EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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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This is a lightly-edited memo I wrote for the 2025 Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum, which were encouraged to be highly opinionated to generate strategy discussion.
I actually wrote more about Shrimp Welfare Project's exploration of Credits here, but I think this 2-minute pitch for the value of Credits is useful to publish on its own.

In 2011, Jayson Lusk published a paper titled The Market for Animal Welfare:

The idea, in short, is to create a separate market for animal welfare that is decoupled from the market for eggs, meat, and milk. Farmers have a product they're supplying (animal welfare) that is only indirectly (and poorly) reflected in the price of food.
Animal advocacy groups have a product they want to buy (higher animal welfare) but there is currently no mechanism for them to achieve this outcome in a market setting.

It is no wonder then, that they [...]

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Hi all,
This is a one time cross-post from my substack. If you like it, you can subscribe to the substack at tobiasleenaert.substack.com. Thanks

Gaslit by humanity

After twenty-five years in the animal liberation movement, I’m still looking for ways to make people see. I’ve given countless talks, co-founded organizations, written numerous articles and cited hundreds of statistics to thousands of people. And yet, most days, I know none of this will do what I hope: open their eyes to the immensity of animal suffering.

Sometimes I feel obsessed with finding the ultimate way to make people understand and care. This obsession is about stopping the horror, but it's also about something else, something harder to put into words: sometimes the suffering feels so enormous that I start doubting my own perception - especially because others don’t seem to see it. It's as if I am being [...]

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Among people who have thought about LLM consciousness, a common belief is something like

LLMs might be conscious soon, but they aren't yet.

How sure are we that they aren't conscious already?

I made a quick list of arguments for/against LLM consciousness, and it seems to me that high confidence in non-consciousness is not justified. I don't feel comfortable assigning less than a 10% chance to LLM consciousness, and I believe a 1% chance is unreasonably confident. But I am interested in hearing arguments I may have missed.

For context, I lean toward the computational theory of consciousness, but I also think it's reasonable to have high uncertainty about which theory of consciousness is correct.

Behavioral evidence

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Outline:

(00:56) Behavioral evidence

(02:23) Architectural evidence

(03:06) Other evidence

(03:19) My synthesis of the evidence

(04:12) What will change with future AIs?

(04:33) On LLM welfare

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Linkpost URL:
https://mdickens.me/2025/07/05/LLMs_might_already_be_conscious/

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I’ve noticed a recurring argument in EA spaces around veganism: “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.” While this may sound compelling on the surface, I believe it fails for several reasons—both ethically and practically.

First-Order Utilitarianism Can Justify Harm

This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook, where harm is permissible as long as it's “offset” by a greater good. Taken to its logical extreme, this reasoning leads to absurd conclusions: “If I donate $10,000 to save two lives, I’m morally justified in taking one life because it's convenient or enjoyable.”

Second-Order Effects: Ethics Become a Privilege for the Wealthy

A system where individuals can buy their way out of ethical harm creates an inequitable moral landscape:

• The Wealthy: Can offset harm without personal [...]

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Outline:

(00:31) First-Order Utilitarianism Can Justify Harm

(00:57) Second-Order Effects: Ethics Become a Privilege for the Wealthy

(01:41) Personal Sacrifice and Offsetting Aren't Mutually Exclusive

(02:04) Veganisms Signalling Effect: The Power of Visible Ethical Action

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Many thanks to Alina Salmen, Vince Mak, Constance Li, and Johannes Pichler for feedback on this post. All mistakes are our own. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of our employers.

Rapid AI development presents unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for animal advocacy. AI could either worsen animal suffering by, e.g, making exploitative systems more efficient, or drastically reduce it by enabling new and improving current solutions. The stakes are immense: AI could profoundly influence the trajectory of animal welfare at a scale we have not seen before - and it could go in either direction. Understanding these potential shifts now is crucial for developing proactive strategies and ensuring our movement's long-term effectiveness.

This piece explores the evolving roles of existing animal advocacy interventions in a post-AI society, looking at how they may change in their nature, feasibility and cost-effectiveness. We don't attempt to assess the [...]

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Outline:

(00:26) Introduction

(02:01) Common Patterns and Broader Implications

(06:07) Deep Dive into Key Interventions

(21:12) Conclusion

(21:59) Appendix: Other Animal Advocacy Interventions

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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Saloni will answer the questions in this AMA between 6-8pm BST on July 8th. Leave your questions as comments, and upvote other questions you’d like to see answered.

If you’ve been around EA for a while, and you’re interested in global health, you’ve probably read Saloni Dattani before.

Saloni writes about global health at Our World In Data and is a co-founder and editor of Works in Progress magazine. She's also recently started a podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen. She also (somehow) finds time to write a great blog, Scientific Discovery.

She's recently written on:

• The decline in cancer mortality, and how it's not all down to decline in smoking.
• How we calculate fertility rates, and why just calculating the total fertility rate leads us astray.

And she delivered a talk at EA Global London on the data that shapes global health.

For some question [...]

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In this article, I argue most of the interesting cross-cause prioritization decisions and conclusions rest on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust enough to justify high degrees of certainty that any given intervention (or class of cause interventions) is “best” above all others. I hold this to be true generally because of the reliance of such cross-cause prioritization judgments on relatively weak philosophical evidence. In particular, the case for high confidence in conclusions on which interventions are all things considered best seems to rely on particular approaches to handling normative uncertainty. The evidence for these approaches is weak and different approaches can produce radically different recommendations, which suggest that cross-cause prioritization intervention rankings or conclusions are fundamentally fragile and that high confidence in any single approach is unwarranted.

I think the reliance of cross-cause prioritization conclusions on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust has been previously underestimated in EA circles [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) Summary

(06:03) Cause Prioritization Is Uncertain and Some Key Philosophical Evidence for Particular Conclusions is Structurally Weak

(06:11) The decision-relevant parts of cross-cause prioritization heavily rely on philosophical conclusions

(09:26) Philosophical evidence about the interesting cause prioritization questions is generally weak

(17:35) Aggregation methods disagree

(21:27) Evidence for aggregation methods is weaker than empirical evidence of which EAs are skeptical

(24:07) Objections and Replies

(24:11) Aren't we here to do the most good? / Aren't we here to do consequentialism? / Doesn't our competitive edge come from being more consequentialist than others in the nonprofit sector?

(25:28) Can't I just use my intuitions or my priors about the right answers to these questions? I agree philosophical evidence is weak so we should just do what our intuitions say

(27:27) We can use common sense / or a non-philosophical approach and conclude which cause area(s) to support. For example, it's common sense that humanity going extinct would be really bad; so, we should work on that

(30:22) I'm an anti-realist about philosophical questions so I think that whatever I value is right, by my lights, so why should I care about any uncertainty across theories? Can't I just endorse whatever views seem best to me?

(31:52) If the evidence in philosophy is as weak as you say, this suggests there are no right answers at all and/or that potentially anything goes in philanthropy. If you can't confidently rule things out, wouldn't this imply that you can't distinguish a scam charity from a highly effective group like Against Malaria Foundation?

(34:08) I have high confidence in MEC (or some other aggregation method) and/or some more narrow set of normative theories so cause prioritization is more predictable than you are suggesting despite some uncertainty in what theories I give some credence to

(41:44) Conclusion (or well, what do I recommend?)

(44:05) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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