EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This document explains how Mieux Donner ran its 2026 hiring round: how we decided what to hire for, how we built the offer and the process, the results we got, and what we would tell another organisation doing roughly the same. It is meant to be reused. We also advise you to read the chapter on hiring in “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit”.

Mieux Donner is the French effective giving initiative, incubated through Ambitious Impact (AIM) and Giving What We Can in 2024. We were roughly 2FTE, have directed over €1M to high-impact charities at a giving multiplier of 5 to 6 times and are now looking to expand the team.

I used AI to do some analysis on the application (without applicant data) and to correct my speech-to-text.

A note for applicants: This document is written for people running a hiring process, not for people applying to one. Reading it will probably not help you, and we do not really advise it. Knowing how a process is designed could be useful if you are applying to a government body or a high-earner position, but the process we follow is unlikely to resemble any of those. [...]

---

Outline:

(02:04) 2026. at a glance

(02:19) 1. Deciding what to hire for

(02:24) Budget and contract

(02:38) Why we opened four roles to hire two people

(05:03) Choosing what to test for

(05:18) 2. The offer

(05:21) Open or closed round?

(06:39) A public offer, and why

(08:28) Sourcing

(09:44) Salary

(11:38) Referrals

(12:08) 3. The process

(14:20) Defining the weights

(15:30) Rating scale and calibration

(16:52) Designing questions LLMs fail, and benchmarking against them

(17:37) Making the tasks LLM-resistant

(20:15) Emails, handling, tracking

(21:36) Value personalised feedback

(22:35) Minimum scores for progression

(24:04) Biggest gap: delay to process applications and opening length

(25:11) After the process email

(25:42) 4. The 2026 results, and what we learned

(25:48) The funnel

(26:46) What actually predicted who advanced

(27:06) Biographical data: an open question

(27:29) Where the good candidates came from

(29:21) We changed the relative weight of TestGorilla vs tasks

(29:46) What we learned about the interview

(30:10) AI in the application

(30:59) 5. The time it takes

(31:37) 6. What we would improve

(33:09) What we are unsure

(34:39) Reusing this

---

First published:

June 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZgBXsLxPAzsy3MBfQ/from-job-posting-to-hire-templates-sourcing-campaign-and-llm

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout or of losing some kind of wholesomeness[1].

But there's another, very simple argument against it that I have not seen anyone fully make explicit[2], even though I think it's very important. It goes like this:

We face a lot of uncertainty about the sign of our impact.

Therefore, we should be very vigilant about our epistemics to make sure that we are not having a negative impact in expectation.

But trying hard deeply distorts our epistemics - it makes us more prone to motivated reasoning about what we’re doing, and leaves us with less slack to reflect on it.

Therefore, all else being equal, we should try less hard.

Crucially, this argument applies much more strongly to people working in “longtermist areas” - which other critiques of trying hard generally don’t do. For example, global health EAs whose terminal value is short-term welfare also face uncertainty about the impact of their actions - but much less (especially about the sign) than people trying to improve the long-term future. So [...]

---

Outline:

(01:28) Uncertainty

(03:47) Epistemic distortion

(05:24) Conclusion

---

First published:

June 13th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LrJmpReG7uptfazpX/a-simple-argument-for-trying-less-hard

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Written in a personal capacity.

I recently came back to SF after finishing my first year of grad school. I already had a sense that new money was coming into EA causes. But being back in the Bay Area has made me feel like this funding increase could be truly flabbergasting. Shamelessly plagiarizing Joe Carlsmith's great blog post, I think that our actions should reflect a strong likelihood of an upcoming step-change in funding for EA causes.

Here is a (stitched together) tl;dr of Joe's post:

Imagine you learn that the quantity of year-over-year EA-style philanthropy will double in each of 2026, 2027, and 2028. This would suggest that eight times as much funding would be directed to EA causes in 2028 relative to 2025. How surprised would you be to end up in this world? What would you do differently if you knew this would happen?

To be clear, I am not confident that the amount of money directed to EA causes will increase this steeply. A huge amount depends on the decisions and wealth fluctuation of a few key donors. However, at this point, I'd be more surprised if the amount of money directed to [...]

---

First published:

June 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hnwFvqFLgkSvFfzbQ/predictable-updating-about-funding-in-ea

---

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.

This is a link post.

Crossposting this from LessWrong, with the permission of the author, Tom Smith.

In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented models I didn’t have time to examine and citing studies I didn’t have time to read. But I lacked a gears-level model of why and how individual efforts could impact electoral outcomes, and I felt intimidated by all the statistics and skeptical of trusting people adjacent to politics.

In the past year, as I’ve done more research and (more recently) volunteered on the ground to help Alex Bores's campaign in NY-12[1], I’ve developed a gears-level understanding of how electoral politics in the US works.

I now believe that working on US electoral politics is one of the highest impact areas from the general AIS perspective. I feel like I was a fool for not thinking it through sooner. In this post, I’ll share some of the gears I’ve learned that inform this belief [...]

---

Outline:

(01:20) ~2% of open-seat primaries come down to 100 votes or less

(02:52) Talking to voters can net 1/3rd of a vote each hour

(05:35) Getting people to bother voting at all is a good strategy

(06:11) Campaigns are very money-constrained, which costs them time

(10:04) Returns don't really diminish

(11:27) There's lots of opportunities to be clever in ways that make you 50% more effective at canvassing

(11:53) If you're motivated and deeply care, you can greatly outperform the majority of volunteers

(13:25) Yes, when people spend tons to support/oppose a candidate, it has a notable effect

(15:20) Donations > reaching out to friends/warm contacts > canvassing > ~anything else an average person can do

(18:23) People over-fixate on vibes and win vs loss

(20:54) Some interventions feel like they don't work but the numbers say otherwise

(21:45) Seriously, a group of agentic people can be an enormous political force

---

First published:

June 18th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Tv6mC6EMvqu9WXwYn/gears-for-political-races

Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nSqB3qYP36enJLRq2/gears-for-political-races

---

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.

This is a link post.

Crossposting this from LessWrong, with the author's permission.

In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of poorly-documented models I didn’t have time to examine and citing studies I didn’t have time to read. But I lacked a gears-level model of why and how individual efforts could impact electoral outcomes, and I felt intimidated by all the statistics and skeptical of trusting people adjacent to politics.

In the past year, as I’ve done more research and (more recently) volunteered on the ground to help Alex Bores's campaign in NY-12[1], I’ve developed a gears-level understanding of how electoral politics in the US works.

I now believe that working on US electoral politics is one of the highest impact areas from the general AIS perspective. I feel like I was a fool for not thinking it through sooner. In this post, I’ll share some of the gears I’ve learned that inform this belief, with a [...]

---

Outline:

(01:19) ~2% of open-seat primaries come down to 100 votes or less

(02:51) Talking to voters can net 1/3rd of a vote each hour

(05:35) Getting people to bother voting at all is a good strategy

(06:11) Campaigns are very money-constrained, which costs them time

(10:04) Returns don't really diminish

(11:26) There's lots of opportunities to be clever in ways that make you 50% more effective at canvassing

(11:52) If you're motivated and deeply care, you can greatly outperform the majority of volunteers

(13:25) Yes, when people spend tons to support/oppose a candidate, it has a notable effect

(15:20) Donations > reaching out to friends/warm contacts > canvassing > ~anything else an average person can do

(18:23) People over-fixate on vibes and win vs loss

(20:53) Some interventions feel like they don't work but the numbers say otherwise

(21:45) Seriously, a group of agentic people can be an enormous political force

---

First published:

June 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Tv6mC6EMvqu9WXwYn/gears-for-political-races

Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nSqB3qYP36enJLRq2/gears-for-political-races

---

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.

This is a link post.

My new short fiction film 'Seat at the Table' is now out on Youtube!

Premise:

When Eva visits her Dad's AI company, she meets Liam, the company's flagship AI system, who she imagines as a polite, precociously-smart kid. But with the company's co-founder claiming Liam 7 is too dangerous to release, Eva starts to wonder if her Dad can really control what he's created.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the film. It's targeted at people who know fairly little about AI, to get them quickly up to speed on where we’re at right now and what this technology actually is. The main points I was trying to get across were:

• It's grown, not built
• It's fascinating[1]
• It's deceptive
• The people making it are scared of it
• The people making it are trapped in race dynamics
• It's getting smarter, fast

If there are people you wish understood these things better, I’d love for you to show this film to them and, if possible, report back on their response. It's always hard to gauge what effect a film is having, especially on people with low AI context, and I’ve found the anecdotal reports about [...]

---

Outline:

(01:30) The next idea

(02:25) How you can help

---

First published:

June 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dPDcLsKHmMAn4hxjj/seat-at-the-table-new-short-film-on-ai-and-help-me-with-the

Linkpost URL:
https://youtu.be/qHpnWiBHHaU?si=hCoCl06nB5zTrx-p

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

This post was crossposted from Multiplier with the author's permission, by the Forum team. The author may not see comments.

Subtitle: Why you might want to DIAL in to short timelines

People in the AI field love to talk about “timelines.” Sophisticated people in the AI field love to ask: “timelines to what?” Automation of AI R&D? (By which metric?) AI that far surpasses humans at nearly all cognitive tasks, or “TEDAI”? Artificial general intelligence? Something more ambitious?

Those answers are each about what AI can do. In this post, I argue that in timelines discussions, we should ask not what AI can do, but what we can do to shape AI outcomes.

More precisely:

• The default answer to “timelines to what?” should be “when the most important decisions will get made”[1];
• We should think of those decisions as having a distribution, not a deadline;
• Your own decisions related to that distribution need to account for how your leverage varies in different timelines.

In other words, the key timeline is the DIAL (Decision Importance, Adjusted for Leverage) Distribution.

The distribution of decision importance

Let's say you’re considering the social impact implications of a career [...]

---

First published:

June 11th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4Jq3enMAcgu2kbmsN/timelines-to-what-a-proposal

Linkpost URL:
https://multipliercg.substack.com/p/timelines-to-what-a-proposal

---

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.

We’ve launched A Beginner's Guide to Digital Minds (digitalminds.guide), a website for people who want an introduction to AI consciousness, AI welfare, and the broader implications of the possibility that AI systems could matter morally.

The guide provides an overview of the questions motivating digital minds research, including: What are digital minds? Could AI systems be conscious? How might they work? Could they matter morally? And given the uncertainty, how should we treat them, govern them, and coexist with them?

The website also offers practical guidance on how to get started, a curated collection of resources, events, and opportunities, including online courses, fellowships, workshops, conferences, jobs, and grants, and an overview of the growing digital minds ecosystem. It also links to the Digital Minds Newsletter (digitalminds.news), which we launched in December 2025. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and whether your background is in AI, philosophy, policy, law, social science, communications, or something else entirely, we hope the guide helps you find ways to engage with it.

The digital minds/AI welfare field is still at an early stage and lacks much of the infrastructure that more established research areas take for granted. We think this is changing rapidly, and we [...]

---

First published:

June 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZsahSGgSuAmwb98wx/introducing-a-beginner-s-guide-to-digital-minds

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA.

TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university. I work on CEA's Groups team (whilst also being an Epidemiology student at Oxford) and spend most of my time supporting people launching new groups. I think biosec-specific university groups are especially high-leverage right now, and I want to make it easier for more of them to exist.

Why university biosecurity groups

Biosecurity is talent-constrained, especially for more experienced grad students/seniors who might have high entrepreneurial fit to start new orgs or own a particular part of the ecosystem. Funders I've spoken to consistently say they could deploy more money if they had the people, especially generalists who can start new orgs. It's relatively clear that the bottleneck for the community is in talented, agentic people who can start their own initiatives.

AI safety had a version of this problem five or six years ago, and university groups turned out to be one of the most effective interventions for fixing it. [...]

---

Outline:

(00:49) Why university biosecurity groups

(03:08) Why I'm offering this

(03:46) Apply

---

First published:

June 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fxjhZs347DnAHukDC/launch-a-biosecurity-group-on-your-campus

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA.

TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university. I work on CEA's Groups team (whilst also being an Epidemiology student at Oxford) and spend most of my time supporting people launching new groups. I think biosec-specific university groups are especially high-leverage right now, and I want to make it easier for more of them to exist.

Why university biosecurity groups

Biosecurity is talent-constrained, especially for more experienced grad students/seniors who might have high entrepreneurial fit to start new orgs or own a particular part of the ecosystem. Funders I've spoken to consistently say they could deploy more money if they had the people, especially generalists who can start new orgs. It's relatively clear that the bottleneck for the community is in talented, agentic people who can start their own initiatives.

AI safety had a version of this problem five or six years ago, and university groups turned out to be one of the most effective interventions for fixing it. [...]

---

Outline:

(00:49) Why university biosecurity groups

(03:08) Why I'm offering this

(03:46) Apply

---

First published:

June 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fxjhZs347DnAHukDC/launch-a-biosecurity-group-on-your-campus

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.