EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TLDR: July 21-27 will be a themed week on the EA Forum for posting career-related quick takes and posts. We'll also have career advisors available throughout the week to answer questions.

Last time we ran a career conversations week, it led to some great posts, including:

• Mistakes, flukes, and good calls I made in my multiple careers - Catherine Low
• Who Is a Good Fit for a Career in Nonprofit Entrepreneurship? - Charity Entrepreneurship
• Monetary and social incentives in longtermist careers - Vaidehi Agarwalla

It's about time we did this again!

Alongside many great posts (which you are encouraged to write), we’ll also have a pinned “Ask Me Anything” post with career advisors throughout the week, as well as a couple of career-related debates.

As a community, we hold collective knowledge about careers that we haven’t [...]

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Outline:

(01:11) Goals

(01:52) How to take part

(03:41) Next steps

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Living in New Zealand can sometimes feel like an obstacle to doing good effectively. We’re far from the EA hubs in the UK/US, and from opportunities for direct work on global health & development.

But are there any areas where we might have an advantage? Here are some possibilities that the community has been discussing recently:

• As a low-risk environment for AI training. Alethios argues that NZ's legislative environment and geothermal resources could make us a good candidate for AI data/training centres.
• As a safe zone for global catastrophic risk. Many have noted that NZ's position as an isolated island nation makes us more resilient to risks like nuclear winter and pandemics.
• As a leverage point for animal welfare. Animal Policy International chose to work in New Zealand because we have high(er) welfare standards that could be used to drive change elsewhere.
• As a [...]

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Linkpost URL:
https://effectivealtruism.nz/blog/nz-comparative-advantage

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This is a crosspost of a recent post by Hannah Yang, FP Research's comms lead, on Founders Pledge's website.

I thought it was important to post this on the Forum because it's unclear to me what people know about FP, and because I often encounter various misconceptions — the three most common being that we focus only on climate (we don't), that we're driven primarily by member interests (we're not), and that we don't move very much money (see below).

Many of the grants below are advised grants — that is, grants made by donors on our recommendation, typically using FP's infrastructure — while some come directly out of our Funds. Like many orgs, we're hoping to raise a lot more money for our managed funds in the coming years to enable greater flexibility, greater efficiency, and indeed greater impact.

More generally, though, FP is planning to roughly triple [...]

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Outline:

(01:55) Global Health & Development

(02:18) $8M to Teaching at the Right Level Africa (2024)

(03:18) $6.4M to Innovation in Government Initiative (2024)

(04:22) $5M to Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (2023)

(05:22) $5M to Bandhan (2024)

(06:16) Global Catastrophic Risks

(06:49) $3M to launch IBBIS (2023)

(08:03) $1.86M to start the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (2022)

(09:06) $2.5M for Carnegie's Averting Armageddon project (2023)

(10:14) Climate

(10:37) $4M to Clean Air Task Force (2021-2022)

(11:48) $5M to DEPLOY/US (2024)

(13:09) $3.5M to establish the Innovation Initiative (2025)

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This is a rough explanation of relative ranges, a heuristic that I've found very helpful for quickly comparing two options that trade off between two dimensions. Consider the following examples of tradeoffs:

You could answer these questions by carefully quantifying the value of each parameter – the actual population of different types [...]

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Outline:

(02:46) Formalization

(04:16) There are more probabilities in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy

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Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program.

For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world's most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts.

But today's world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it!

80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel will aim to inform, entertain, and energize with a mix of long and shortform videos about the risks of transformative AI, and what people can do about them.

[Chana has also been experimenting with making shortform videos, which you can check out here; we’re still deciding on what form her content creation will take]

We hope to bring our own personalities and perspectives on these issues [...]

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Outline:

(00:18) About the program

(01:40) Our first long-form video

(03:14) Strategy and future of the video program

(04:18) Subscribing and sharing

(04:57) Request for feedback

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I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under. I'm going to talk about one complication and one consequence of my donation, but I want to be clear from the get: I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I met Quinn at an EA picnic in Brooklyn and he was wearing a shirt that I remembered as saying "I donated my kidney to a stranger and I didn't even get this t-shirt." It actually said "and all I got was this t-shirt," which isn't as funny. I went home [...]

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Linkpost URL:
https://cuttyshark.substack.com/p/my-kidney-donation-story

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Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are our own and do not represent those of any organisation we're affiliated with. We're grateful to Bob Fischer, Tobias Leenaert, Pablo Moleman, Felix Werdermann, and Kevin Xia for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the arguments presented. While we've done our best to base this post on careful research and reasoning, we don't claim to be experts on this topic. Our aim is not to assert a final conclusion, but to explore an idea we find worth discussing, and we'd be really grateful for any thoughts that might challenge or deepen our understanding.

This post explores whether eating sardines and anchovies could overall result in more good than harm and whether the consumption of these fish can be aligned with the ethics of veganism, despite departing from conventional vegan norms. [...]

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Outline:

(01:35) 🥣 Health & Nutrition

(01:40) Uncertainty in Nutrition Science

(02:50) Limitations of Supplementation

(04:05) Potential Health Benefits of Fish

(06:42) 🌍 Sustainability

(06:47) Resources and Emissions

(07:44) Fish Populations

(09:31) Ecological Impacts

(10:18) 🐟 Animal Ethics

(10:21) Moral Weights

(12:34) Fishing vs. Crop Deaths

(13:21) Fishing vs. Natural Deaths

(15:25) Species Survival

(16:47) 💡 Societal Implications

(16:52) Moral Progress

(18:43) Food System Change

(19:55) 📢 Effective Advocacy

(19:59) Pragmatism vs. Purity

(21:11) Diversity vs. Unity

(22:14) 👉 Conclusion

The original text contained 29 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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1. Introduction

One of the first activities I organized in Effective Altruism 3 years ago, after I participated in the first Dutch Effective Altruism Introductory course 3.5 years ago, was a bookclub on Tobias Leenaert's book How to Create a Vegan World. The proximate cause was that this was organized earlier once by Marieke de Visscher but not again and I also wanted to participate.

I ran it 3 or 4 times and am quite enthusiastic about it, so I want to share the format here to enable (and encourage) you, or someone else, to run it too. I’ll share the program setup and then the reflection questions to guide the conversation, which Tobias Leenaert as the author provided himself and okayed sharing. Both of the Google documents were shared in full and upfront with the participants, so people knew what to expect and could prepare. And as [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) 1. Introduction

(01:20) 2. Context on Organising

(01:25) 2.1: Sessions, Beforehand and Afterwards

(02:31) 2.2: Participants

(04:45) 2.3: Two equal parts build up this bookclub

(05:45) 2.4: Time-management

(08:48) 3. Impact

(10:58) 3.1: Evaluations

(12:06) 4: Program

(14:29) 5: Reflection Questions

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Cross-posted from my personal blog after strong encouragement from two people. The text is partially personal musings over my journey through the pre-surgery process, and partially a review of arguments why it might or might not make sense for a person who cares about effective altruism to donate a kidney.

Some of the content is specific to where I am based in (Finland), and some of the content is less honed than I'd like, but if I didn't timebox my writing and just push whatever I have at the end of it I probably would not publish anything. Hope you enjoy!

June 4, 2025

I was eating phở in the city center when the call came. The EM study had been done.

"Bad news," my nephrologist said. "You have a kidney disease."

The words hit harder than the spicy broth. After more than nine months [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) The Decision

(02:04) The QALY Trade-off

(07:02) My Journey Begins

(10:22) Fixing Scott's CT Scan Calculations

(12:45) The Troubles

(13:10) The Microhematuric Mystery

(14:21) The Kidney Biopsy

(15:31) The Final Verdict

(16:10) Understanding Thin Basement Membrane Disease

(17:54) The Silver Linings

(18:35) Lessons Learned from a Failed Donation

(20:39) The End

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nihilcavum/p/thoughts-on-kidney-donations?r=f8fef&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that.

There's been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates.

After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet warranted. In particular:

• Some ideas in this space seem fairly promising, but in the “maybe a researcher should look into this” stage, rather than “shovel-ready”
• We’re skeptical of the case for most speculative “TAI<>AW” projects

  • We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) Summary

(02:17) 1. Paradigm shifts, how they screw up our levers, and the eras we might target

(02:26) If advanced AI transforms the world, a lot of our assumptions about the world will soon be broken

(04:13) Should we be aiming to improve animal welfare in the long-run future (in transformed eras)?

(06:45) A Note on Pascalian Wagers

(08:36) Discounting for obsoletion & the value of normal-world-targeting interventions given a coming paradigm shift

(11:16) 2. Considering some specific interventions

(11:47) 2.1. Interventions that target normal(ish) eras

(11:53) 🔹 Leveraging AI progress to boost standard animal welfare work

(12:59) ❌ Trying to prevent near-term uses of AI that worsen conditions in factory farming (bad PLF)

(14:18) 2.2. Interventions that try to improve animal welfare in the long-run (past the paradigm shift)

(14:27) ⭐ Guarding against misguided prohibitions & other bad lock-ins

(16:33) 🔹 Exploring wild animal welfare & not over-indexing on farming

(17:59) 💬 Shaping AI values

(25:34) 💬 Other kinds of interventions? (/overview of post-paradigm AW interventions)

(27:57) 3. Potentially important questions

(32:58) Conclusion

(34:34) Appendices

(34:37) Some previous work & how this piece fits in

(36:21) How our work fits in

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

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