By EA Forum Team
The podcast currently has 379 episodes available.
Epistemic Status: 13 years working as a therapist for a wide variety of populations, 5 of them working with rationalists and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at over 20 rationality camps and workshops. This is an extremely short and colloquially written form of points that could be expanded on to fill a book, and there is plenty of nuance to practically everything here, but I am extremely confident of the core points in this frame, and have used it to help many people break out of or avoid manipulative practices.
TL;DR: Your wants and preferences are not invalidated by smarter or more “rational” people's preferences. What feels good or bad to someone is not a monocausal result of how smart or stupid they are.
Alternative titles to this post are "Two people are enough to form a cult" and "Red flags if dating rationalists," but this [...]
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Outline:
(02:53) 1) You are not too stupid to know what you want.
(07:35) 2) Feeling hurt is not a sign of irrationality.
(13:13) 3) Illegible preferences are not invalid.
(17:20) 4) Your preferences do not need to fully match your communitys.
(21:41) Final Thoughts
The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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In this post, we’ll report on our activities in 2024, outline our plans for 2025, and show our room for funding.
Summary
EA Germany (EAD) acts as an umbrella organisation for the German EA community, the third largest national community and biggest in continental Europe, according to the 2022 EA survey.
The non-profit has a focus on talent development (e.g. with an EA intro program and a career program, organising an EAGxBerlin), community building support (e.g. with community building retreats), and general community support (e.g. with 1-1s and employer of record program). EAD tested several new programs in 2024, especially in the area of global catastrophic risks.
In 2025, we plan to focus on refining our target group and testing tailored programs, guided by current data indicating that some individuals are several times more likely to shift their career plans towards impactful paths.
CEA's funding decision in February will [...]
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Outline:
(00:20) Summary
(01:39) About EA Germany (EAD)
(03:41) Overview/Report 2024
(03:46) Our main programs
(08:35) Explorations
(08:57) Projects to reduce Global Catastrophic Risks
(09:58) Germany-wide online group
(10:42) Job recommendations
(11:06) Google ads
(11:21) Volunteer programs
(12:17) Media outreach
(12:59) Not started
(14:01) Planned changes for 2025
(14:27) Reaching a clear, more narrow target group
(15:31) Team
(16:06) Funding
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Note: Following this project, I am still extremely uncertain as to whether fishing is good or bad for animals on net.
Abstract
Fishing has both direct and indirect effects on populations, e.g. through the effects of fishing predators on their prey and trophic cascades. Whether fishing is — on the margin or on average — good or bad for wild animal welfare overall in the near term depends on potential tradeoffs between different groups of animals. In this piece, I narrow down which groups of animals are most affected by fishing, directly or indirectly. I also assess how the populations of some of these groups have been affected by fishing so far and have trended over time. Unfortunately, I’m not able to answer whether fishing has been or is good or bad on net, but I outline next steps.
Key takeaways
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Outline:
(00:14) Abstract
(00:57) Key takeaways
(03:42) Acknowledgements
(03:59) Full document
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This is my first post on the EA Forum. (Yeah, I'm nervous.)
Note: The Global Health Security Index (GHSI) is the first comprehensive assessment of health security capabilities across 195 countries. Created by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and The Economist Intelligence Unit, it evaluates each country's ability to prevent, detect, and respond to health emergencies using publicly available data across six categories: prevention, detection, rapid response, health system, compliance with international norms, and risk environment.
About me
I’m Vincent Niger—nurse, Europubhealth+ Erasmus Mundus double master's candidate in Public Health, currently based in Maastricht, where I’m enrolled in the master's in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health. I’m also a facilitator for BlueDot Impact's Pandemic course, which I cannot recommend warmly enough. Seriously, check it out! I’m exploring the possibility of shifting my career toward biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
The [...]
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Outline:
(00:50) About me
(01:21) The research
(03:49) Reasons for sharing here
(04:22) Self-criticism and questions
(05:31) Key Findings
(06:21) Looking Ahead
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In theory, effective altruists are committed to using reason and evidence to identify the best interventions. In practice, much of the available funding is controlled by a small number of actors including prominent donors – most recently, Sam Bankman-Fried, and now Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. What these donors consider worth funding has a sizable influence on what actually gets funded.
Today's post uses historical comparisons to the Christianization of Roman philanthropy as well as Gilded Age philanthropy in the United States to begin to think critically about the discretion afforded to wealthy donors in shaping philanthropic priorities. In particular, I suggest, philanthropists exhibit important conservative biases that may explain some of effective altruism's muted reaction towards institutional critiques of effective altruism. And more broadly, philanthropists tend to favor many of the same views and practices that brought them success in industries which differ importantly [...]
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The EA Infrastructure Fund doesn’t currently have a significant need for more funding and an increase in funding wouldn’t change our immediate grantmaking decisions. That said, additional funding now could increase our ability to increase the scope of our grantmaking in future.
EAIF currently has $3.3M in available funds. So far over 2024 EAIF has made grants worth $1.1M, and I expect this to be around $1.4M by the end of 2024.
Examples of grants we’ve made over 2024 include:
EA Brazil, a 12-month salary for a full-time and a part-time [...]
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This post summarizes the main findings of a new meta-analysis from the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab. We analyze the most rigorous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that aim to reduce consumption of meat and animal products (MAP). We conclude that no theoretical approach, delivery mechanism, or persuasive message should be considered a well-validated means of reducing MAP consumption. By contrast, reducing consumption of red and processed meat (RPM) appears to be an easier target. However, if RPM reductions lead to more consumption of other MAP like chicken and fish, this is likely bad for animal welfare and doesn’t ameliorate zoonotic outbreak or land and water pollution. We also find that many promising approaches await rigorous evaluation.
This post updates a post from a year ago. We first summarize the current paper, and then describe how the project and its findings have evolved.
What is a rigorous RCT?
There is [...]
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Outline:
(01:09) What is a rigorous RCT?
(02:15) The main theoretical approaches:
(04:45) Results: consistently small effects
(07:22) Where do we go from here?
(09:00) How has this project changed over time?
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The New Atlantis (American religious conservative magazine about science and ethics) has an article out about Effective Altruism. It endorses some parts of EA, but is critical of EA as a whole. Main points (although the article is more nuanced than this summary can convey):
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Gwern recently wrote a very interesting thread about Chinese AI strategy and the downsides of US AI racing. It's both quite short and hard to excerpt so here is almost the entire thing:
Hsu is a long-time China hawk and has been talking up the scientific & technological capabilities of the CCP for a long time, saying they were going to surpass the West any moment now, so I found this interesting when Hsu explains that:
the scientific culture of China is 'mafia' like (Hsu's term, not mine) and focused on legible easily-cited incremental research, and is against making any daring research leaps or controversial breakthroughs...
but is capable of extremely high quality world-class followup and large scientific investments given a clear objective target and government marching orders
there is no interest or investment in an AI arms race, in part [...]
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Why would we, immersed in the quantification of animal welfare, engage in a discussion that seems more ivory-towered academic than practical for improving the lives of billions of animals? As it turns out, access to information plays a pivotal role in our ability to gather data and metrics that directly impact animal welfare.
We are now witnessing a third revolution in information access—the first being the advent of scientific publishing, and the second, the rise of the internet. This current revolution is driven by astonishing advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), a branch of AI that can process vast amounts of information in seconds—tasks that previously required weeks of painstaking effort, even with internet assistance. However, for LLMs to perform effectively, they need direct access to scientific studies. Here is where the legacy system of paywalled publishing becomes a serious barrier, requiring a revisit of its shortcomings.
The Case [...]
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Outline:
(01:07) The Case Against Paywalls
(02:12) A Barrier to Training LLMs
(03:37) The Need for Action
(05:18) The Broader Implications
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The podcast currently has 379 episodes available.