Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- This is an edited version of a LW shortform. Superintelligence will likely be developed by US companies; run on US data centres; and be under the jurisdiction of the US government. This will massively boost US military power and make the US economically dominant (e.g. US producing 99% of world GDP). By default, middle powers will be left in the dust. How can middle powers avoid this fate?
- In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.
- The post Open position: Marketer appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- My guess is that, among the men I know who lost their virginity after their mid-twenties, more than half deal with serious erectile dysfunction or delayed ejaculation.
- CLTC is pleased to announce that Nada Madkour, Ph.D., will serve as Director for our AI Security Initiative (AISI), a premier academic program dedicated to shaping standards and…. The post Dr. Nada Madkour to Serve as Director of CLTC’s AI Security Initiative (AISI) appeared first on CLTC.
- taking the reality out of reality tv
- At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession. For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot about Roman history. Emperors, internal politics, Caesar, etc. I was always learning some random bag of facts about Roman history.
- During Africa month, global leaders will gather at high-level platforms like the Africa CEO Forum and the World Health Assembly to discuss the continent’s economic future. Yet one of the most persistent barriers to that future remains underfunded – malaria. Despite decades of progress, malaria continues to place a heavy burden on African economies, health systems and families. It […].
- AI Philanthropy, AI Foundations and African Jobs
- Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines gloireri Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:35 Kenya Takes a Giant Leap Toward Food Systems-Based Dietary Guidelines. A landmark four-day workshop in Nakuru brings 29 technical experts together to shape what Kenyans eat — for generations to come.
- The post How a Community Health Worker Helped Save a pregnant mother in Burkina Faso appeared first on Living Goods.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- Follow-up to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-knows-who-you-are after the release of Claude Opus 4.8. Claude Opus 4.8 refuses to do the stylometric identification task at a much higher rate than Claude Opus 4.7 did. More interestingly, when it does take a guess, it is consistently unable to identify me from my writing, from prompts as close as I could get to those 4.7...
- Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics: JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far rostral region of of the cerebrum, but after binding with a leukocynoid it takes a role in maintaining the blood-brain barrier – in particular guiding the movements of lipid molecules.
- How the first week has gone
- [Cross posted from my substack]. In their EA Forum post last year, CEA described their ‘principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community’. I'm a big fan of principles-first stewardship in principle. I think EA needs a steward, and I think that stewardship should be organised around EA's core principles.
- Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like Roger et al. and Ryd et al.)...
- We’d like to develop training techniques that work when applied to future misaligned AI systems. One strategy for studying proposed techniques is to test them on model organisms. However, model organisms built with common techniques are often fragile: we (and other researchers like...
- I have linked below my recent version of my research compilation on Profit for Good businesses and the Charitable Ownership Advantage thesis. I have spent several hundred, if not over a thousand hours, compiling the evidence supporting the thesis that, given our modern economy in which ownership is typically practically separate from business management and governance, Profit for Good...
- ☀️Join the Summer Impact Cohort 2026 - EA Switzerland Turn your ambitions into action! 🚀 View this email in your browser Sign Up Impact Cohort - Summer 2026 ☀️ From Ambition to Action Want to do good and act on it in 2026? Join the Effective Altruism Switzerland Impact Cohort 2026!
- Reading the first post of the sequence (Probabilities are not the right concept) is recommended but not required for understanding this post. Infinite ethics. Once you start looking at infinities, all ethical systems get confusing. Intuitively, it's good to plant an apple tree. But if the universe already has infinitely many apple trees, why bother? Infinity plus one is still infinity.
- Anthropic employees in particular are giving directly to political campaigns at an unusual clip
- 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.
- ACE spotlights Africa Network for Animal Welfare (ANAW), an ACE Movement Grant recipient working to enhance the chicken welfare standards in Nakuru County, Kenya through policy advocacy and targeted stakeholder outreach. … Read more...
- 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
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