EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

And the need for more AIS advocacy workExecutive Summary

The Center for AI Policy (CAIP) is no more. CAIP was an advocacy organization that worked to raise policymakers’ awareness of the catastrophic risks from AI and to promote ambitious legislative solutions. Such advocacy is necessary because good governance ideas don’t spread on their own, and to meaningfully reduce AI risk, they must reach the U.S. federal government.

Why did CAIP shut down? The reasons are mixed. Some were internal, such as hiring missteps. But others reflect the broader ecosystem: funders setting the bar for advocacy projects at an unreasonably high level, structural biases in the funding space that privilege research over advocacy. While CAIP's mistakes played a role, a full account also needs to reckon with these systemic factors.

I focus on CAIP, as I think it filled a particular niche and was impactful, but there are many [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) And the need for more AIS advocacy work

(00:15) Executive Summary

(02:25) Why Advocacy?

(07:27) What was CAIP up to?

(09:57) Was the Work Impactful?

(13:26) Why did CAIP Shut Down?

(13:58) CAIP's Failures

(15:38) Funders Have Set the Bar Too High for Advocacy

(18:17) Biases in the Funding Space

(20:30) What can we do?

(21:14) Donate Yourself

(24:01) Start an Organization

(26:33) In Conclusion

(27:03) Appendix

(27:07) A1: What is Advocacy?

(28:25) A2: Responses to General Opposition to Advocacy

(30:09) A3: AIS Grantmakers' Positions on AIS Advocacy

(31:42) A4: The Estimate of Funds Spent on AIS Advocacy

(33:00) A5: Donation Options in the AIS Advocacy Space

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First published:

September 16th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/p5vrSuLdLLCCZGzvg/the-center-for-ai-policy-has-shut-down

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We scraped all EA forum posts & comments from 2024 and 2025 to use as a test bed for sense making, analysis, and AI-powered epistemic grading as a part of the Future of Life Foundation's Fellowship on AI for Human Reasoning.

(We’re happy to share all code and all datasets, etc. to interested parties. Just reach out!)

(There are streamlet dashboards associated with each image so you can search/sort with the data yourself)

General Sense Making

Matt Brooks - [email protected]

I didn’t have a clear vision of what I was trying to find / accomplish, so I kind of did a bunch of random stuff to see what I found interesting and potentially valuable. Feel free to skip any sub section below that doesn’t seem interesting to you.

Here are the six types of analysis I explored:

1. Had Gemini read 1M tokens of EA content and generate an [...]

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Outline:

(00:46) General Sense Making

(01:51) EA Forum Egregore

(04:23) Monthly Vibe

(09:04) Page Rank & Author Analysis

(10:19) Topic Clusters

(10:54) Keyword Trend Analysis

(11:42) EA Forum Twins

(14:19) Post-Level Epistemic Quality Analysis

(22:40) Putting it into practice - Introducing Winnow

(23:36) Appendix

(23:39) An Analysis of the EA Forum Egregore

(33:13) All Monthly Summaries

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First published:

September 15th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7kHX4CEiKJgWfJahY/we-mapped-the-ea-forum-s-intellectual-landscape-read-about

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

We’ve released our review of our programmes for the years 2023 to mid-2025. The full review is available on our website, and we’re sharing the summary below.

You can find our previous reviews here.

Summary: Key updates since 2022

• Niel Bowerman is our new CEO: He was appointed in January 2024 after a prolonged period of interim arrangements following the FTX collapse.
• We’re focusing harder on AGI as our top cause area: We narrowed our primary focus to helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI.
• We’ve set up several new programmes and initiatives: We restarted our headhunting programme (now called 'sourcing'), launched a new video programme, released the second version of our career guide, and started releasing video interviews on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
• We’ve spun out from EV: On April 1, 2025, we spun out from EV [...]

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First published:

September 15th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5LhZerWRjZHHFc8Cw/linkpost-80-000-hours-review-2023-to-mid-2025

Linkpost URL:
https://80000hours.org/2025/09/80000-hours-review-2023-to-mid-2025/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

The Incident

It was 11 PM on a rainy August evening when my partner and I were walking back from a coffee shop in London, and I accidentally stepped on a snail. Its shell shattered completely under my weight, although it was still moving. We thought there was hope for it, and so we gently lifted it with a leaf and moved it off the sidewalk while I frantically searched on my phone for what to do.

What followed was five agonising minutes of research and moral deliberation before we made the decision to euthanise it by crushing it. Nearly every source we found said the same thing: with a completely shattered shell, a snail is extremely unlikely to survive. They are unlikely to be able to regenerate shells that are badly damaged, and without protection for their internal organs, they are exposed to infections [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) The Incident

(03:36) What beyond that single snail?

(08:16) Do snails suffer?

(11:12) Why should we take this (and more) seriously?

(16:49) What can we actually do?

(19:24) Final thoughts

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First published:

September 14th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/apKpiCCjkoriaWDmD/the-night-i-accidentally-stepped-on-a-snail

Linkpost URL:
https://riaviswanathan.substack.com/p/the-night-i-accidentally-stepped

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Introduction

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives is rapidly accelerating. Take ChatGPT: released less than three years ago, it now has over a billion weekly users, and is already vastly more capable than the original version. The same goes for other popular AI models, like Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude. And that's just the tools that most of us have access to: behind the scenes, companies are increasingly using even more powerful AI for applications as diverse as financial trading, policing, and drug discovery.

Animal agriculture is no exception: major producers are already exploring how to integrate AI into their farms. In a couple of decades, the typical farmed pig might be overseen by an AI-powered CCTV system rather than a human farmer; China's pilot ‘pork skyscrapers’ give a taste of what this might look like. This could bring benefits: for example, commercially available systems [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) Introduction

(02:30) Thomas Richie Manandhar-Richardson, Bryant Research

(02:53) Deep Research tools

(03:47) Rethinking research work

(05:05) Constant experimentation

(06:21) Aaron Boddy, Shrimp Welfare Project

(06:35) Creating an AI culture

(07:29) Precision Welfare

(08:43) The beginning of a revolution

(09:30) Hannah McKay, Rethink Priorities

(09:47) AI's impacts on animals is a huge research topic in itself

(10:43) AI-resilient interventions

(11:13) Skill-building for an AI-driven future

(12:23) Janire Castellano Bueno, Wild Animal Initiative

(12:39) AI for wild animals

(13:56) AI as an enhancement, not a replacement

(15:00) Accelerating writing tasks

(15:44) Sagar Shah, Rethink Priorities

(15:55) Accelerating research

(17:12) How to stay relevant in an AI world

(18:39) Don't fall behind

(19:03) Conclusion

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First published:

September 11th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7yzupQyiS7arFzvZR/the-impacts-of-ai-on-animal-advocacy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Link to the job posting.

I would strongly encourage community members with any type of science or tech background to apply for this role, particularly if they are readers of the paper and are able to emulate its style.

I was an Editorial Fellow at The Economist in 2021. This is kind of like being an old intern, but it did give me some useful insights that I think should make you think hard about applying for this role.

• The Economist is an enormously influential publication. With approximately 5 million readers per week, it is distinguished by the quality of its readership, which is (a) elite and (b) global. That is to say, it is read by English-speaking decisionmakers in government and the private sector beyond just the English-speaking world.
• Many journalists at the paper do not have prior journalism experience; domain expertise, writing ability, and the ability [...]

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First published:

September 14th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4Znw4GXNdedJquW83/the-economist-is-hiring-a-science-and-technology

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Various people are worried about AI causing extreme power concentration of some form, for example via:

• Powergrabs
• The intelligence curse
• Gradual disempowerment

I have been talking to some of these people and trying to sense-make about ‘power concentration’.

These are some notes on that, mostly prompted by some comment exchanges with Nora Ammann (in the below I’m riffing on her ideas but not representing her views). Sharing because I found some of the below helpful for thinking with, and maybe others will too.

(I haven’t tried to give lots of context, so it probably makes most sense to people who’ve already thought about this. More the flavour of in progress research notes than ‘here's a crisp insight everyone should have’.)

AI risk as power concentration

Sometimes when people talk about power concentration it sounds to me like they are talking about most of AI risk, including AI takeover [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) AI risk as power concentration

(03:58) Power concentration as the undermining of checks and balances

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First published:

September 11th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnkEoTxdGCsBFRQty/sense-making-about-extreme-power-concentration

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A handful of us from EA Salt Lake City are dipping our toes into program evaluation, looking at the impact of an organization run by one of our members. This post highlights the progress we’ve made so far, as well as a number of questions that we’re hoping EA folks with a bit more experience can help us answer.

TLDR: We’ve found that digging wells in Niger easily clears Open Philanthropy's “Bar”, and we are looking for feedback to see if our analysis makes sense.

The Organization: Wells4Wellness

Wells4Wellness has been operating since 2009, digging (and importantly, maintaining) wells across Niger. Niger has one of the highest rates of death from unsafe water sources in the world at around 80 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Most of those deaths are children under 5 dying from diarrhea. A majority of the country is also sitting on top [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) The Organization: Wells4Wellness

(02:04) Our Current DALY Estimates

(05:21) Costs and ROI

(07:51) Comparison to Chlorination

(09:55) Time Horizon and Discounting

(10:41) Our Questions

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First published:

September 12th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Q36besmzrHfNPadSA/well-well-well-do-wells-clear-the-bar

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Written by Lucas Moore (Partnerships Manager) and Sjir Hoeijmakers (CEO), Giving What We Can.

This memo provides updates on and a high-level overview of the effective giving landscape as of mid-2025, adapted from an earlier memo for Effective Giving Summit in June 2025. It is based largely on information gathered through our 2025 EG ecosystem pulse survey and builds on the memos we wrote for the MCF last year: 1, 2, 3, 4. Please leave a comment if you’d like us to clarify anything further. All figures are in USD.

Background

The effective giving ecosystem features an interdependent network of over 60 organisations trying to direct philanthropic resources to where they can do the most good, inspired by effective altruism principles and concepts such as cost-effectiveness, cause prioritisation and counterfactuality.

Within this ecosystem, there are organisations identifying high-impact philanthropic opportunities (evaluators) and organisations fundraising for them (fundraisers). Many [...]

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Outline:

(01:24) Key updates

(07:35) Overview of the ecosystem

(09:33) How much money is moved to high-impact destinations

(11:59) Where money goes

(13:54) Where operational funding comes from

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First published:

September 12th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dm2uawLLeLbY8WNKM/updates-on-the-effective-giving-ecosystem-mcf-2025-memo

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This report is the second in a sequence detailing the results of Wave 2 of the Pulse project by Rethink Priorities (RP). Pulse is a large-scale survey of US adults aimed at tracking and understanding public attitudes towards effective giving and multiple impactful cause areas over time. Wave 2 of Pulse was fielded between February and April of 2025 with ~5600 respondents.[1] Results from our first wave of Pulse, fielded from July-September of 2024, can be found here, with the forum sequence version here.

This part of the Wave 2 sequence focuses on attitudes towards AI.

Findings at a glance

Survey features:

• Wave 2 of Rethink Priorities’ Pulse project surveyed ~5,600 US adults between February and April 2025, following up on Wave 1 (July–September 2024).
• Results were poststratified to be representative of the US adult population with respect to Age, Sex, Income, Racial identification, Educational attainment, State and [...]

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Outline:

(00:52) Findings at a glance

(03:40) Worry about AI

(07:50) How the US public views different stances on AI

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First published:

September 12th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xAoAB2bopZP2FWomt/us-public-attitudes-towards-artificial-intelligence-wave-2

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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