Effective Altruism News
Effective Altruism News
- "We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data."
- Are you in midtown Manhattan? Come to the meetup
- What we can and can’t learn from ASML.
- Transformer Weekly: Blackburn’s preemption package, G7 AI talks, and OpenAI’s big new hires...
- Daniel Susskind explains why AI's effect on work is a choice rather than an inevitability, how the same technology can either replace workers or complement them, why we are almost always wrong about which jobs disappear, and what we should teach young people so they can flourish in the age of AI.
- A study finds that U.S. congressional staff overwhelmingly use science to back policy positions already decided rather than to inform new ones, with implications for how animal advocates engage decision-makers with evidence. The post Congress Treats Science As A Rhetorical Tool appeared first on Faunalytics.
- I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness”, which I’ll call the unawareness argument. To that end, this post will: break down the unawareness argument at a high level;. explain why the EA community should care about this argument; and.
- In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries. Could we do the same today?
- TL;DR: We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence, ‘ The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance’—submit your entries by August 14th. There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: $7k in totalAdditionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to $50k for a truly exceptional entry: an original solution...
- Research agenda: LMICs We'll be providing research across LMICs for the time being View this email in your browser From India to South East Asia. Hello readers, and welcome to the June 2026 issue of our newsletter.
- The Dutch East India company was among the first modern companies to receive legal personhood. Should we reconsider what personhood means in the age of AI?
- Sometimes I develop dating discourse takes, and then I can’t write about them in a regular blog post because of the whole thing where I want to have takes that are “true” and “important” and “not just a generalization from my objectively bizarre life dating AI safety researchers in the Bay Area.” But then sometimes I am tempted to write them anyway, and I remember how much joy I get from other...
- They do things different there
- This document explains how Mieux Donner ran its 2026 hiring round: how we decided what to hire for, how we built the offer and the process, the results we got, and what we would tell another organisation doing roughly the same. It is meant to be reused. We also advise you to read the chapter on hiring in “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit”.
- Digital Minds Newsletter #3
- People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout or of losing some kind of wholesomeness . But there’s another, very simple argument against it that I have not seen anyone fully make explicit , even though I think it’s very important. It goes like this:
- Wei Dai is a computer engineer known for his work in cryptography and cryptocurrency systems, and for his long-standing contributions to AI safety, decision theory, and metaphilosophy. He joined Forethought’s Fin Moorhouse to discuss: Do we need to solve ‘metaphilosophy’ before we can trust AIs to answer crucial questions about the long-run future?.
- The post Beyond the Numbers: How Better Performance Is Improving Maternal and Child Health in Kenya appeared first on Living Goods.
- The AI industry is using us, our data, our art, our writing, our subscriptions, and our compliance… until they don't need us anymore. They're not collaborators— they're conquistadors.
- A machine superintelligence does not need to be built in an American data center to risk an American life. At the 2026 CNBC CEO Council Summit, MIRI President Nate Soares laid out why this is a global problem that needs a global solution, and why that solution is more achievable than people think.
- Written in a personal capacity. I recently came back to SF after finishing my first year of grad school. I already had a sense that new money was coming into EA causes. But being back in the Bay Area has made me feel like this funding increase could be truly flabbergasting.
- If it transfers misalignment, we might get a misaligned model that’s easier to incriminate. If it doesn’t, we might get a capable benign replacement model.
- 9% of the global population lives in extreme poverty. Climate change alone could double that by 2050. Climate impacts also hit the world’s poorest communities hardest – the people least responsible for the emissions driving them. In the meantime, climate adaptation finance is shrinking. But the problem isn’t just the size of the pot – […]...
- BOJACK: Hey, I wanted to talk to you about—you know—I feel bad about what happened. HERB: So, you're apologizing. BOJACK: Yes. I'm sorry. HERB: Okay. I don't forgive you. BOJACK: Herb, I said I'm sorry. HERB: Yeah. And I do not forgive you. BOJACK: Uh, not sure you get what's happening here. This could be the last time that you— HERB: No. I'm not going to give you closure. You don't get that.
- Not all evidence is created equal. Discover the Hierarchy of Evidence: a framework that ranks study types from anecdotes to meta-analyses, so you can stop being misled by weak science and start evaluating health claims with confidence.
- When it comes to defending animals effectively, it’s useful to consider the following questions: (1) What characteristics of each type of audience should we consider […] Read more...
- Context: We are the ‘model motivations’ team at Arcadia Alignment. We aim to build a science of ‘ model intentions’, unifying insights from personas and other empirical evidence. In this post, we’ll outline the need for much better model organisms and how we might get there. The case for building more natural model organisms for alignment research.
- Voting in close elections, donating, and telling your friends to do the same is one of the best ways you can use your time.
- The post We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters. appeared first on 80,000 Hours.
- Building independent expertise inside Capitol Hill could reduce reliance on industry briefings and fellows
- From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to proselytize EA ideas.
- A review of 500 nutrition studies found that research with ties to the meat industry is more likely to reach favorable conclusions about meat consumption. The post Meat Industry Influence On Nutrition Research appeared first on Faunalytics.
- Executive Director Whitney Tate and affiliate researcher Andrew Zeitlin recently met with Rwandan government partners to explore new areas of collaboration.
- Vaccinating wild animals can protect human health, and spare animals from extinction and suffering.
- A friend once shared an essay with me for feedback. It struck me as mistaken and terribly naive, and I said so, which they did not take well. (They didn't say it, but a standard LessWrongian response here would have been "instead of insulting me, why don't you provide an actual counterargument? "—and that's often a very good move for helping conversations keep on-track.).
- Crossposting this from LessWrong, with the permission of the author, Tom Smith. In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard.
- Jeff Kaufman, Director of Detection at SecureBio: "There are a lot of ways that someone could cause a lot of harm with biology using stealth pathogens with a long delay from when you become infected until you start showing symptoms.
- not things that don't
- What’s unthinkable today can shift into obviously true. It has happened before and we must make it happen again to save the world from AI danger. #PauseAI...
- Workforce Nutrition in Textile Factories: Progress Toward Industry Buy-In gloireri Thu, 06/18/2026 - 06:36 Blog Thursday, 18 June 2026. Workforce Nutrition in Textile Factories: Progress Toward Industry Buy-In. GAIN Ethiopia Workforce Nutrition. Read article. In Ethiopia, the growing Textile industry is powered by the youth, typically aged 18 to 35 years, more than 85 percent of...
- Each year, Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) invites animal charities from around the world to apply for an in-depth evaluation with the goal of identifying the most impactful giving opportunities for donors seeking to contribute to meaningful, large-scale improvements for animals. We are thrilled to announce that six charities have been selected for this year’s charity evaluations,... Read more...
- In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented models I didn’t have time to examine and citing studies I didn’t have time to read.
- My new short fiction film 'Seat at the Table' is now out on Youtube!. Premise: When Eva visits her Dad’s AI company, she meets Liam, the company’s flagship AI system, who she imagines as a polite, precociously-smart kid.
- Proposing a new way to track AI research automation
- This blog post discusses work in a recently-published paper. However, this blogpost was primarily written by Parv Mahajan and Andy Wang, and several of the more speculative takes may not represent the all-things-considered view of the entire team. Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12747. TL;DR:
- This post was crossposted from Multiplier with the author's permission, by the Forum team. The author may not see comments. Subtitle: Why you might want to DIAL in to short timelines. People in the AI field love to talk about “timelines.” Sophisticated people in the AI field love to ask: “timelines to what?” Automation of AI R&D? (By which metric?).
- Epistemic status: speculative, but I think the mechanism is plausible. There has been recent interest in generating synthetic documents to upsample examples of aligned AI during LLM pretraining. See, for instance, Geodesic's Alignment Pretraining paper or Anthropic's " Teaching Claude Why.".
- Epistemic status: speculative, but I think the mechanism is plausible. There has been recent interest in generating synthetic documents to upsample examples of aligned AI during LLM pretraining. See, for instance, Geodesic's Alignment Pretraining paper or Anthropic's " Teaching Claude Why.".
- We’ve launched A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Minds (digitalminds.guide), a website for people who want an introduction to AI consciousness, AI welfare, and the broader implications of the possibility that AI systems could matter morally. The guide provides an overview of the questions motivating digital minds research, including: What are digital minds? Could AI systems be conscious?
- Content note: this is written as part of a daily writing challenge for myself. I have a comrade in rationalist event organizing, who once explained his theory of apologies. He said if you hurt someone, it only makes sense to apologize if you should have known better.
- On 12 June 2026 Pugwash and the SCRAP Weapons project (at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies) organized … More...
- I gave a talk at EAGx Nordics about epistemic discipline, building on my argument-checking of opinion pieces and live debates.
- A David Sacks-endorsed advocacy group said it would spend $100m promoting Trump’s AI agenda — but a defunct PAC and flop YouTube video suggest a stuttering start...
- A recent exploratory study from Te Protejo finds interesting links between cruelty-free ethics and veganism. Our latest blog looks at the longer history of the connection between anti-vivisection and animal advocacy, and calls for more attention to the cause our movement was built on. The post Cruelty-Free As An On-Ramp Into The Animal Movement appeared first on Faunalytics.
- A preview of everything to come in Issue 24
- Please spend two minutes filling in the below polls!. Planning where we focus at CaML requires forming views on many controversial questions, particularly with regards to alignment. In many cases, people we've talked to have very different intuitions about where the alignment community stands on these issues. These polls will help us get a sense of where the main areas of (dis)agreement lie.
- EA Forum Digest #296 AI, animals, and how to do good better Hello!. I asked for more polls, and here they are in the form of several cruxy statements about AI alignment and digital minds — thanks CaML! Enjoy the digest, Toby (for the Forum team) We recommend: Are top existential risk estimates 50,000 times too high?
- Limit unreasonable third-party demands using the Conference of Services model
- I. One of my guilty pleasures is reading dating advice books.
- would this work?
- For eighty years, nuclear weapons haven't been used. The reason? Deterrence, built on the assumption that leaders are rational, red lines are clear, and there's enough time to think before deciding. Now hypersonic missiles, cyber capabilities, and AI are eroding all three.
- How are emerging AI developments likely to impact animals in the coming years? The session highlights both opportunities and risks across areas such as precision livestock farming, alternative proteins, interspecies communication, wild-animal welfare, and long-term risks. It also introduces two strategies for influencing AI development to benefit animal well-being.
- What does it look like when effective altruism funding translates into measurable, large-scale policy impact? This talk shares how Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact (AIM)) incubator funding supported Movendi International and the Center for Alcohol Policy Solutions in developing the world's first investment case for alcohol policy, with Sri Lanka as the proving ground.
- Stefan once did daily argumentation analyses of articles on DN Debatt, Sweden's most widely read debate forum, grading them from 0 to 10. While he had expected to find errors, he was surprised by how basic they were.
- A fireside conversation with Bjørn Ihler on building a career in global security when there is no standard ladder to climb. Drawing on fifteen years between counter-terrorism, advisory work with world leaders and international organisations, founding and running The Khalifa Ihler Institute an international non-profit promoting peaceful and thriving communities, and founding Revontulet, an...
- AI governance is a nascent field with no established playbook, and that's precisely why it needs people who can navigate ambiguity, map unfamiliar terrain, and move fast without a traditional mandate. This talk draws on a non-linear journey from historian to think-tank builder to show how adaptable expertise, the right conversations, and intellectual curiosity without the need for full mastery...
- Biological risks represent some of the most consequential, pressing, and still underrepresented areas of existential risk work. This session offers an accessible entry point into the biosecurity field: why it matters, what makes certain threats globally catastrophic, and how the landscape is rapidly shifting.
- Frontier AI poses coordination challenges that no single government, institution, or research community can solve alone, yet the window for building durable international governance infrastructure is narrow and closing. This talk offers a ground-level account of what such coordination can look like in practice.
- People get sick due to accidents, infections and around childbirth - and need urgent care to save their lives. Tragically, too many children and adults do not get such care. Most don't even need expensive care in an intensive care unit, they just need to receive the basics, the low-cost Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC), such as oxygen and essential treatments.
- It's only in the last decade that it's become possible to measure happiness in a rigorous, scientific way, and to work out the best ways to improve it. Michael Plant and his team at the Happier Lives Institute have pioneered comparing charities by how much happiness they increase per euro spent, using WELLBYs.
- A practical session on what makes a strong grant application, from how funders actually read proposals to the mistakes that sink otherwise promising projects. Come with questions, leave with a clearer sense of what it takes to get funded. Kiryl Shantyka serves as EAGx Coordinator at Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).
- For many people, deciding to give effectively could be the single most impactful decision they make, if they stick to it. In this session Sofie Sjöstrand goes over the why and how of effective giving, helping you avoid common pitfalls and create lasting impact. Sofie is the Executive Director of Ge Effektivt.
- How do we do the most good? Most well-intentioned interventions have little measurable impact. A small number are vastly more effective than the rest. This session covers the core frameworks of effective altruism: identifying important, tractable and neglected problems; thinking about counterfactual and marginal impact; and weighing priorities across cause areas including global health, animal...
- The AI safety landscape can feel opaque from the outside: a dense network of organisations, research agendas, and entry points that isn't always easy to navigate. Drawing on his experience building Apart Research, Jaime maps the ecosystem: who the key players are, what they work on, and where people with different backgrounds can find a foothold.
- This session provides an overview of Ambitious Impact's (AIM) work to launch cost-effective organisations improving the world at scale. Over the last five years, AIM has launched more than 50 organisations improving the lives of upwards of 75 million people and 1 billion animals.
- It’s official. Elon Musk is now the world’s first-ever trillionaire, after his rocket ship company SpaceX’s record-shattering $2 trillion debut on the NASDAQ last Friday. With a mind-numbing net fortune of $1.4 trillion that is growing by the day, Musk is now worth more than the entire economy of Switzerland. He is more than 13 […]...
- Fifteen ideas to bring costs down and speed projects up
- How to save on construction costs without compromising safety
- Consistent and predictable funding builds state capacity
- An outdated federal law blocks transit modernization
- Allowing self-certification will accelerate project delivery
- A penny today is worth a dollar tomorrow
- Reduce reliance on consultants to create more direct control over costs
- Redesigning federal grant procedures and requirements will set up projects for success
- Procedural requirements delay voter-approved transit
- Federal incentives can reform bus procurement
- An accessible repository of transit planning information would aid project delivery
- Itemized procurement reduces expensive change order conflicts
- June Brief | We're looking for our next 3 teammates! Learn more about our three open roles, applications close July 5 ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
- Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA. TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university.
- OpenAI financial data leaked to the industry’s biggest hater settles an open question — just not in his favor...
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