EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Key details

What: The Tarbell Fellowship is a 12-month program for early career journalists covering AI. We provide funded 9-month placements at major newsrooms such as TIME, The Information, MIT Tech Review, and many others.

When: June 2025 → June 2026

Benefits: We arrange fully-funded placements at major newsrooms for all fellows. Placements run for 9 months (Sep 2025 - May 2026) and we provide stipends of up to $50,000 to support Tarbell Fellows during this period. We’re open to funding extensions up to 24 months if there is mutual interest in doing so. Fellows also participate in a 10-week AI Journalism Fundamental Program before starting their placements and attend a week-long journalism summit in San Francisco.

Who should apply: Our ideal applicants want to build a career in journalism and are concerned about the potential risks of advanced artificial intelligence. Experience in AI governance, technical research, and [...]

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First published:

January 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bfWdw89z9joSJBA6f/tarbell-fellowship-2025-applications-open-ai-journalism

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

ALTER is excited to announce our continued progress on a number of fronts, despite some clear challenges and setbacks. Below we summarize our work, then our funding situation.

Before the main update, we are excited to launch our new website, here! (Direct link to English version here.) We’ve redesigned to update from the original version, and better highlight our current focus areas, contributors, and staff.

Substantive Project Areas

AI Policy and Standards

AI Policy and standards has been ALTER's primary focus recently, and we are pursuing a number of avenues simultaneously.

We have continued working with the NIST AI Safety Consortium, primarily around CBRN and especially biorisks from foundation models, but also on reporting standards for AI systems. David gave a presentation on understanding a threat model from AIxBio use by sophisticated actors, with encouragement and assistance from Holden Karnofsky and Luca Righetti. This work is primarily impactful [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) Substantive Project Areas

(00:37) AI Policy and Standards

(02:45) AI Community Building

(03:25) Learning-Theoretic AI Safety

(04:11) Biorisk / AIxBio

(04:30) Bioweapons / BWC

(04:59) Salt Iodization

(05:31) Funding Situation

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First published:

January 7th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/unLsvqXABka9WB42u/alter-israel-end-of-2024-update

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Both characters are fictional, loosely inspired by various traits from various real people. Be careful about combining kratom and alcohol.)

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First published:

January 7th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lwe3b8NdE6JkeaeEt/fiction-comic-effective-altruism-and-rationality-meet-at-a

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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Summary

It seems to me that almost every view of what matters for welfare — hedonism, desire theories, preference views, and objective list theories — misses a lot of what we care about, projects concerns we don’t actually have onto us, or otherwise fails to care about them on our behalves as we (would actually) care about them. In one way or the other, they fall short in empathy.

Ways of caring are the ways by which things can seem good, bad, better or worse to someone. These at least include pleasure, unpleasantness, desires, moral intuitions, moral judgements, conscious preferences, conscious approval and disapproval, conscious goals, and potentially even the dispositions for these. I conceive of radical empathy as taking on all of everyone's ways of caring, and caring exactly about what they (would actually) care about on their behalf.

1. All ways of caring seem morally considerable to [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) Summary

(01:47) Acknowledgements

(02:01) Ways of caring

(07:41) Caring about what we actually care about

(12:56) Object views

(15:43) Universalized subjectivity

The original text contained 27 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

January 6th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8q9K5BZJvxNCtiDy3/really-radical-empatthy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

TL;DR: The EA Opportunity Board is back up and running! Check it out here, and subscribe to the bi-weekly newsletter here. It's now owned by the CEA Online Team.

EA Opportunities is a project aimed at helping people find part-time and volunteer opportunities to build skills or contribute to impactful work. Their core products are the Opportunity Board and the associated bi-weekly newsletter, plus related promos across social media and Slack automations.

It was started and run by students and young professionals for a long time, and has had multiple iterations over the years. The project has been on pause for most of 2024 and the student who was running it no longer has capacity, so the CEA Online Team is taking it over to ensure that it continues to operate.

I want to say a huge thank you to all the students who have run this project over [...]

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Outline:

(01:26) Our plans

(02:56) Help us by providing input

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

January 7th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mMYSLTedzLpqwp2Fk/the-ea-opportunity-board-is-back

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This may be the first in a sequence of posts sharing little-known interesting stories from the history of Effective Altruism.

In 2021, Effective Altruists played a role in encouraging Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, to liquidate and donate a substantial portion of his meme coin holdings, valued at billions, to high-impact causes such as COVID-19 relief efforts in India. Here's a chronological breakdown of the what worked and the individuals involved. I have no connection to any of the people involved.

🗓️ Late April to Early May 2021

• Background: Vitalik Buterin had been gifted large quantities of meme tokens like SHIB and AKITA, totaling approximately $13 billion at their peak.
• These tokens were sent by their creators to Vitalik's public wallet as a publicity stunt, assuming he would never cash them out.

🗓️ May 7-10, 2021

• In an Effective Altruism (EA) Facebook group, Greg Colbourn noticed [...]

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Outline:

(00:08) This may be the first in a sequence of posts sharing little-known interesting stories from the history of Effective Altruism.

(00:41) 🗓️ Late April to Early May 2021

(01:06) 🗓️ May 7-10, 2021

(01:41) 🗓️ May 10-12, 2021

(02:29) 🗓️ May 12-13, 2021

(03:09) 🗓️ May 13, 2021: Community Reactions and Reflection

(03:43) 🗓️ Mid-May 2021

(04:02) 🗓️ May 14-20, 2021: Media Coverage Picks Up

(04:25) 🗓️ Late May 2021: Reflecting on Success and Future Plans

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First published:

January 5th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HdpiBp9hRvnwYP8j4/how-effective-altruists-influenced-vitalik-buterin-to-donate

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Tl;DR: Fill out this one-question-form to let us know if you’d be willing to try out a free Growth & Wellbeing platform for EAs.

The Gist

Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring an idea that's received a lot of enthusiasm from EA community members, psychologists, coaches, and the community health team: creating a platform tailored to the unique mental health and personal growth challenges faced by EA-affiliated and similar individuals.

This project would provide interventions designed by EA-familiar psychologists and coaches, addressing challenges common to EAs, such as impostor syndrome, burnout, perfectionism, anxiety, and more. For example, many EAs have reported feelings of self-doubt or decision paralysis when navigating the complexity of global cause areas or the emotional toll of working on catastrophic risks. These plans can be further customized by users to fit their specific needs and circumstances.

Before fully committing, we’d love your [...]

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Outline:

(01:22) Why This Matters

(02:21) Background

(03:34) What Is RISE?

(05:06) Who Might Benefit and How?

(06:19) QandA

(08:20) One-question Form

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First published:

January 5th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6EQrfATfkr3QqsTxL/announcing-rise-a-community-centered-wellbeing-and-growth

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Animal Welfare Economics Working Group is soliciting 300-word abstracts for its annual interdisciplinary conference on the economics of animal welfare. This in-person event, which is the latest in a series of international events on this topic, will be held on June 10–11, 2025 at the Paris School of Economics.

The Working Group welcomes submissions on any topic that bears on the economics of animal welfare. This includes theoretical research on including losses or benefits to animals in economic analyses, applied empirical work on the effects of policies or industry structure on animal welfare, and anything else within the purview of economics as it relates to the well-being of commodity, companion, or wild animals. (For some examples, see the Working Group's growing Research Library.)

We invite abstracts from economists and those in relevant fields, including animal welfare science, political science, and philosophy. In addition to full presentations, we also [...]

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First published:

January 5th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/REKdHxo8JKxygkn2G/2025-animal-welfare-economics-conference-pse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

• After >2 years at Hi-Med, I have decided to step down from my role.
• This allows me to complete my medical residency for long-term career resilience, whilst still allowing part-time flexibility for direct charity work. It also allows me to donate more again.
• Hi-Med is now looking to appoint its next Executive Director; the application deadline is 26 January 2025.
• I will join Hi-Med's governing board once we have appointed the next Executive Director.

Before the role

When I graduated from medical school in 2017, I had already started to give 10% of my income to effective charities, but I was unsure as to how I could best use my medical degree to make this world a better place. After dipping my toe into nonprofit fundraising (with Doctors Without Borders) and working in a medical career-related start-up to upskill, a talk given by Dixon Chibanda at EAG [...]

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First published:

January 5th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z6fM4iXiBnfF3gf87/stepping-down-as-executive-director-of-high-impact-medicine

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(You can read this post as a Google Doc, which may be easier to share with global health focused non-EAs)

There is a current consultation by the UK's International Development Committee which presents a tractable and potentially highly impactful opportunity for people to push the UK government to give greater focus to the use of evidence and increase the effectiveness of the aid budget. The consultation closes in four days on Tuesday January 7th. It doesn’t require you to be an expert or a UK citizen to make a submission, though likely greater weight will be placed on people who do fall under those categories.

I made a similar post recently for another consultation that only ended up receiving around 130 submissions total, meaning if even ten people take 15 minutes to make a submission it could likely be highly impactful! I also led more extensive efforts on [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) Context

(01:58) Making a Submission

(02:54) Success of ICAI Consultation Efforts

(04:03) Further Information

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First published:

January 3rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qu2u78BSemd4ZEqt5/help-make-uk-aid-more-cost-effective-another-opportunity

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.