very common, like a house with a white picket fence and a tree in the garden). Then it was the observation that this effect seemed to occur extremely quickly when AIs were trained on AI-generated inputs.
- What it means for an AI to “want” something? MIRI President Nate Soares breaks it down with @novaramedia: AI systems are going to do something that’s to “wanting” what submarine movement is to swimming. Not human, but functionally the same outcome.
- Developing a superintelligent AI that does what we want, without killing everyone, might be extremely difficult. In this video, we showcase the arguments from Chapter 10 of the book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. The chapter draws on analogies with space probes, nuclear reactors, and computer security.
- Eating someone is inconsistent with loving them properly
- In an earlier post—...
- Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things.
- In a lab room, a toddler, deaf from birth, sits while a tone plays. There’s no reaction. His face does not change. Six weeks later, after a single injection of an experimental gene therapy, the same toddler is back in the same room. The tone plays. The toddler’s head turns toward the sound. And somewhere […]...
- The typical primary care physician is incompetent in every measurable respect. This is a huge problem. Here, I make the case that. Primary care physicians are broadly, grossly incompetent. This is due to empty credentialism. Making it much (~10X) easier to become a PCP is a good solution. Primary Care Physicians are Broadly, Grossly Incompetent.
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes … Continue reading →...
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. I’ve really wanted more good short accounts of why AI poses an existential risk. Working on one myself has been one of those incredibly high priorities I keep putting off. Meanwhile award-winning journalist Ben … Continue reading →...
- Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things.
- ➡️ 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... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Et si Matrix n'était pas une fiction, mais un documentaire sur votre attachement ?
- I’ve really wanted more good short accounts of why AI poses an existential risk. Working on one myself has been one of those incredibly high priorities I keep putting off. Meanwhile award-winning journalist Ben Bradford of NPR has made a podcast version of my case for AI x-risk that I am thrilled with!
- Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. From March 9th to 15th 2016, Go players around the world stayed up to watch their game fall to AI. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, commonly understood to be the world’s strongest player at the time, with a convincing 4-1 score.
- How much do cows suffer in the production of milk? I can’t answer that; understanding animal experience is hard. But I can at least provide some facts about the conditions dairy cows live in, which might be useful to you in making your own assessment. My biggest conclusion is that cows made better choices than … Continue reading "Dairy cows make their misery expensive (but their calves can’t)"...
- It is a fact about wolves and rationality that you should warn people about wolves quite a few times for every effective wolf attack. In particular, there is an asymmetry between the costs of having one’s flock devoured and averting a non-eventuating wolf attack. If the carnage is a hundred times worse, then it’s worth up to ninety-nine false alarms to stop it.
- In this episode, Greg Burnham and Tom Adamczewski join Anson Ho to push back on benchmark pessimism and dig into what the next generation of AI benchmarks could look like.
- This is the abstract, introduction, and discussion of our new paper. We study three popular mitigations for emergent misalignment (EM) — diluting misaligned data with benign data, post-hoc HHH finetuning, and inoculation prompting — and show that each can leave behind conditional misalignment: the model reverts to broadly misaligned behavior when prompts contain cues from the misaligned...
- Current AIs routinely take unintended actions to score well on tasks: hardcoding test cases, training on the test set, downplaying issues, etc. This misalignment is still somewhat incoherent, but it increasingly resembles what I call " fitness-seeking"—a family of misaligned motivations centered on performing well in training and evaluations (e.g., reward-seeking).
- The topic of AI welfare is fast becoming mainstream. As I wrote in my last post, there’s an emerging debate that has been drawing some strong reactions. There is some resistance to even treating AI welfare as a legitimate concern. But there’s a perhaps more understandable resistance—not to taking AI welfare seriously in general, but to particular […].
- Or, did a chief scientist of an AI assistant startup conclusively show that GPT-5.5 has 9.7T parameters? . Introduction. Recently, a paper was circulated on Twitter claiming to have reverse engineered the parameter count of many frontier closed-source models including the newer GPT-5.5 (9.7T parameters) and Claude Opus 4.6 (5.3T parameters) as well as older models such as o1 (3.5T) and...
- Fitness-seeking is increasingly what misalignment looks like in practice—how should we respond?
- Current AIs routinely take unintended actions to score well on tasks: hardcoding test cases, training on the test set, downplaying issues, etc. This misalignment is still somewhat incoherent, but it increasingly resembles what I call " fitness-seeking"—a family of misaligned motivations centered on performing well in training and evaluations (e.g., reward-seeking).
- The post The Human Cost of Farming Animals – The Transfarmation Project appeared first on Mercy For Animals.
- A random professor's opinion isn't an expert consensus!
- My sense is that people think of AI existential risk and AI unemployment as distinct issues. Some people are extremely concerned about extinction and perhaps even indifferent to total unemployment. Some people think of moderate AI unemployment as a realistic and concerning issue, and AI extinction as science fiction.
- Transformer Weekly: Cruz’s latest messaging bill, Google employee outrage, and Elon goes to court...
- A study reveals how negative experiences over time may create lasting behavioral scars in rhesus macaques used for research. The post Lifetime Hardship Predicts Repetitive Behavior In Macaques appeared first on Faunalytics.
- In this newsletter:
- Our residential seminar for 18–22 year olds was such a success that we are running it again. Apply this week or forever hold your peace.
- I. I’m going to talk about the persona selection model, which in my opinion is one of the most important concepts to understand if you want to understand large language models’ psychology.
- 🚀 Las últimas novedades de la comunidad de AE...
- I do not find it amusing
- In honor of yesterday’s nonspecific point in the gradual arrival of self-driving cars, an interview with myself. Interviewer: It sounds like you’re pretty excited about self-driving cars. Weren’t you just saying that unemployment from AI is on some kind of very overlapping continuum with extinction from AI?
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. often worry that people are being too deferential about their beliefs. I also hear others worrying about this, and nobody seemingly worrying about the reverse, except perhaps my friends and therapists (and I guess … Continue reading →...
- Ever wonder Faunalytics uses your community survey responses? In this blog, we break down a handful of important ways your feedback is incorporated directly into our work. The post How You Help: 5 Ways We Use Your Community Survey Responses appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Big complex idea
- Because it has concrete advice and exercises
- Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things.
- Meticulousness, moral muddles, mirth, mastery, millenarianist movements, masks
- We estimate that between 290,000 and 1.6 million H100-equivalents (H100e) were smuggled to China through 2025. Our median estimate of 660,000 H100e would be roughly a third of China's total compute.
- This was originally posted here. It's written for an audience that's not deep in the weeds of EA giving theory/culture, but a few people suggested I post here as there's much that's additive to or divergent from some common EA practices. Feedback / disagreements welcome! Also my first time posting here. Hi!. --. Most people who intend to give large amounts of money away never actually do.
- A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information that you seek to publicize.
- This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged every day. I started my newest blog, world spirit sock puppet, on 7 October 2020, and blogged every day until February 20th 2021, 138 posts later. I just came across an unpublished draft about the experience from later that year (saved May 4), which I feel that I should reckon with a bit rather than just jumping into a month of this as if it’s a new...
- Every way I know to store clothes I hate, to a first approximation. I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I can’t see almost any of them without taking a bunch out.
- When I’ve been sick for a bit, here are some things that may be true: I haven’t exercised lately. . I have developed a vague background sense that I’m fragile and if I were to exercise it should be by walking around the garden or something. . I’m dressed in what is too shlubby to even count as comfortable. .
- I hear that many people believe that the idea of advanced AI threatening human existence was invented by AI CEOs to hype their products. I’ve even been condescendingly informed of this, as if I am the one at risk of naively accepting AI companies’ preferred narratives. If you are reading this, you are probably familiar enough with the decades-old AI safety community to know this isn’t true.
- It’s early in the morning, and sadly 1:29pm. After spending some time looking at things and picking them up and walking up the stairs and down the stairs and considering questions like “what should I…”, which my brain apparently considered objects of art more than of imperative, I inched into a decision to go out somewhere.
- I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, today with my boyfriend. We have a modest Airbnb apartment, up enough stairs that if you decided to count the flights you would probably have forgotten about the project by the top. It’s pleasant and unassuming, and we were moving slowly toward beginning writing our mandatory blog posts rather too late in the evening when a new presence got our attention.
- Last Tuesday I went to a Broadway show, Ragtime. I was in the front row, but surprised by how much the action did not feel real and a few feet away from me. Perhaps the performers were so skilled they didn’t seem like real people, or the sound so loud and sharp that it didn’t feel like people legit singing just over there.
- I’m on a plane heading back to San Francisco. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for most of the years since 2009, and a large fraction of that time the place has felt near the brink of self-driving cars. (Well, everywhere has, but San Francisco feels like the first testing ground for the most interesting experiments in technology.). And that has felt like a big deal.
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information … Continue reading →...
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. Every way I know to store clothes I hate, to a first approximation. I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I … Continue reading →...
- Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet. Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t … Continue reading →...
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