EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Crosspost of my blog article.

I just took the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a pledge to give away at least 10% of my income over the course of my life to highly effective charities. I think you should take it too!

We live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and abundance. Americans today live like kings in the ancient past. We have access to technology that would have been considered magic even just a few hundred years ago. Even relatively poor Americans are richer than nearly everyone who has ever lived.

At the same time, the world is filled with huge and pressing problems. Children whose parents survive on two dollars a day die in their beds, because their parents can’t afford medical care. Animals by the billions are tortured in factory farms. Existential threats imperil the entire future.

For this reason, I pledged to take [...]

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First published:

July 25th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jherCCFLzvZLnRvXW/why-i-just-took-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The Forum Team crossposted this with permission from Secret Third Thing. The author may not see comments.

Listicles are hacky, I know. But in any case, here are ten AI safety projects I'm pretty into.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think there's a real chance that AI systems capable of causing a catastrophe (including to the point of causing human extinction) are developed in the next decade. This is why I spend my days making grants to talented people working on projects that could reduce catastrophic risks from transformative AI.

I don't have a spreadsheet where I can plug in grant details and get an estimate of basis points of catastrophic risk reduction (and if I did, I wouldn't trust the results). But over the last two years working in this role, I’ve at least developed some Intuitions™ about promising projects that I’d like [...]

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Outline:

(01:09) 1. AI security field-building

(02:37) 2. Technical AI governance research organization

(04:30) 3. Tracking sketchy AI agent behaviour in the wild

(06:39) 4. AI safety communications consultancy

(08:25) 5. AI lab monitor

(10:50) 6. AI safety living literature reviews

(12:36) 7. $10 billion AI resilience plan

(14:00) 8. AI tools for fact-checking

(15:35) 9. AI auditors

(17:20) 10. AI economic impacts tracker

(19:25) Caveats, hedges, clarifications

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First published:

July 24th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D6ECZQMFcskpiGP7Q/ten-ai-safety-proj

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The most common way to identify the effective altruism movement is by pointing. Effective altruists are:

• The people who try to help the global poor in ways backed up by randomized controlled trials, generally favoring public health programs.
• The people who try to improve conditions for farmed animals through corporate outreach and policy advocacy, and who care about weird groups of animals like insects and wild animals.
• The people who spend a lot of time worrying that we’re going to make artificial intelligences and they’re going to kill everyone.

This raises many questions, like what the heck do these three groups have to do with each other and what they get out of posting on the same forums and going to the same conferences.

Perhaps we could seek out definitions that would help us. The Center for Effective Altruism says effective altruism is “a framework and research field [...]

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wES2tZzZDnEnxm4aQ/effective-altruism-an-unmanifesto

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Martyn James | Co-founder of Clear Solutions

Martyn spent more than a decade at Google in technical partnership roles before exploring a career transition, realising that he was starting to feel a bit restless in his career. “Life was good,” he recalls, “but I wanted to do something a little more worthwhile.”

Martyn first heard about effective altruism (EA) in passing around 2013 from a colleague, though he wasn’t initially interested in the space. “I remember Googling it and thinking, ‘it's a bunch of Oxford philosophers, probably not for me.'” Years later, in 2020, Martyn was at home on parental leave. He began listening to the 80,000 Hours podcast and the ideas resonated. Eventually, he joined the EA Introductory Program. “It was the first time I found a structured, evidence-based path for people who wanted to do good.”

Though still sleep-deprived and caring for a newborn, Martyn kept exploring [...]

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First published:

July 24th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nBtKgo3TLhfZTyAcW/google-to-co-founding-a-global-health-charity-mid-career

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Here's a Career Conversations Week debate for you:

The percentage of EAs earning to give is too lowPlace your vote or view results.disagreeagree

Clarifications:

• We can treat the [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Clarifications:

(01:03) Reading list:

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CazfSjmhK8SuDfLpf/are-enough-eas-earning-to-give

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I'm the 1Day Sooner program director for indoor air quality (IAQ). In practice, that means I research indoor air cleaning interventions (including how they work and their associated economics) and do relevant public communication and policy analysis. I spend most of my time reading academic literature, writing about IAQ (for policy or general audiences), and talking to people. 1Day Sooner is small and idiosyncratic.[1] I don't know if my job description generalizes well to older and/or larger organizations, and I think other orgs would be unlikely to give this title to someone of my age and experience level.

How I got here

1Day Sooner was founded at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and I learned about it from some EA influencer's public Facebook post. (Possibly Rob Wiblin?) I signed up to volunteer, and later contracted, for 1Day Sooner while in grad school for mechanical engineering.[2] The volunteering was [...]

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Outline:

(00:51) How I got here

(02:10) Responsibilities

(03:28) A representative segment of a weeks to-do list

(04:21) Some representative work output

(04:48) Pros & Cons

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZFbsCqAJ6KY4WHEeZ/writing-about-my-job-program-director

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic Status: These observations come from my personal experience trying to advance a specific idea (Profit for Good) while working full-time as a lawyer on unrelated work. I'm sharing my impressions and frustrations, which may or may not generalize to others developing EA-aligned projects outside traditional pathways—whether that's creating new theories, developing interventions, researching neglected areas, organizing communities, or working on any high-impact initiative while maintaining an unrelated career. I have deep uncertainty about how much of what I've experienced reflects systemic issues versus my particular circumstances, idea, or approach. Others pursuing impact work part-time may have very different experiences, and there may be support systems I've failed to find or utilize effectively. I share this not as a definitive critique but as one data point that might resonate with others in similar situations.

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Since late 2021, I've been developing a framework that could redirect $100 billion [...]

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Outline:

(01:43) The Visibility Gap

(02:46) What Ive Built Despite the Constraints

(05:12) The Real Cost

(08:17) Lessons from Five Years in the Trenches

(10:04) Moving Forward

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cmYoAuiCSyxry6HoF/building-ea-projects-with-an-unrelated-full-time-job

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone's trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the third in a series of posts critically examining the state of cause prioritization and strategies for moving forward.

Executive Summary

• An increasingly common argument is that we should prioritize work in AI over work in other cause areas (e.g. farmed animal welfare, reducing nuclear risks) because the impending AI revolution undermines the value of working in those other areas.
• We consider three versions of the argument:
  • Aligned superintelligent AI will solve many of the problems that we currently face in other cause areas.
  • Misaligned AI will be so disastrous that none of the existing problems will matter because we’ll all be dead or worse.
  • AI will be so disruptive that our current theories of change will [...]

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Outline:

(00:30) Executive Summary

(02:27) Introduction

(06:07) Three versions of the argument

(06:11) Argument 1: Aligned AI will solve it

(12:22) Which areas will be solvable by AI?

(13:04) Dimensions necessary for success

(14:51) Is AI effective on those dimensions?

(16:28) Timeline of impact

(18:01) Argument 2: Misaligned AI will destroy us

(21:12) Argument 3: AI will change the landscape, we should wait for the dust to settle

(24:49) The general structure of the argument

(25:44) Objections to Premise 1 and 2: The chances of a strong AI bottleneck are overestimated

(29:12) Objection to Premise 3: AI work doesn't win by default

(30:25) Objection to Premise 3: Work on other cause areas causally contributes to the AI revolution going well

(33:13) Conclusion

(34:30) Acknowledgements

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fkHc5uxfauZ3EFkJ9/do-short-ai-timelines-make-other-cause-areas-useless

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Posts from my ancestors: Aaron Gertler | Lizka Vaintrob

I love my job. I didn't expect to be in a job that I could be proud of just a few years after university, but now I am[1]. I'm very grateful for that.

Sometimes I've heard people worry that a job in meta-effective altruism would be unmotivating, but I disagree. When I see a great conversation happening on the Forum, a valuable post existing because I nudged someone, or someone making a move to more impactful work because of a link in the EA Newsletter, I feel great, and partially responsible.

The job isn't easy. I have a lot of balls to juggle, even when I'm feeling down or unmotivated. But overall, I really can't imagine a better job for me to be in right now. I'm always learning, and getting better at skills I care about.

I'm not sure [...]

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Outline:

(01:31) What is my job?

(03:00) How did I get here?

(07:33) Why here and not somewhere else?

(07:37) Why here?

(10:10) Why not somewhere else?

(11:53) What do I do every day?

(12:50) Skills - what helps, what can I get better at?

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First published:

July 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6eoseCNpCStc4KS4d/writing-about-my-job-content-strategist-cea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This forum—and the EA community surrounding it—is a bit of an echo chamber. We need people who care about EA values in the rest of the world for several reasons: influence and evangelism, cross-pollination, reality checks, and pragmatism.

Influence and evangelism

The only way for EA to grow is to expose non-EAs to EA concepts. We need people working in all sectors and organizations who can be EA evangelists and ambassadors.

This is especially important in roles like government policy and oversight where decisions have outsized influence.

Cross-pollination and reality checks

As much as non-EAs can learn from us, we can also learn from them. The more we understand how “the real world” works, the better we will be at honing our strategies for getting the world to focus on the important, tractable, and neglected areas. And it helps develop empathy for people who aren't living by EA principles.

[...]

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Outline:

(00:27) Influence and evangelism

(00:49) Cross-pollination and reality checks

(01:13) Pragmatism

(02:46) Max out your employer match(even if you use another donor's money)

(03:08) Resources

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First published:

July 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QNxc9DGcyRAhdyypF/we-need-people-working-for-non-ea-orgs

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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