Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- 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
- 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;...
- Hi there,
- And other purely metaphysical harms
- Executive summary
- Leading scientists produced a 299-page report. They came away terrified.
- Unlike Western contexts, where it’s often a personal identity or political statement, vegetarianism in China is a practical diet motivated by the pursuit of healthy, affordable, and spiritually nourishing food. The post Understanding The Cultural Context Of Vegetarianism In China appeared first on Faunalytics.
- UPDATE: I got 27 calls scheduled, 846 views, and 54 saves within 1 day of posting. Grateful for the support. The following is a Linkedin post. I am seeking your 2 min help to help amplify by commenting or reposting: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jen-b-49a906114_aijobs-techlayoffs-aisafety-ugcPost-7463471447823310848-A_1S?. . I am receptive to feedback, namely:
- The average person works 80,000 hours over the course of their career. Ideally, that time should be fulfilling, well-paid, and spent doing things that make the world a better place. Of course that’s much, much easier said than done. In an increasingly fragile job market made still more fraught by AI, there’s no longer such […]...
- we think in conversations
- 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: .
- Three categories of futures, depending on how AI goes: ASI timelines are long. ASI timelines are short, and we’re on track to solving AI alignment. ASI timelines are short, and we’re not on track to solving AI alignment. If we want to make a good future for all sentient beings, each of these futures has different implications for what we should work on. If timelines are long….
- AI ‘time horizons’ are mostly not about time (I think it’s mostly ‘data’, but you’ll see where I’m unsure). One chart from 2025 has become perhaps the most (in)famous in modern AI commentary. For those in the know, ‘ the METR graph’ is unusually compelling because it achieves what so few measures of AI progress have achieved: a somewhat meaningful Y axis (‘time horizon’ ) as well as a...
- Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping. This chart is the core of it: . . This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars.
- To reduce child mortality, we need to understand what children are dying from.
- (In medicine at least)
- A piece that will piss everyone off
- This was produced as a part of the AI Safety Camp 2026 "Assumptions of the Doom Debate" project, led by Sean Herrington, who was also the lead author on this post. The other participants have equal contributions and are listed in no particular order. It is the first in a sequence we intend to publish over the coming weeks. TL;DR:
- Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. The questions I tackle in […]...
- [see also Four Ways Learning Economics makes you people dumber future AI]. This is a tweet by Seb Krier that caught my eye. The exact person and exact points are incidental. It illustrates what to is a flaw in many 'economics' frames on AI. Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right.
- Introduction. This sequence is an attempt to sketch a unified framework for several interconnected questions: Where do Bayesian priors come from? What even are probabilities? How should we deal with infinite ethics? What's going on with anthropics? I hope to lay out both some of the existing answers and my own preferred synthesis.
- Scientific institutions are struggling to survive under a mountain of publications and poor standards of peer review. Artificial Intelligence could usher in a new era of knowledge, or be its downfall. The post The Burden of Discernment appeared first on Palladium.
- Plus some new ways to filter markets, new trading log UI, and personalize mana offers
- We torture billions of beings that are, in relevant cognitive respects, like some humans
- Abstract. Several major technology companies have announced plans to operate AI data centers in orbit. Elon Musk recently claimed: “the lowest-cost place to put AI will be space […] within two years, maybe three.” If a meaningful fraction of new AI compute really is placed in space within a few years, that would be a fairly big deal for AI governance and strategy.
- Source. “Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考) Source: PLA Daily (解放军报) Date: January 21, 2025 Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰). Introduction. Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too.
- You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too […]...
- Out-of-context reasoning (OOCR) is a concept relevant to LLM generalization and AI alignment. Also available as a PDF. Contents. What is OOCR?. Examples. Papers. Videos. What is out-of-context reasoning for LLMs?. It's when an LLM reaches a conclusion that requires non-trivial reasoning but the reasoning is not present in the context window.
- H/T Hauke for “ Don’t torture your innie”. John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) I went to a lightning talk on a ‘little-known’ productivity hack that will change your life. The idea? Putting monetary bounties on things to get yourself to do them.
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