EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

We’ve been expanding our cause area overviews to highlight more ways people can make a difference. These new articles dive into different global challenges and offer a broad look at various impactful career paths worth considering:

• Biosecurity – Exploring the importance of reducing risks from pandemics and other biological threats.
• Mental Health – Examining the role of mental well-being in improving lives on a global scale.
• Economic Growth – Investigating the role of economic development in large-scale positive change.
• An Intro to AI Safety and a profile on opportunities in AI Safety and Governance.
• An introduction to Effective Giving that explores how strategic charitable giving can provide another route to impact.

We’d also planned to share a big piece on broad societal improvements (covering topics like scientific practices and societal values), but it turned out to be quite tricky to get right, so we’re taking extra time to get it up [...]

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It's been a while since my last post - but we’ve been busy with good work in the meanwhile, including welcoming our daughter into this world!

We’ve been working with some high-impact clients to effect operational transformations and help them grow, in addition to building out a suite of services to give nonprofits more resources. We’re ready to transform our next high-impact organizations and give them the resources they need to grow.

Recap: About WorkStream Nonprofit

Our mission is to provide nonprofits with operational support, training, resources and guidance to help them:

• Maximize available resources
• Increase their impact
• Create a sustainable and scalable organization
• Achieve operational excellence

I’m personally passionate about eliminating the operational bottlenecks that limit nonprofit effectiveness. While in businesses, it's easy to measure effectiveness in terms of finances, nonprofits don’t have that metric, so maximizing impact becomes a little more of an obscure metric. We’re [...]

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Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the next

One of the biological threats the NAO is most concerned with is a

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Linkpost URL:
https://naobservatory.org/blog/scaling-our-early-warning-system/

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Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant.

Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, however she is the first to have threatened to go public about the leak. Needless to say, mistakes were made.

We’re still trying to figure out the source of this compromise to our secure chat group, however we thought we should give the public a live update to get ahead of the story.

For some context the “infohazards small working group” is a casual discussion venue for the most [...]

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Outline:

(04:39) Top 10 PR Issues With the EA Movement (major)

(05:27) Accidental Filtration of Simple Sabotage Manual for Rebellious AIs (medium)

(08:18) Hidden Capabilities Evals Leaked In Advance to Bioterrorism Researchers and Leaders (minor)

(09:27) Conclusion

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Epistemic status: 0%

Much ink has been spilled on this forum investigating what we should do about the world's most pressing problems. However, I've recently come to the realization that doing nothing may be even more promising than the most cost-effective EA interventions!

Below is a shallow writeup of the top reasons why you should stop doing things.

1. The Singularity is Near. Soon AI will do all the things, so why bother?
    
2. The Unilateralist's Curse. It was foretold that if you do things unilaterally, you will be cursed.
    
3. EA thought leaders are still clueless about what to do despite years of research!
    
4. Markets are efficient. The thing you would have done is already priced in.
    
5. Doing things is not your comparative advantage. Someone else would do it better.
    
6. Lack of evidence. Despite years of people doing things, there is still a striking [...]

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For immediate release: April 1, 2025

OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.

"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."

The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.

CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," [...]

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[This is a belated submission for the EA Red-teaming contest]

Having recently discovered PowerSmoothie.org, a website founded by our very own Holden Karnofsky, I felt compelled to share some concerns with the EA community about the nutritional framework and ethical implications of this project.

While the site presents itself as an evidence-based approach to nutrition, several troubling issues emerge upon closer inspection. PowerSmoothie.org applies naive utilitarian analysis to nutrition in a way that undermines EA values and the system change we need in the food system.

Is Holden a lizard in a human suit?

First, some of the writing is so strange that I suspect Holden might be a lizard masquerading as a human. For example, take this statement:

Was anyone really considering putting bread in the blender? Most humans intuitively understand that bread doesn't belong in a blender without requiring an explicit cost-benefit analysis of bread-blending [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) Is Holden a lizard in a human suit?

(01:38) Nutritional disinformation

(02:18) Promoting eating insects....didn't turn out so good

(03:45) Epistemic Rigour

(04:04) Conclusion

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Hi, I’m Tandena Wagner. As part of my research for EcoResillience Initiative (an EA organization searching for the best ways to preserve biodiversity into the long-term future), I’ve investigated several common claims that various resource limitations could be disastrous for civilization – ie, that we’re approaching “peak oil”, or imminently running out of phosphorus, soil nitrogen, chromium, etc. For the most part, I’ve found these claims to be overblown, often thanks to systematic exaggeration caused by the poor epistemic environment of activist environmentalism. In general, Paul-Erlich-style resource limitations do not seem pressing compared to other risks to civilization.

However, there's one key resource that I’ve become increasingly concerned about: human civilization might be running out of low-hanging fruit.

Low-hanging fruit is essential for continued human thriving

You might [...]

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(01:13) Low-hanging fruit is essential for continued human thriving

(03:35) What would it mean if humanity exhausted the low-hanging fruit?

(04:32) New ways of making fruit hang lower are getting harder to find

(05:52) Shorter trees -- lower fruit

(08:50) Low-hanging fruit has broad benefits

(10:28) The Fruit is Too Damn High

(13:07) A fruitful direction for future research

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It is standard form in EA to state one's welcomingness of feedback, both in a personal and professional capacity. Individuals and organisations alike often have many means by which you can deliver feedback, whether through anonymous forms or direct communication, and forum posts will often begin or end with:

"I'm open to feedback..."
"I'm looking for feedback of the following nature..."
"I'm very full because I ate feedback for breakfast, but there's always room for more..."
And so on.

I'm now wondering: what happens if you write, "I am not open to feedback". Literally, is that even allowed? I've never seen it done. I'm concerned to see such heterogeneous thinking on the topic and I find it alarming that a community which espouses openness would be so closed off to non-openness.

How is it that not a single person in this intellectual, professional, personal community, or [...]

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It's time for safety conscious researchers to leave Anthropic

This is a short post, due to an unfortunate lack of time (in more ways than one).

I think it's pretty clear that AGI might come about rather (or indeed, very) soon. I don’t need to rehash on this forum why this might be amongst the most transformative events in history, and importantly, the catastrophic implications if this goes wrong. Whilst this community has often focused heavily on avoiding either misuse by ‘bad actors’ (often perceived to be terrorist groups) or misalignment risk, the risks of conflict or huge power concentration, as well as systemic risks cannot be ignored. Also, as the recent debate week showed, even supposedly ‘good’ actors might lock in their values, and if these are sufficiently different to the ‘true’ values, eg they fail to adequately value digital minds, for example, this may be [...]

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