EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

The full post is long, but you can 80/20 the value with the 700 word summary! Over half the post is eight optional case studies. Thanks to Jemima Jones, Claude 4 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro for help copy-editing and drafting

TL;DR: I recommend giving advice by asking questions to walk someone through key steps in my argument — often I’m missing key info, which comes up quickly as an unexpected answer, while if I’m right I’m more persuasive, and can still express my case. This is useful in a wide range of settings, as a manager, managee, friend, and mentor, and is better for both parties, if you have the time and energy and are able to seriously engage with whether you are wrong.

• Socratic Persuasion: When trying to persuade someone, especially if giving advice, I much prefer the Socratic method over directly presenting my case. I take my argument/thought [...]

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Outline:

(00:57) Summary

(06:57) Why does this matter?

(10:27) Caveats & Warnings

(13:26) Case Studies

(13:51) Managing/prioritisation: Convincing a team member that a project is a better use of their time

(18:27) Debugging/giving negative feedback: Retrospectives on Time Management

(21:14) Interpersonal/conflict resolution: Friend Having a Dispute

(23:06) Domain knowledge/negative feedback: Critiquing Research Project Ideas

(25:43) Ambition/career advice: Encouraging Someone to Drop Out of a PhD (to Accept a Job Offer)

(29:19) Debating: Convincing Someone We Can't Just Turn Misaligned AI Off

(32:22) Reflection/self-improvement: Receiving Negative Feedback

(35:23) Coaching/career advice: Giving Career Advice to Someone I've Just Met

(38:30) Conclusion

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Around 1 month ago, I wrote a similar Forum post on the Easterlin Paradox. I decided to take it down because: 1) after useful comments, the method looked a little half-baked; 2) I got in touch with two academics – Profs. Caspar Kaiser and Andrew Oswald – and we are now working on a paper together using a related method.

That blog post actually came to the opposite conclusion, but, as mentioned, I don't think the method was fully thought through.

I'm a little more confident about this work. It essentially summarises my Undergraduate dissertation. You can read a full version here. I'm hoping to publish this somewhere, over the Summer. So all feedback is welcome.

TLDR

• Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.”
• Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — [...]

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Outline:

(00:57) TLDR

(02:11) 1. Background: A Happiness Paradox

(04:02) 2. What is Rescaling?

(06:23) 3. My Approach: Life Events would look smaller on stretched out rulers

(08:10) 4. Results: Effects Are Shrinking

(10:46) 5. How much might we be underestimating life satisfaction?

(12:42) 6. Implications

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I hosted Meri Beckwith, CEO of Lindus Health, on my podcast Development & Research. Meri founded Lindus after being a clinical trial patient—because he was astounded at how badly clinical drug trials were being run by the world's leading companies.

We talk about why clinical trials companies are twenty years behind in adopting new technologies, how a flooded supply closet can cause a billion-dollar clinical trial to fail, and his speculation about the incentives that—so far—have stopped the world from getting better.

Links: { Twitter, YouTube, transcript, Spotify, LessWrong }

Here's a section I particularly enjoyed:

Meri Beckwith:

If you talk to any executive in pharma and ask, "What's your biggest pain point for clinical trials?" they'll [...]

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https://developmentandresearch.bio/episode/meri-beckwith/

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Thanks to Max Taylor, Irina Gueorguiev, Robert Praas, Albert Didriksen, Mark Rogers and Justis Mills (EA Forum) for feedback on this post. All mistakes are my own. This post does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

• This post explores how farmed animal advocacy might change in a post-work world enabled by transformative AI (TAI), mass automation, and universal basic income (UBI).  It is not a forecast, but a speculative exploration, intended to surface underexplored questions at the intersection of AI, economic systems, and animal advocacy.
• Implications for animal advocacy may include labor becoming abundant and funding becoming less of a bottleneck. However, much current advocacy work may be handled by AI in the process and effective strategies should be “human-scalable” and asymmetrical—leveraging advantages the industry can’t easily copy.
• Industrial Animal Agriculture may persist on various grounds that our movement needs to be ready to [...]

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Outline:

(00:30) Executive Summary

(01:39) Contextual Notes

(02:45) Introduction

(04:12) Post-Work Farmed Animal Advocacy Work

(07:38) Post-Work Industrial Animal Agriculture

(12:19) Open Questions for Farmed Animal Advocates

(16:23) Closing Thoughts

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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I recently had a thought-provoking conversation about progress studies in the Nigerian context. One core question we kept returning to was this: What actually drives progress in Nigeria?

From my experience, the answer is rarely the government. In many sectors where the state should be leading—healthcare, science, infrastructure—the reality is stagnation. Corruption and personal interests often override any semblance of strategic policy or institutional continuity. When progress happens, it is because individuals choose to push through the friction.


I want to offer a case from Nigeria, where I lead a project focused on bacteriophage research—a rapidly advancing field globally, with major implications for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and biosecurity.

In countries like the US and many in Europe, phage therapy is beginning to receive government attention. Agencies are investing in infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and translational science. In Nigeria, however, researchers are on their own. There [...]

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The company released a model it classified as risky — without meeting requirements it previously promised

This is the full text of a post first published on Obsolete, a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

After publication, this article was updated to include an additional response from Anthropic and to clarify that while the company's version history webpage doesn't explicitly highlight changes to the original ASL-4 commitment, discussion of these changes can be found in a redline PDF linked on that page.

Anthropic just released Claude 4 Opus, its most capable AI model to date. But in doing so, the company may have abandoned one of [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) The company released a model it classified as risky -- without meeting requirements it previously promised

(05:51) When voluntary governance breaks down

(08:09) What ASL-3 actually means

(09:50) A test of voluntary commitments

(10:54) What happens next

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Linkpost URL:
https://www.obsolete.pub/p/exclusive-anthropic-is-quietly-backpedalling

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Summary 

While many people and organisations in the EA community can be great connections, don't assume that just because a person has been in the EA community for a long time, they'll be a good fit for you to work with or be friends with.

Don’t assume that just because a project or org has been around for a long time, it would be a good place for you to work. It may be a great opportunity, but it might not. Do some of the usual things you would do to check that this is a good interaction for you (e.g. talk to people who know or have worked with them before starting a collaboration, take time to get to know someone before placing large amounts of trust on them, and pay attention to any signals that this interaction might not be a good for you).

[...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Summary

(01:27) Choosing to work with another person

(03:04) Conference attendance

(03:38) Working with organisations

(04:06) Personal Interactions with Community Members

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A while back (as I've just been reminded by a discussion on another thread), David Thorstad wrote a bunch of posts critiquing the idea that small reductions in extinction risk have very high value, because the expected number of people who will exist in the future is very high: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/mistakes-in-moral-mathematics/. The arguments are quite complicated, but the basic points are that the expected number of people in the future is much lower than longtermists estimate because:

-Longtermists tend to neglect the fact that even if your intervention blocks one extinction risk, there are others it might fail to block; surviving for billions (or more) of years likely requires driving extinction risk very low for a long period of time, and if we are not likely to survive that long, even conditional on longtermist interventions against one extinction risk succeeding, the value of preventing extinction (conditional on more happy [...]

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This is a brushed up memo from a CEA retreat, aimed at orienting staff to the current state of the EA Newsletter, in preparation for a marketing push.

If you want to subscribe to the EA Newsletter, you can do so here.

Purpose and goal

The EA Newsletter is a frankenstein project - built by many people, not all of whom I've met. It's five months off a decade old. I've been its writer and custodian for a year and change (before me it was Lizka, and before her, Aaron Gertler).

When it began in 2015, it was focused on updating its audience on developments in the effective altruism community. Over the years, the focus of the newsletter shifted in a few directions. Now it:

• Tries not to assume interest in EA as such, but rather in things EAs find interesting and important. More ‘X says [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Purpose and goal

(02:25) Engagement metrics and performance

(02:29) Open rate

(03:12) What's the average open rate for emails from non-profits?

(03:50) Click rate

(03:56) What's the average click rate for emails from non-profits?

(04:27) New subscriptions and conversion

(07:05) Understanding our audience

(07:23) Mailchimp demographics

(07:52) Impact survey

(08:41) What actions have you taken directly because of clicking a link in the newsletter?

(09:34) How important is the Newsletter vs other ways you get information?

(10:13) The industries respondents work in

(10:46) Where respondents live

(11:09) Where next?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Podcast version (read by the author) here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.

1. Introduction

Currently, most people treat AIs like tools. We act like AIs don’t matter in themselves. We use them however we please.

For certain sorts of beings, though, we shouldn’t act like this. Call such beings “moral patients.” Humans are the paradigm example. But many of us accept that some non-human animals are probably moral patients as well. You shouldn’t kick a stray dog just for fun.[1]

Can AIs be moral patients? If so, what sorts of AIs? Will some near-term AIs be moral patients? Are some AIs moral patients now?

If so, it matters a lot. We’re on track to build and run huge numbers of AIs. Indeed: if hardware and deployment scale fast in a world transformed by AI, AIs could quickly account for most [...]

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Outline:

(00:19) 1. Introduction

(02:08) 2. Pain

(04:52) 2.1 That

(06:10) 3. Soul-seeing

(08:30) 4. The flesh fair

(12:04) 5. Historical wrongs

(15:46) 6. A few numbers

(19:45) 7. Over-attribution

(22:09) 8. Good manners

(24:42) 9. Is moral patienthood the crux?

(27:18) 10. The measure of a man

(32:05) 11. Next up: consciousness

The original text contained 21 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Linkpost URL:
https://joecarlsmith.substack.com/p/the-stakes-of-ai-moral-status

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