EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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Summary

We’re launching the fifth round of Meta Charity Funders — a selective funding opportunity for promising meta charities, i.e. organisations that support or mobilise others to have a large positive impact. Last round (Spring 2025), MCF awarded ~$550k to 10 charities, including effective giving initiatives and specialised community- and capacity-building groups.

Apply for funding by October 31st 23:59 GMT or join the circle as a funder (more information below)!

We expect all applicants to have read this post carefully, as well as “Meta Charity Funders: What you need to know when applying” to understand how to write your application. The application method has been modified compared to last round, but previous materials published on the EA forum will still give relevant context.

Eligibility criteria

• (Strict) You operate as a meta charity, i.e. you are one step removed from direct impact. The outcomes of your work are designed [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) Summary

(01:10) Eligibility criteria

(02:15) Historical funding areas

(02:54) What makes for a competitive application?

(04:15) Information for this round

(04:19) Process

(04:56) Historical support

(05:27) Join as a funder

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Chana Messinger (80k's head of video, formerly of CEA's Community Health team) and I (Matt Reardon, formerly of 80k) have been recording Expected Volume (Apple, Spotify),[1] a podcast of unscripted conversations between us and and some great guests from across the community, including:

1. Andy Masley
2. Phil Trammell
3. Conor Barnes
4. Daniel Filan
5. Alex Lawsen
6. Trevor Levin
7. Julia Wise

Topics vary widely, but we often touch on EA history, community dynamics, politics, and religion, with some personal revelations about us and our guests mixed in. Some highlights include:

• Chana being very gracious with my episode-long critique of her whole job (making AI-first YouTube videos for 80k)
• Phil Trammell explaining why equities consistently go up (and why you shouldn’t "just buy all the stocks”)
• Andy Masley on his burgeoning environmental impacts of AI work on his incredible blog which you should all read
• Julia Wise answering the question of whether [...]

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Outline:

(02:22) Theory of change

(04:32) Feedback

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Housekeeping notes:

• This was hastily written; there might be some bad phrasing here and there – Forgive me!
• This advice may not apply to everyone. It was inspired a lot by my personal experience moving away from research and into “other” roles in AI safety, starting around September 2024.
• I’ve previously written a little bit about why I’ve enjoyed fieldbuilding and why I’ve found it valuable in the bottom of this other post as well)

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TLDR: Non-research roles in AI safety don't appear to get enough attention, despite a lot of professional benefits that they offer (e.g. skillbuilding in neglected-yet-important skills like people management; higher impact). People who might otherwise be interested in AI safety research careers could consdier more atypical roles (and many of these can still feel "research adjacent"!)
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In 2024, I made a decision to move across the ocean and start a new [...]

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Note to competition judges: feedback extremely welcome!

Preface

Relationship to "The Case for Strong Longtermism"

This post engages with themes central to Greaves and MacAskill's "The Case for Strong Longtermism" in Essays on Longtermism, offering not a refutation but an important reframing of how we should think about far-future moral priorities. While Greaves and MacAskill compellingly argue that far-future effects dominate the moral importance of our actions today, my argument suggests that the quality and trajectory of future lives, and specifically whether they contain extreme suffering that crosses or comes near a threshold of non-offsetability, should be the predominant longtermist concern.

In Section 6 ("Robustness of the argument"), Greaves and MacAskill briefly touch on variations in axiology, including risk aversion and prioritarianism, noting these might actually strengthen rather than weaken the case for longtermism. My thesis extends this line of thinking much further: if some suffering genuinely cannot be [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Preface

(02:15) Intro

(03:05) How to read this post

(03:47) Part I: The logical claim

(03:55) A brief aside

(04:42) 1. Introduction: what we take for granted

(05:32) 2. The meaning of utilitarianism and the hidden sixth premise

(05:53) The Utilitarian Core

(06:59) What is left out

(07:34) Representation premise.

(08:56) 3. Why real-number representation isnt obvious

(09:02) What utilitarianism actually requires

(09:40) Where cardinality might hold (and where it might not)

(10:55) Alternative mathematical structures

(12:17) The point

(13:46) 4. The VNM (non-) problem

(17:51) Not an epistemic red flag

(18:46) Part II: The metaphysical claim

(19:00) 5. The argument from idealized rational preferences

(19:05) The setup: you are everyone

(20:05) The question

(21:43) The burden of idealization

(23:02) What this reveals

(23:29) Not a proof

(24:32) 6. The implications of universal offsetability are especially implausible

(25:49) The moral difference

(27:16) 7. The asymptote is the radical part

(28:41) Why instruments?

(30:03) The compensation schedules structure

(30:49) Why this Is already radical

(32:25) 8. Continuity and the location of the threshold

(33:33) Where the threshold falls

(34:14) 9. From arbitrarily large to infinite: a small step

(36:05) 10. The phenomenology of extreme suffering

(38:29) 11. Addressing major objections

(38:44) Time-granularity problem

(40:08) Extremely small probabilities of terrible outcomes

(41:52) Evolutionary explanations of intuitive asymmetry

(44:04) Doesnt this endorse destroying the world?

(48:54) General principle

(49:14) 12. Conclusion

(49:18) Implications

(49:54) We keep whats compelling

(50:52) We drop whats implausible

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Nightmares of Nature offers a shocking and novel twist on the classic wildlife doc, turning it into a horror movie seen from the point of view of the individual animals.

Nature is full of wonder, but it's also full of bone-chilling monsters.

Will our animal heroes survive this wildlife horror story or meet a grizzly end?

The first episode follows a pregnant mouse who has to navigate a scary world of predators in order to find a safe place to give birth…

The Netflix trailer is here, and the full series has just gone live here.

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Here's a talk I gave at an EA university group organizers’ retreat recently, which I've been strongly encouraged to share on the forum. I'd like to make it clear I don't recommend or endorse everything discussed in this talk (one example in particular which hopefully will be self-evident), but do think serious shifts in how we engage with ethics and EA would be quite beneficial for the world.

Part 1: Taking ethics seriously

To set context for this talk, I want to go through an Our World in Data style birds-eye view of how things are trending across key issues often discussed in EA. This is to help get better intuitions for questions like “How well will the future go by default?” and “Is the world on track to eventually solve the most pressing problems?” - which can inform high-level strategy questions like “Should we generally be doing more [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) Part 1: Taking ethics seriously

(04:26) Incentive shifts and moral progress

(05:07) What is incentivized by society?

(07:08) Heroic Responsibility

(11:30) Excerpts from Strangers drowning

(14:37) Opening our eyes to what is unbearable

(18:07) Increasing effectiveness vs. increasing altruism

(20:20) Cognitive dissonance

(21:27) Paragons of moral courage

(23:15) The monk who set himself on fire to protect Buddhism, and didn't flinch an inch

(27:46) What do I most deeply want to honour in this life?

(29:43) Moral Courage and defending EA

(31:55) Acknowledging opportunity cost and grappling with guilt

(33:33) Part 2: Enjoying the process

(33:38) Celebrating what's really beautiful - what our hearts care about

(42:08) Enjoying effective altruism

(44:43) Training our minds to cultivate the qualities we endorse

(46:54) Meditation isnt a silver bullet

(52:35) The timeless words of MLK

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If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism' syllabi and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich countries built on the suffering of the poor, and our decision to not walk away from our own complicity.

If you haven't read ‘Omelas’, I suggest you stop here and read it now[1]. It's a short 5-page read, and I find it beautifully written and worth reading.

The rest of this post will contain spoilers.

The popular reading goes something like: Omelas is a perfect city whose [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) The Standard Reading

(01:14) The Correct (?) Reading

(02:28) The First Question

(03:51) The Second Question

(04:34) The Misreading Is Perfect

(06:27) Le Guin Disagrees

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TL;DR: Mox, a community space and incubator in San Francisco, is offering 2x/month complimentary access to members of AI safety orgs, and other causes we admire.

Current partners of the Mox Guest Program include:

• ARC
• MIRI
• Elicit
• GovAI
• FAR AI
• Seldon Labs
• Tarbell Fellowship
• Redwood Research
• Lightcone Infrastructure

and a few other private partners.

What we’re offering

We’re looking to partner with aligned orgs, to make it easy for their staff to drop by when they’re in SF. This works especially well for:

• People who work elsewhere but occasionally visit SF and want a place to work
• Those who have offices but want access to a community space on evenings and weekends
• Anyone looking to exchange ideas with other folks working on AI safety

While in the space, guest program members are full Mox members. They’re welcome to join members-only events and to [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) What we're offering

(01:33) Why we're doing this

(01:54) What people say about Mox

(03:42) How to join

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Linkpost URL:
https://moxsf.com/guests

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Biological risks are more severe than has been widely appreciated. Recent discussions of mirror bacteria highlight an extreme scenario: a single organism that could infect and kill humans, plants, and animals, exhibits environmental persistence in soil or dust, and might be capable of spreading worldwide within several months. In the worst-case scenario, this could pose an existential risk to humanity, especially if the responses/countermeasures were inadequate.

Less severe pandemic pathogens could still cause hundreds of millions (or billions) of casualties if they were engineered to cause harm. Preventing such catastrophes should be a top priority for humanity. However, if prevention fails, it would also be prudent to have a backup plan.

One way of doing this would be to enumerate the types of pathogens that might be threatening (e.g. viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc), enumerate the subtypes (e.g. adenoviruses, coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, etc), analyze the [...]

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Outline:

(04:20) PPE

(09:56) Biohardening

(14:36) Detection

(17:00) Expression of interest and acknowledgements

The original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Linkpost URL:
https://defensesindepth.bio/the-four-pillars-a-hypothesis-for-countering-catastrophic-biological-risk/

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