EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TL;DR

• In an online experiment with 4,761 Americans, short presentations built from 14 message modules increased the relative value people placed on a plant-based gift basket by $10.05, about 26% of its original value, compared with a placebo video.
• Content mattered much more than quantity. Describing celebrities' plant-based diets and framing meat reduction as being on the right side of history produced the largest gains.
• More modules, captive viewing, and asking people to eliminate meat (rather than reduce it) made no significant difference.
• This is a real-stakes choice, which is better than stated intentions, but it is a single choice measured immediately after exposure. It says nothing about what people ate the following week.

Why I'm posting this now

There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether EA has given up on diet change. Seth Ariel Green argues it hasn't: funders deprioritised it because the evidence was weak, and they would back new approaches that come with better evidence. He also asked more of us to post rather than polish.

Here's my quick contribution! Note, the meta-analysis by Green, Mathur and colleagues found that meaningfully reducing meat consumption remains an unsolved problem, and a single online [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) TL;DR

(01:08) Why I'm posting this now

(01:51) What we did

(04:05) What we found

(06:10) What this can and can't tell us

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Disclaimer: I have a physics background, but not a statistics or terrorism background. I’m hoping the simple nature of the equations will protect against me screwing up the maths here, but you should obviously not take blog posts as final authorities on any of these matters.

Introduction:

In effective altruist communities, the concept of a warning shot refers to a catastrophic event that tips off humanity about the seriousness of a threat of human extinction. The hope is that such an event would serve as a wake-up call to humanity and prompt cooperation to prevent extinction from occurring.

Warning shots are often discussed in the context of existential risk from AI, where the assumption seems to be that such warning shots would be few and far between. I have previously written an article arguing the opposite, that if AI truly is an existential threat, that warning shots would be incredibly frequent. However, I am not aware of significant study of AI attacks as a statistical phenomenon.

In this article, I want to discuss a different phenomenon where statistical data is available, and has been to shown to follow a fairly regular statistical pattern: that of terrorist attacks.

I think [...]

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I’m a bit concerned that the EA Forum is going to die a slow death. I don’t want this to happen as it has long been, in my opinion, the best place on the internet. I'd like it to stay that way. I personally have found myself engaging less, because the content is less interesting and relevant to me.

I also think some of the trends I highlight below are due to CEA investing less in the Forum (e.g., my impression is the Forum team is smaller than it used to be). I think a lot of what I critique below is downstream of community dynamics, rather than the Forum itself. But I also think injecting the EA Forum with a vibrant intellectual culture will be good for EA as a whole.

The point of this post is to open a discussion, and give my own ideas for what I think might help. I welcome people to disagree, share their own takes on what the EA Forum should be, and the purpose it serves.

EA Forum moderators — I think you all do an admirable job. My personal view is that there should be way more of you doing [...]

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Outline:

(01:51) Is the EA Forum dying?

(03:25) What's the value of the Forum?

(05:09) Ideas for saving the Forum

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Tl;dr: This is my recommended curriculum for a 6-week "Doing Good in the Age of AGI" reading group. It is primarily focused on cause prioritization in recent months, and it is intended for an audience that has already completed an EA intro fellowship or has a similar amount of context.

While creating this reading list, I tried my best to ensure that all the required readings were enjoyable, information-dense, and discussable. For the most part, I also tried to remove duplicate content. This is less true for the optional readings, but there's still a lot of great stuff there. It turns out that the EA community is pretty fantastic and flush with ideas! Still, if anyone has thoughts about serious oversights in this list or ways to improve it while keeping the required readings below 1 hour per week, I'd love to hear it.

There is also a version of this doc with prettier formatting.

What is this?

Effective Altruism has long sought to answer the question, “How do I do the most good with the resources available to me?” From this question, it has trended toward several patterns of thinking, as it has found those styles [...]

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Outline:

(01:06) What is this?

(04:08) Week 0: Will AI be transformative?

(07:37) Week 1: The Search for the Most Important Problem

(12:24) Week 2: The Hinge of History?

(16:09) Week 3: Direct Risks from AI

(21:28) Week 4: AGI and Animals

(25:21) Week 5: Democracy Preservation in the Face of Transformative Technology

(29:07) Week 6: Better Futures

(32:13) Other extended reading lists:

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With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There's increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell's best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to fall further.

This presents a unique opportunity to demonstrate that mental health interventions should be considered as part of broader global health portfolios. We can do so by making methodological improvements to our cost-effectiveness analyses.

The Happier Lives Institute have pioneered (and are constantly improving) methods for CEAs of mental health in WELLBY terms. However, their mission doesn’t cover other forms of outcomes, such as DALYs and income doublings. Furthermore, they haven’t yet publicly explored models of psychotherapy that leave lasting impacts on individuals (which may be of interest to HLI). Therefore, with an eye to increasing the estimated impact of mental health interventions in ways that are legible to mainstream EAs, I propose three directions for EA-flavoured mental health research.

About me: I’m Huw, I work at Kaya Guides, an [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) Converting symptom severity to DALYs

(05:47) Converting SF-12 scores

(07:51) Directly mapping PHQ-9s to disability weights

(10:41) Understanding long-term effects of psychotherapy

(14:33) Economic impacts of psychotherapy

(16:05) Conclusion

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Unless plant-based or cultivated meat reaches taste and price parity with conventional meat, the amount of farm animal suffering will grow, with no end in sight.

If we succeed with plant-based meat, we can significantly decrease conventional meat production and the suffering it causes. If we succeed with cultivated meat, we have a real shot at eliminating industrial animal agriculture.

Even if we fall short of that goal, every 10 percent of conventional meat that we displace spares about 22 billion vertebrate animals a year, cuts about 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, spares roughly 130 million hectares of land from grazing animals or growing animal feed, pulls about 10,000 metric tons of medically relevant antibiotics out of the food chain, slashes naturally occurring pandemic risk, and more.

For anyone who wants to make the world better, this is a chance to help solve some of its biggest problems. The obstacles are real. So is the cost of waiting.

Since I'm writing for the EA Forum, I'll focus on animals.

The number of animals farmed and slaughtered for human food is staggering, and it keeps growing.

Every year, humanity farms and slaughters roughly 220 billion vertebrate [...]

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Outline:

(01:33) The number of animals farmed and slaughtered for human food is staggering, and it keeps growing.

(02:51) Alternative proteins are our best (and perhaps only) hope to reduce the number of animals farmed and slaughtered for food.

(04:36) Why diet change advocacy is not enough

(05:30) The goal: Plant-based and cultivated meats that taste the same or better and cost the same or less, compared to conventional meats

(07:27) Eliminating the most egregious abuses is important, but it's not enough.

(09:00) The Forum's top two questions: Will it work, and will people eat it?

(11:34) Will AGI or TAI solve cultivated meat? Let's make it happen!

(13:27) My AI dream: a frontier lab takes on cultivated meat

(14:42) There is no plan B for reducing farm animal numbers, so let's go all-in on alternative proteins.

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This is a crosspost from my blog.

For as long as “effective altruism” has been a term, 80,000 Hours has been one its most important organizations - introducing new people to EA's core ideas and helping them to find impactful careers.

Since March 2025, this has no longer been the case. This is because 80,000 Hours now primarily focuses on funneling people into careers in AI with the assumption that humanity is on the verge of “AGI,” which they believe could determine humanity's future, possibly by bringing about either utopia or apocalypse.

I think this is a deep loss for EA, and I wanted to share some reasons why:

1. There's no longer a good resource to introduce people to EA.

80,000 Hours’ career guide and its problem profiles used to be the very best resource for introducing people to the core ideas behind EA and motivating them to pursue impactful careers.

Now that it has an AGI worldview baked into its content, it no longer really fulfills that purpose since it's about AI rather than EA.

This is quite sad to me given that, for a long time, 80,000 Hours was my favorite website, and I used to [...]

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Outline:

(00:50) 1. There's no longer a good resource to introduce people to EA.

(01:42) 2. EA should be about diversity of thought

(02:25) 3. Less people are discovering EA now.

(02:48) 4. 80,000 Hours' content is increasingly bizarre, which is bad for EA.

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Summary: The actions taken this decade may be exceptionally important for the future of civilization, but we should be unusually hesitant to proclaim that any course of action is “best.” Still, we should try our best.

This post was written as part of an introduction to a new reading group I’m starting called “Doing Good in the Age of AGI.” If you want to follow along, the full curriculum can be found here.

Uncertain in the best of times

Do you think freezing rent prices would be good for the economic middle class? How confident are you?

You might have an answer that you like, but you’re probably not that confident in it. Perhaps you haven’t formally studied economics, but maybe you’ve had some passing interest in the topic. Ever since Mamdani's mayoral campaign became a talking point across the country, or since his rent freeze passed in June of 2026, discussion of this economic policy has shifted back into the public spotlight. Maybe you’ve tried to read the arguments on both sides, and you’ve noticed that there's a lot to read. As it turns out, people are opinionated enough that 82% of renters and homebuyers believe there [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) Uncertain in the best of times

(07:36) Moving Forward

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TL;DR 

We (Frances, Sarah, and Geetha) work in AI safety and the broader EA ecosystem. We are increasingly concerned about sexual harassment, workplace harassment, and discrimination in these spaces. Through our advocacy, we have heard numerous firsthand accounts of ineffective or nonexistent reporting systems and anti-harassment policies, dismissive organisational attitudes, and harassment incidents being mishandled (including Frances’). We are now collecting incident reports through confidential calls, so we can make the case to funders and organisations for minimum standards on how harassment is prevented and handled. If you have an experience to share, we’d love to hear from you (please fill out this form).

How you can help

Please share this widely: within your organisation, in relevant Slack and fellowship groups, on social media, directly with people you know, and anywhere else you’re comfortable.

Our ultimate goal

We will produce a list of recommendations for how organisations in the space can improve, including policies, guidance on handling conflicts of interest in complaints, resources to support victims through reporting, and standards for reporting and codes of conduct at events and co-working spaces.

To make these recommendations effective, we need to understand the issues victims are facing and be able to [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) TL;DR

(00:58) How you can help

(01:12) Our ultimate goal

(02:24) Our ask

(02:59) How it works, plus confidentiality & anonymity

(04:17) Who should you talk to?

(04:35) Who we are and how to contact us

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I'm very happy to announce the launch of the Global Priorities Research Group, a new research group at LSE dedicated to the study of ethical prioritisation. We are hosted by LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) and aim to pursue philosophical research designed to help individuals and institutions decide how they should allocate scarce resources to realise the best outcomes for humanity and the wider world, continuing the work of Oxford's Global Priorities Institute.

GPRG aims to put particular emphasis on philosophical research that helps us navigate the largest-scale challenges associated with the impacts of transformative AI. We'll also consider how to compare and weight the interests of different kinds of minds - be they human, animal, or artificial - as well as foundational questions related to value and rational choice with the potential to reorient our priorities across a wide range of issues. You can find out more about our research programme here.

I'm leading the group, and I’m joined at LSE by Teruji Thomas. We're currently hiring for two 4-year postdoctoral researchers, so if you'd be interested in joining the group, please consider making an application before the deadline on November 15th.

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