EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Thank you to all the wonderful people who've taken the time to share their thoughts with me. All opinions are my own: Will Aldred, Jonah Boucher, Deena Englander, Dewi Erwan, Bella Forristal, Patrick Gruban, William Gunn, Tobias Häberli, James Herbert, Adam Jones, Michael Kerrison, Schäfer Kleinert, Chris Leong, Cheryl Luo, Sobanan Narenthiran, Alicia Pollard, Will Saunter, Nate Simmons, Sam Smith, Chengcheng Tan, Simon Taylor, Ben West, Peter Wildeford, Jian Xin.

Executive Summary

There is broad consensus that research is not the most neglected career in AI Safety, but almost all entry programs are targeted at researchers. This creates a number of problems:

• People who are tail-case at research are unlikely to be tail-case in other careers.
• Researchers have a bias in demonstrating ‘value alignment’ in hiring rounds.
• Young people trying to choose careers have a bias towards aiming for research.

Introduction

When I finished the Non-Trivial Fellowship, I was [...]

---

Outline:

(00:45) Executive Summary

(01:17) Introduction

(03:12) We Need Non-Research AI Safety Talent

(05:01) Most Talent Pipelines are for AI Safety Research

(05:53) This Creates the Wrong Filter for Non-Talent Roles

(07:03) This Creates a Feedback Loop of Status

(07:48) Research Fellowships have a Bias in Hiring

(08:55) Conclusion

(09:32) FAQ

(10:29) Further Questions

(11:19) Bycatch; Addendum

---

First published:

August 30th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m5dDrMfHjLtMu293G/ai-safety-s-talent-pipeline-is-over-optimised-for

---

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.

I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too.

Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult.

I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make efforts to grow and improve so I can make impact in my little way.

Part of this effort was my attempt to pivot my research. I started off working on fungi—asking the question of how fungi are responding to climate change. But when I couldn’t get funding to generate even basic data, I decided to pivot to [...]

---

First published:

August 30th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6bpGjjyGygDPPg68j/i-am-not-a-good-fit-reflections-on-my-journey-with-ea-and

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I have hesitated for some time before writing this, but I feel it is worth sharing. Perhaps others have felt this way too.

Looking at EA priorities and opportunities, I have come to realize I am not a good fit for any EA funding opportunity, and getting help has been particularly difficult.

I am a faculty member at the Department of Microbiology, Plateau State University. I did not train in the US but in Nigeria, and this usually comes with its limitations. However, I have always tried to make efforts to grow and improve so I can make impact in my little way.

Part of this effort was my attempt to pivot my research. I started off working on fungi—asking the question of how fungi are responding to climate change. But when I couldn’t get funding to generate even basic data, I decided to pivot to [...]

---

First published:

August 30th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6bpGjjyGygDPPg68j/i-am-not-a-good-fit-reflections-on-my-journey-with-ea-and

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Introduction

We recently hosted a weekend-long, 22 person retreat in Spain to bring together budding EA communities from the two biggest cities: Barcelona and Madrid, as well as EAs from other parts of the country.

In this post, we’ll walk through a brief history of community building in Spain, why we chose to do the retreat, how we think it went, and what our plans are for the near future. We think the How did we plan the retreat? and Lessons Learned sections will be particularly valuable for other community builders thinking of hosting a retreat, and we’ve also shared some of our documentation in the Resources section, which you’re welcome to copy and make use of.

This post was written by Tristan Williams (Madrid), Melanie Brennan and Anthony Lara (Barcelona).

A brief history of EA in Spain

Effective Altruism (EA) in Spain is still fairly underdeveloped. Like other [...]

---

Outline:

(00:13) Introduction

(01:04) A brief history of EA in Spain

(04:02) Why do a retreat?

(05:04) How did we plan the retreat?

(07:57) How did the retreat go?

(09:29) Lessons Learned

(09:33) Things We'd Keep the Same

(12:20) Things We'd Change

(16:27) Future plans

(17:13) Conclusion

(17:45) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Group photo outdoors, people sitting and standing among trees, everyone waving.

(17:56) Thank you

(18:20) Resources

---

First published:

August 29th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yjFSsa7X6GkcPH8xE/reflections-on-ea-spain-s-first-national-retreat-1

---

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.

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is seeking a strong operator to join our Events team as Chief of Staff, providing essential support to scale up the effective altruism community's largest conference series and event portfolio.

Apply now

About CEA and the Events team

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA, that's us!) is an organization dedicated to building and stewarding a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world's most pressing problems and taking action to solve them. Our current strategic priorities include growing the effective altruism community, improving the EA brand, and diversifying EA funding sources.

The Events team manages some of the most important community infrastructure across multiple domains. EA Global and EAGx are the leading conference series in the EA community and play a foundational role in coordinating and representing the movement. The Summit on Existential Security leads the field for coordinating senior [...]

---

Outline:

(00:28) About CEA and the Events team

(02:48) Key responsibilities

(04:56) What were looking for

---

First published:

August 29th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BDFSXpbKrixzw7NX4/cea-is-hiring-for-a-chief-of-staff-events-team

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Generative AI is not causing YCombinator companies to grow more quickly than usual (yet)

Epistemic status: I think you should interpret this as roughly something like “GenAI is not so powerful that it shows up in the most obvious way of analyzing the data, but maybe if someone did a more careful analysis which controlled for e.g. macroeconomic trends they would find that GenAI is indeed causing faster growth.”

1. Some people have asked me to consider going back to earning-to-give, and so I am considering founding another company. A major hesitation is that startups generally take 6 to 10 years to be acquired or go public. This is unfortunate for founders who believe that we are less than 10 years away from all human labor being automated.
2. It's possible that the advent of generative AI will make startups grow faster, which could provide a faster exit path. YCombinator CEO [...]

---

Outline:

(03:32) Methodology

(04:07) Identifying GenAI startups

(05:04) Sources of error

(06:51) Results

(06:54) The most valuable companies 2 years after doing YC

(07:19) The most valuable companies 1 year after doing YC

(07:43) Average Growth

(08:35) Discussion

(08:39) Garry Tan's comments

(09:34) Has YCombinator just lost the mandate of heaven?

(11:02) Stripe data disagrees, showing that AI companies are growing revenue more quickly

(12:56) Carta's data agrees, showing that companies aren't growing faster

(14:16) You can still get rich quick though

(15:04) Further Research

(15:46) Conclusion

---

First published:

August 29th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C6t6ANhDrAKhQXwdT/generative-ai-is-not-causing-ycombinator-companies-to-grow

---

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.

It was originally introduced as a way to separate out FTX-scandal related tags. Now that that purpose is no longer relevant it serves as a noisy but biased way of de facto deprioritising posts. It's also very top-down: ironically, the community can't tag or untag community; only CEA can do that. I worry this has lead to a consistent bias in CEA posts not receiving the tag - see e.g. this recent post, which is about as community-oriented as anything I've seen on the forum. [1]

As an experiment, see if you can guess without looking which of the following shuffled set of posts received the tag and which didn't:

• EA Summit: Santiago 2025 – Retrospective
• How important are differing cultural attitudes toward corruption?
• The anti-fragile culture
• Good Governance: Unweirding Boards
• EA Organization Updates: August 2025
• A big milestone: 10,000 10% pledgers!
• Why I'm excited about AI [...]

---

First published:

August 29th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4qS2BQpfi7sDwisPd/the-community-tag-is-problematic

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

I let a tooth rot for over a year. It was my upper right second molar, the one just before the wisdom tooth. Every time I ate something hard, like a peanut, it would wedge into the decay and shoot a spike of pain through my upper jaw. I was lazy, so I ignored it until it got worse.

And then it did.

One afternoon in June, a truly terrible toothache set in. Before I could get an emergency dental appointment, I found myself standing in the shower, letting hot water run over my head to dull the pain. Afterwards, I planted my face into a cuddle bear on the sofa. I’d been told that swearing out loud helps, so I swore, muffled, into the bear. The neighbours must have been distressed.

After the temporary root canal, once the pain had eased, my mind drifted [...]

---

First published:

August 28th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnmfA7QAnHweKoGTc/not-stepping-on-bugs

Linkpost URL:
https://y1d2.com/p/bugs

---

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.

One of my goals for this year was to write a piece setting out my own views on the topic of AI consciousness and the possible paths forward. I wrote it because I realized that I'd co-authored a string of pieces (Butlin et al. 2023; Long et al. 2024; Keeling et al. 2024; Caviola et al. 2025; Colombatto et al. 2025) and yet none of these quite captured my personal position as of 2025. I've also given media interviews but they're always a bad way to explain your views clearly.

To make matters worse, I've seen over the past year extreme positions on both sides becoming entrenched. The debate has been acquiring some of the features of a toxic debate - two sides aggressively mocking each other, taking offence at each other's choice of words - when I think the best approach goes calmly down the middle, acknowledging [...]

---

First published:

August 28th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sQi27D5aKeduipwaC/ai-consciousness-a-centrist-manifesto

---

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.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I hit my two-year mark at Open Philanthropy. I’ve learned a lot over this period, but I’ve been especially surprised by how great the ROI is on AI safety talent development programs after digging into the numbers.

Consider this graph:

I’ve heard at least four examples in the last ~year or so of this dynamic playing out at AI safety organizations that run fellowship programs.1 This amount of applications isn’t the norm per se, but it happens often enough that we literally have an emoji in our Slack called :fellowship-growth: that we use to celebrate these cases.

So yeah, now that I’ve seen how the sausage is made, I’m officially talent development pilled.

A brief case for talent development

Talent gaps are still very much a thing. Key institutions2 ruthlessly compete to hire from a small pool of [...]

---

Outline:

(01:06) A brief case for talent development

(03:27) What to do about this

---

First published:

August 28th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xWk7ruWrDjtdj6nqG/why-i-m-excited-about-ai-safety-talent-development

Linkpost URL:
https://thirdthing.ai/p/ai-safety-funders-love-this-one-secret

---

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.