EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

The sheer scale of factory farming can feel overwhelming. Billions of animals suffer every year in unimaginable conditions. It's easy to feel like our efforts are just a drop in the ocean. But what if I told you that we have a realistic chance of ending this system within our lifetimes? This isn't wishful thinking. It's a grounded assessment based on the convergence of exponential forces: the rapid growth of the animal advocacy movement, the acceleration of technological innovation, and the strategic application of systems-level thinking.

The Challenge of Ending Factory Farming

While most animal advocates would agree that ending factory farming is the ultimate goal, few believe it's achievable in their lifetime. The scale of animal agriculture is vast, and progress often feels slow and incremental. We see encouraging signs – more vegan options in restaurants, corporate welfare commitments, legislative bans on certain cruel practices – but the [...]

---

Outline:

(00:42) The Challenge of Ending Factory Farming

(01:19) The Power of Exponential Growth

(05:28) Harnessing the Power of Exponential Technologies

(08:03) Thinking at a Systems Level, Not an Individual One

(09:10) The Role of Artificial Intelligence

(11:17) Enabling AI to Find High-Impact Interventions

(11:41) Harnessing Collective Knowledge Through AI

(12:58) Targeting Strategic Hubs

(13:32) Key Hubs for Global Change

(18:30) Transforming Global Hubs

(18:55) Phase 1: Building the Foundation

(19:27) Phase 2: Targeted Outreach

(20:03) The Importance of Local Activism

(20:26) Building Foundations for Change

(21:31) Creating Culturally Resonant Messaging

(22:13) The Ripple Effect of Local Change

(23:05) Strengthening the Global Movement

(23:34) Building the Future of Advocacy

(24:28) Two Ways to Accelerate Our Progress

(25:31) Breaking Down Language Barriers

(25:58) Creating Exponential Impact Together

(26:25) Join Us in Shaping Tomorrow

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Donation Election Fund is now open! Donate now to make the donation election a bigger deal, promote effective giving conversations, or simply to get your hands on our rewards.

The CEA Online Team will match[1] the first $5,000 in donations.

Money in the Donation Election Fund will be disbursed to the three winners[2] of the Donation Election (proportionate to their vote). EA Forum users will vote to determine the final winners. We don't yet know the full list of candidates, but we currently have at least 18, and expect more.

If there is a charity or project of a charity you'd particularly like to take part (which either is or is fiscally sponsored by a registered charity in the UK or a 501(c)3 in the US), tell them to contact me[3].

Rewards for donors

Sadly, Lizka is no longer on the team, so we [...]

---

Outline:

(00:58) Rewards for donors

(01:17) Rewards for individuals giving above a certain amount.

(01:54) Rewards for everyone, if the fund raises above a certain amount.

(02:12) FAQ

(02:16) Why should I donate to the Donation Election Fund?

(04:21) Why should I not donate to the Donation Election Fund?

(04:50) Im a UK Donor, will I be able to giftaid my donation?

(05:10) How will voting in the Donation Election work?

(05:24) Do I need to donate to vote?

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

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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

If the world is destroyed, it won’t be our fault and there may have been nothing we could do about it. It will take a lot of people contributing their small part to avert AI danger, and they might not all do it, and we could all end up dead.

I work against this outcome because I don’t want it to happen, and I believe I can do some small part to reduce the danger. It's delusional and not helpful to work on this cause because you think there has to be some way you can single-handedly fix it (sometimes referred to as “heroic responsibility”).

There's an impulse to bear the urgency of x-risk (or of animal suffering, or global disease burden, etc.) in mind at all times, and for me this is often done with extremely delusional hopes that, by refusing to live my normal life [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Warning: This post discusses statistics about extreme pain that may be distressing. While cluster headaches are a neglected, high-impact issue, understanding their true burden requires appreciating the intensity of suffering involved. The pain often reaches levels far beyond typical human experience, making subjective accounts a valuable datapoint until we have robust methods for quantifying pain intensity. For further context, links to firsthand accounts are provided in the footnote[1].

You no longer have a headache, or pain located at a particular site: you are literally plunged into the pain, like in a swimming pool. There is only one thing that remains of you: your agitated lucidity and the pain that invades everything, takes everything. There is nothing but pain. At that point, you would give everything, including your head, your own life, to make it stop.

- Yves, cluster headache patient from France (from Rossi et al., 2018)

Key [...]

---

Outline:

(01:11) Key takeaways

(03:57) 1. Introduction

(04:00) 1.1. Clinical Features and Pain Comparisons

(07:22) 1.2. Treatment and Prevention

(10:02) 1.3. The Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis and Existing Metrics

(14:49) 1.4. Goal

(16:14) 2. Methods

(17:43) 2.1 Prevalence

(19:17) 2.2 Frequency

(22:21) 2.3 Duration

(23:53) 2.4 Intensity

(25:58) 2.5 Burden Metrics

(29:01) 3. Results

(29:10) 3.1. Global Burden of Cluster Headache Pain

(32:05) 3.2. Reweighting of Extreme Pain

(39:41) 3.3. Ceiling Effects

(43:34) 4. Recommendations and Conclusions

(48:31) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 26 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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

The first mini-event we have planned for Giving Season is Funding Diversification Week (Nov 4th – Nov 10th). Personally, I’m very excited about this. As a category of EA thought I think it has as much depth and potential for discovering cruxy disagreements as, say, the recent Animal Welfare vs Global Health debate.

However, it's one of the less well defined themes, so you might not be immediately inspired to write a post. In this post, I want to lay out what we were thinking of when we came up with the idea, and give some examples of posts that would fit under the theme.

The narrowest interpretation of the name is something like “funding is very concentrated in OpenPhil, and we think this is bad, what can we do to change this?”. Posts that would fit under this theme would be things like:

1. What your org has [...]

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

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

The written word dominates EA discourse but visuals have a unique power in communicating ideas that seems quite underleveraged in this community. As a designer and communicator in the space, I wanted to share some of the presentations and visualizations I’ve created over the years in hopes that they might be helpful to others. My goal isn't to present these visuals as "ready-to-use" resources—for various reasons they're not ready (see disclaimers)—but rather as references that hopefully inspire others to create and invest in visual forms of communication.

Effective Giving 101 (2023)

In 2023, when I was director of design at Giving What We Can, we were invited to give a talk at Microsoft about effective giving. We normally don’t dive so deep into the research that undergirds our recommendations but—given the highly-educated, highly-analytical audience at Microsoft—I thought it could be compelling to actually get into the weeds and [...]

---

Outline:

(00:16) Summary

(00:50) Effective Giving 101 (2023)

(01:53) Full deck: Doing Good Better (Microsoft 2023)

(02:00) GiveWell's 2020 analysis of AMF

(02:58) Slides: GiveWell's 2020 analysis of AMF

(03:15) Global income illustration

(04:53) Slides: The Global Income Distribution

(05:09) Prioritization in GCR (2024)

(05:56) Parfit's 99% extinction hypothetical

(06:56) Slides: Parfit's 99% v 100%

(07:13) Mapping the GCR landscape

(08:54) Slides: Visualizing: The GCR Landscape

(09:13) Bonus: Effective Giving Strategy Frameworks

(10:20) Vision to Vectors

(10:23) Slides: Vision to Vectors

(10:39) The Pledger Journey

(10:42) Slides: The Pledger Journey

The original text contained 8 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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

More to come on this later- I just really wanted to get the basic idea out without any more delay.

I see a lot of EA talk about digital sentience that is focused on whether humans will accept and respect digital sentiences as moral patients. This is jumping the gun. We don't even know if the experience of digital sentiences will be (or, perhaps, is) acceptable to them.

I have a PhD in Evolutionary Biology and I worked at Rethink Priorities for 3 years on wild animal welfare using my evolutionary perspective. Much of my thinking was about how other animals might experience pleasure and pain differently based on their evolutionary histories and what the evolutionary and functional constraints on hedonic experience might be. The Hard Problem of Consciousness was a constant block to any avenue of research on this, but if you assume consciousness has some purpose related [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Today, we’re sharing two posts:

• an update on what we have been up to over the past year
• this post, where we zoom in on our pilot university program to give more context and share some future directions

We’re also announcing that we’re hiring a University Groups Strategy Lead to focus on these pilot universities!

As we’ll be attending EAG Boston this weekend, we likely won’t be able to respond to comments as quickly, but we will try our best!

TLDR

• CEA's University Groups Team has made good progress on offering sustainable and cost-effective scalable support to principles-first EA groups. Examples are our Organizer Support Program (OSP), Groups Support Funding, University Group Organizer Retreats, and the Groups Resource Center.
• With a select number of universities, we are now piloting more involved support to see if we can take principles-first EA groups to a new level.
• Our vision is that [...]

---

Outline:

(00:38) TLDR

(01:52) Background: our scalable group support

(03:30) Taking principles-first EA groups to a new level

(03:36) Vision

(06:39) Goals

(08:19) Our programming this year: Early OSP (EOSP)

(10:31) Some possible future ideas we’re excited about

(12:39) Hiring

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

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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

The failure rate is not 0

The base rate of failure for startups is not 0: Of the 6000 companies Y Combinator has funded, only ~16 are public. This is the wrong reference class for FTX at a $32b valuation, but even amongst extremely valuable companies, failures are not uncommon:

• WeWork had a peak valuation of $47b
• Theranos had a peak valuation of $10b
• Lucid Motors had a peak valuation of $90b
• Virgin Galactic had a peak valuation of $14b
• Jull had a peak valuation of $38b
• Bolt had a peak valuation of $11b
• Magic Leap had a peak valuation of $13b

That is only a handful of cases, but the reference class for startups worth over $10b is also pretty small. Maybe 45 private companies and another ~100 that have gone public. I'm playing pretty fast and loose here because the exact number isn't important, the odds [...]

---

Outline:

(00:04) The failure rate is not 0

(03:54) Why does risk matter?

(06:45) Looking back from today

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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

Today, we’re sharing two posts:

• this post, on what we have been up to over the past year
• an update on our pilot university program

We’re also announcing that we’re hiring a University Groups Strategy Lead to focus on these pilot universities!

As we’ll be attending EAG Boston this weekend, we likely won’t be able to respond to comments as quickly, but we will try our best!

Summary

• Over the past year, we’ve continued to coordinate large-scale mentoring programmes and offer grants for standard group expenses. We also ran a retreat and hosted two summer interns
• We incubated and spun-out an organisation focused on AI Safety group support
• We’re working on piloting more involved support with a select number of university groups - for which we’re hiring a University Groups Strategy Lead!
• Internally, we’ve stepped up work to evaluate the impact of our programmes and been joined [...]

---

Outline:

(00:36) Summary

(01:49) Intro

(03:06) What we’ve been working on

(03:10) Organiser Support Programme (OSP)

(04:15) OSP Fall ‘24

(04:48) Participation over time

(05:17) Size and Spread of University Groups (2024)

(05:43) Raw data - OSP 2024

(06:18) Early OSP fall ‘24

(06:55) Fieldbuilder Support Programme (FSP)

(07:51) Retreats

(09:14) Group Support Funding

(09:59) Succession and handover

(10:38) MandE

(11:01) Expanding the Team

(12:23) Summer Internships

(13:12) Other activities

(13:55) Strategic trade-offs

(14:32) Upcoming activities

The original text contained 3 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

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