EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what's most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That's great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing various of these alongside what we’re most focused on. I think more attention is starting to go to this - as evidenced by Jeff's blog post about how he thinks political donations should be his primary method of giving going forward. But I think we probably have a ways to go. Political actions look better than they used to I think it's pretty unsurprising that EAs are sceptical of lobbying policy makers as a theory of change. By my lights, it looked decidedly less effective a decade ago. At that point, work on existential risk was very speculative, and mostly needed additional research. It was totally unclear what better legislation would [...] ---Outline:(00:56) Political actions look better than they used to(02:20) An example of making it tractable: PauseAI UK's campaign this week(03:57) How valuable and achievable is it for us to do more of this? --- First published: June 24th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dieuDkXYAveFsX48c/possible-mistake-eas-are-making-and-shout-out-to-pause-ai-uk --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Bentham's Bulldog recently argued that AI won’t definitely make factory farms obsolete. I agree, but I’d go further and argue that by default AI won’t make factory farms obsolete. However, I think it's possible (though not guaranteed) that AI could make factory farms a lot more humane. He throws out an 80% of cultivated meat being developed, and a 70% chance of it displacing factory farms contingent on it being developed. In particular, I think 70% is too optimistic. An 80% chance of cultivated meat being developed contingent on TAI seems reasonable to me, insofar as its possible to forecast such things right now. We currently have no feasible technical roadmap for cultivated meat to be able to create all of the myriad kinds of animal products that people consume today. However, one could plausibly think that TAI means that any technology that's consistent with the laws of physics will become possible. Cultivated meat will be possible in these worlds, and some additional superset of these worlds. However, I’d put a much lower chance of it being adopted in a significant way. To make a very vibesy forecast, I think there's maybe a 40% chance that cultivated [...] ---Outline:(02:11) The worlds in which cultivated meat are possible are also ones in which animal protein is significantly cheaper(04:42) People will choose whichever they want more, and we have no evidence people will want cultivated meat.(06:42) Objections(09:23) AI could make factory farming significantly more humane --- First published: June 23rd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YZoBtzuPy8qzJK6z5/ai-probably-won-t-make-factory-farms-obsolete --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

TLDR: AIM won’t run another round of Founding to Give at this time, but we’d be excited for someone else to run (an amended version) of it AIM launched the Founding to Give program two years ago to incubate for-profit startups with the goal of creating (1) impact via donations and (2) directly through company activities. Since then, we have run 2 cohorts for which we had over 3,000 applications, selected 38 founders who all pledged 50% of their exit money to effective charities, and launched 24 startups. We’ve been positively surprised at the level of talent we’ve been able to recruit for a program including many repeat founders who have substantial technical expertise or have raised substantial funding in the past. We have been incredibly impressed with the FTG founders, several of whom have gone on to be selected for top tier accelerators such as Entrepreneur First, Antler, YC, and Techstars. We think that FTG has shown multiple compelling theories of change, but the best versions of those ToCs would take us quite far outside of AIM's main focus in the effective nonprofit space, and require substantially different models/talent profiles/connections relative to AIM's current comparative [...] ---Outline:(02:05) What are the most compelling versions of "for-profit impact incubation?"(05:31) What's next?(06:25) To finish --- First published: June 23rd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xLYuYwRNDieqxo7AH/update-aim-s-founding-to-give-program --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hey all! The University of Toronto is really large (>100,000 students) and talent-dense. We think turning the EA group into a thriving community at U of T is high impact, neglected, and very tractable. We’re looking for University of Toronto students who are passionate about EA to join the organizing team to kick-start this community in the fall. We’re currently accepting applications for our virtual summer intro fellowships, where you’ll discuss readings on effective altruism over 8 weeks online, and meet other U of T students who are attending uni with you in the fall. Currently, the UTEA group runs intro fellowships through the fall and winter semesters, but has no community events beyond that. We think that the community can grow way bigger with more marketing, regular socials, retreats, and talks on high-impact careers. If you're passionate about effective altruism and would like to help out (we'll be tabling in August), send an email to uoft.effectivealtruism@gmail.com. --- First published: June 22nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P3Z5ispeMtLybY3Lt/build-a-flourishing-ea-group-at-the-university-of-toronto --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Here's Holden Karnofsky: I tend to think it's worse than 51/49. I tend to think we’re always going to be prone to overestimate how robustly good our actions are. And the more we learn about all the galaxy-brained considerations that one should have had in one's head, the more it's going to be like 50+ε%. I think AI safety is a great cause to work in. I’m excited to work in it. I think it's high impact. I am doing my best to do things that I will be proud to have done and hope for the best. But I really do have to live with the possibility that my ultimate impact on the utilons or whatever is going to be negative. I’m not aware of a good list of downside risks for AI safety broadly[1], so I decided to make one. This is not intended to be fully comprehensive, these are just the ones that I personally take seriously[2][3]: AI governance interventions are obviously high-variance: bad regulation can easily make things worse, many interventions could increase the risk of great power conflict, increased political polarization around AI could be really bad, more centralization of power increases authoritarianism [...] --- First published: June 19th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XNc6uNWMXuai4Tnom/a-brief-list-of-ways-ai-safety-efforts-could-be-net-negative --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

By Deena Mousa, Program Officer, Global Health & Wellbeing Cause Prioritization AI is progressing rapidly and could have profound implications for the health and wellbeing of people around the world. While global health philanthropy has historically assumed relative continuity with the past, we would like to engage seriously with the potential implications of transformative AI. This RFP supports rigorous and cost-effective research, policy development, field-building, and implementation focused on improving health and economic outcomes for individuals in measurable ways that are responsive to both the challenges and opportunities that a world transformed by AI might bring. Please see the example projects below. This RFP is responsive to the possibility that AI reshapes which global health problems are tractable and where the highest-impact opportunities lie. That said, we think the questions core to global health work remain the same: who is helped, by how much, at what cost, and compared to what alternative? A few examples of what a transformative AI future might look like in terms of R&D and health: A "compressed 21st century" in biomedicine. AI could compress many decades of biological progress into a few years, delivering cures or effective treatments for a wide range [...] ---Outline:(01:15) A few examples of what a transformative AI future might look like in terms of R&D and health:(02:20) Economic examples:(03:40) What we're funding(05:26) How we assess grants(06:12) How to apply --- First published: June 19th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NAaZTyx54bLYzpZg8/coefficient-giving-rfp-global-health-and-wellbeing-in-an-era --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 summarize the angles for critiquing the argument that I expect to be most productive, and how the sequence responds to existing critiques. Argument breakdown Here's a new framing of the unawareness argument (compared to how I present it in the sequence). I expect this framing to help readers disentangle different types of disagreements they might have, corresponding to three different premises of the argument. Roughly: What would justify preferring action A over B on impartial altruistic grounds? We’d need to “expect” that according to our epistemically idealized self, A has better expected total consequences across the cosmos (normative premise). But if our understanding of these actions’ consequences is too coarse, then we can’t say how our idealized self would compare their expected values (conceptual premise). And our understanding of any given action's cosmos-wide consequences is in fact that coarse (empirical premise). [...] ---Outline:(00:42) Argument breakdown(03:51) Why cluelessness matters(07:12) Critiques: What I expect to be productive, and what's been said so far(09:29) Acknowledgments(09:37) Appendix: Sequence summary annotated with the corresponding premises The original text contained 43 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 19th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NesgdEY6yPrE9wDap/cluelessness-summary-of-the-argument-why-it-matters-and-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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”. Mieux Donner is the French effective giving initiative, incubated through Ambitious Impact (AIM) and Giving What We Can in 2024. We were roughly 2FTE, have directed over €1M to high-impact charities at a giving multiplier of 5 to 6 times and are now looking to expand the team. I used AI to do some analysis on the application (without applicant data) and to correct my speech-to-text. A note for applicants: This document is written for people running a hiring process, not for people applying to one. Reading it will probably not help you, and we do not really advise it. Knowing how a process is designed could be useful if you are applying to a government body or a high-earner position, but the process we follow is unlikely to resemble any of those. [...] ---Outline:(02:04) 2026. at a glance(02:19) 1. Deciding what to hire for(02:24) Budget and contract(02:38) Why we opened four roles to hire two people(05:03) Choosing what to test for(05:18) 2. The offer(05:21) Open or closed round?(06:39) A public offer, and why(08:28) Sourcing(09:44) Salary(11:38) Referrals(12:08) 3. The process(14:20) Defining the weights(15:30) Rating scale and calibration(16:52) Designing questions LLMs fail, and benchmarking against them(17:37) Making the tasks LLM-resistant(20:15) Emails, handling, tracking(21:36) Value personalised feedback(22:35) Minimum scores for progression(24:04) Biggest gap: delay to process applications and opening length(25:11) After the process email(25:42) 4. The 2026 results, and what we learned(25:48) The funnel(26:46) What actually predicted who advanced(27:06) Biographical data: an open question(27:29) Where the good candidates came from(29:21) We changed the relative weight of TestGorilla vs tasks(29:46) What we learned about the interview(30:10) AI in the application(30:59) 5. The time it takes(31:37) 6. What we would improve(33:09) What we are unsure(34:39) Reusing this --- First published: June 17th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZgBXsLxPAzsy3MBfQ/from-job-posting-to-hire-templates-sourcing-campaign-and-llm --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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. Shamelessly plagiarizing Joe Carlsmith's great blog post, I think that our actions should reflect a strong likelihood of an upcoming step-change in funding for EA causes. Here is a (stitched together) tl;dr of Joe's post: Imagine you learn that the quantity of year-over-year EA-style philanthropy will double in each of 2026, 2027, and 2028. This would suggest that eight times as much funding would be directed to EA causes in 2028 relative to 2025. How surprised would you be to end up in this world? What would you do differently if you knew this would happen? To be clear, I am not confident that the amount of money directed to EA causes will increase this steeply. A huge amount depends on the decisions and wealth fluctuation of a few key donors. However, at this point, I'd be more surprised if the amount of money directed to [...] --- First published: June 17th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hnwFvqFLgkSvFfzbQ/predictable-updating-about-funding-in-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This is a link post. 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. But with the company's co-founder claiming Liam 7 is too dangerous to release, Eva starts to wonder if her Dad can really control what he's created. Would love to hear your thoughts on the film. It's targeted at people who know fairly little about AI, to get them quickly up to speed on where we’re at right now and what this technology actually is. The main points I was trying to get across were: It's grown, not built It's fascinating[1] It's deceptive The people making it are scared of it The people making it are trapped in race dynamics It's getting smarter, fast If there are people you wish understood these things better, I’d love for you to show this film to them and, if possible, report back on their response. It's always hard to gauge what effect a film is having, especially on people with low AI context, and I’ve found the anecdotal reports about [...] ---Outline:(01:30) The next idea(02:25) How you can help --- First published: June 16th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dPDcLsKHmMAn4hxjj/seat-at-the-table-new-short-film-on-ai-and-help-me-with-the Linkpost URL:https://youtu.be/qHpnWiBHHaU?si=hCoCl06nB5zTrx-p --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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? How might they work? Could they matter morally? And given the uncertainty, how should we treat them, govern them, and coexist with them? The website also offers practical guidance on how to get started, a curated collection of resources, events, and opportunities, including online courses, fellowships, workshops, conferences, jobs, and grants, and an overview of the growing digital minds ecosystem. It also links to the Digital Minds Newsletter (digitalminds.news), which we launched in December 2025. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and whether your background is in AI, philosophy, policy, law, social science, communications, or something else entirely, we hope the guide helps you find ways to engage with it. The digital minds/AI welfare field is still at an early stage and lacks much of the infrastructure that more established research areas take for granted. We think this is changing rapidly, and we [...] --- First published: June 17th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZsahSGgSuAmwb98wx/introducing-a-beginner-s-guide-to-digital-minds --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Disclosure: I work at GiveDirectly. This is a linkpost summarizing findings from a pilot we ran in Rwanda. I used AI to assist in writing this post, and it's likely that >30% is AI-generated text. View our blog and watch a video of recipients using AI here: https://www.givedirectly.org/the-robots-work-at-night Last year, GiveDirectly tested whether unrestricted access to an AI chatbot could complement cash transfers for recipients living in extreme poverty. Alongside our usual ~$1,000 one-time transfers in rural Rwanda, we offered 832 recipients access to a ChatGPT-powered chatbot via WhatsApp - a platform most already used - with no restrictions on what they could ask. What we expected We anticipated questions about the GiveDirectly program, help planning how to spend transfers, and basic business advice. People did use it for all of those things. What actually happened The more revealing pattern was how quickly recipients moved beyond program-specific questions. Across 21,000 inbound messages between November 2025 and April 2026, people used the chatbot the way people use AI everywhere: for family conflicts, sick children, market prices, and questions they couldn't easily take to anyone else. A few examples, translated verbatim from Kinyarwanda: "I have conflicts with the [...] --- First published: June 16th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pzFa3GGWfYLPNEGpq/what-21-000-whatsapp-messages-reveal-about-ai-utility-in --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe. We have decided to shut down because we don't want to be responsible for building the thing that kills us all. A common refrain among safety-conscious AI developers: "it doesn't matter if we stop building dangerous AI, because someone else will just build it instead." Is that really true, though? If a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company comes out and says "We've concluded that our product is horribly dangerous, nobody knows how to make it safe, and there's too high a risk that it leads to human extinction", this won't raise any eyebrows? This has no chance of spurring policy-makers into action? Shutting down would make people say, holy shit, they are serious about this extinction risk thing. Shutting down sends a strong signal to governments that they should pay serious attention to AI x-risk. It [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 15th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xeekqhAyzmihdFBuj/a-frontier-ai-company-should-shut-down --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.