EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum.

A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific reservations I do remember not being convinced initially. After a lot of talking with Julia and others, however, this campaign did seem like a really promising opportunity. Six days later we made the donation:

We hadn't donated to a political campaign since college, but Julia was impressed with this candidate's work on pandemic preparedness, which is an area we've both thought was important for a long time. In general, we prefer to donate through funds because they are able to put a lot more time and attention into identifying excellent donation opportunities, but campaign finance rules mean this model doesn't work for political donations.

Flynn lost, and not for lack of funding. People took away a range of lessons (see the [...]

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First published:

June 6th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YYNH5uvmmaEKi4h2m/coming-around-to-political-donations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

About one year ago, I started spending most of my time organising PauseAI UK. At that time our largest protest had seen fewer than 50 attendees, no prominent politicians or scientists were associated with PauseAI, and I largely ran the UK chapter by myself.

In the past year PauseAI UK has delivered two conferences, written an open letter signed by 63 UK politicians, arranged a conference in the European Parliament, and co-organised the largest AI protest in the world. We now have a strong team, with Matilda da Rui joining as Deputy Director and several highly dedicated volunteers taking on substantial responsibility and launching their own local groups around the UK.

I'm proud of our track record and excited about the trajectory we are on. As AI capabilities improve exponentially, the number of people aware of the risks and motivated to take action increases commensurately. I believe we can harness this energy and turn it into real impact that actually improves humanity's chance of a positive future.

Track Record

June 2025 – PauseCon London

We delivered the first PauseAI conference, PauseCon, on behalf of PauseAI Global, bringing together around 60 volunteers from around the world for the first time [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Track Record

(01:17) June 2025 - PauseCon London

(02:09) August 2025 - Open Letter to Demis Hassabis

(03:00) September 2025 - Book launch party

(03:28) October 2025 - Documentary Screening in Parliament

(04:01) December 2025 - Westminster Hall Debate

(04:32) February 2026 - PauseCon Brussels

(06:00) February 2026 - March for AI Safety

(07:00) Theory of Change and Strategy

(07:04) Creating the political momentum for a pause

(07:47) Our mission

(09:52) Positive outcomes for PauseAI UK

(10:17) Scenario 1: PauseAI as a special interest group

(11:52) Scenario 2: PauseAI as a mass movement

(12:51) High-level strategy

(12:55) Brand and messaging

(15:29) Why the UK?

(16:31) Growth

(19:00) Short-term plans

(21:27) Funding

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First published:

June 5th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BpzBacaPFFnnAPdbK/one-year-of-pauseai-uk

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This post covers key insights for pandemic risk reduction from our Risk Analysis paper, which was awarded ‘Best Paper of 2025’

Global pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and most recently, COVID-19, have brought hardship and loss: from global famine to loss of life, from deepening inequality to overwhelming health systems, and more.

An important lesson arises: the more prepared we are against a pandemic, the better we can protect the lives of millions.

Historically, pandemics usually arose through animal-to-human interaction. In the present day, a new origin source for pandemic potential pathogens (PPP) has emerged from human interaction with PPP in laboratory settings (for example, in vaccine development). This represents a new type of risk with different characteristics (e.g., geographic distribution) and potential for harm.

Alongside laboratory origin sources, increased global travel (especially via air networks) facilitates the rapid spread of pathogens, further increasing potential for harm. Even if a particular country is unlikely to give rise to a new emerging infectious disease or be the source of a lab leak, it might be strongly connected to other countries that do face such risks.

But infectious diseases don’t affect only our physical and mental [...]

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Outline:

(03:24) Methodology

(04:45) Results

(07:24) Limitations

(08:44) Going forward

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First published:

June 1st, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/arwZWyZrKoFBeDErX/global-pandemic-prevention-how-disease-spreads-across

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Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause.

I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thing to bring up. Many people in the animal welfare space are working really hard, and this post might leave some feeling defeated. But I think this is one of the most important things to talk about in animal welfare right now. My intention is not to be a downer or create infighting. Instead, I hope this post inspires lots of people to tackle this major neglected problem.

key takeaways 

• Even some of the most prominent animal welfare interventions have surprisingly weak evidence behind them. In some cases, the available evidence even suggests that the intervention may be causing harm.
• Specifically
  • We have very limited data on electrical shrimp stunning that doesn't support a confident conclusion as to whether it's good or bad.
  • We have mixed evidence on whether transitioning egg producers to cage-free improves welfare overall.
  • We have evidence that the substitution effect of alternative proteins is weak, at best.
• Significant additional funding and talent should be allocated to raise [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) key takeaways

(01:45) introduction

(02:29) three salient animal welfare interventions and their evidence bases

(03:17) shrimp stunning and slaughter

(11:01) cage-free

(20:29) alternative proteins

(21:47) this is a field-wide problem

(22:18) my recommendations to funders

(22:22) animal welfare should not be de-funded

(23:36) we should be taking ownership of the entire evidence pipeline

(24:49) when bet making doesn't make sense

(25:38) conclusion

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First published:

June 5th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/svjqgyFuFQ34qSgmw/animal-welfare-has-an-evidence-problem

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This is a link post.

FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately 200 thousand dollars for prizes. Winning submissions may receive a prize from 5 thousand dollars-50 thousand dollars and if submissions warrant, multiple 50 thousand dollars prizes are possible. Winners may be offered opportunities for further funded work.

You can express interest right away to receive commentary, information, and updates — whether you’d like to participate or are just interested in the outcomes of the competition.

The heights of human epistemic investigation are impressive and valuable, but rare and difficult to reach — see our abridged collection of strong examples.[1] The limiting factor is rarely exquisite insight (though this helps!), and more often diligence, a curious and open mindset, and the time and effort needed to do the thorough work investigating background on a topic: activities AI is well placed to assist with.

Existing AI-assisted knowledge base work demonstrates real pieces of this — agent memory (e.g., Claude Code's memory and [...]

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Outline:

(02:44) What we're looking for

(04:05) Ingestion

(04:47) Structure

(05:35) Assessment

(06:33) What a good entry looks like

(10:39) Prize structure

(12:10) Interested in participating or following along?

(12:27) Why we're doing this

(13:11) We're excited to see what you build.

(13:26) The case studies

(13:29) COVID

(15:34) Black holes

(16:33) Eggs

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First published:

June 4th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kP8TGXggDcaPhdjqn/lab-leaks-black-holes-and-eggs-epistemic-case-study

Linkpost URL:
https://flf.org/epistack-competition/

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There are many competing theories of how society does and should function, from Karl Marx and Adam Smith to Steven Pinker and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which of these theories are correct (or which elements of them are) may matter a lot if we're seeking to change society for the better.

However, these theories are often hard to understand - you may need to read an entire book (or dozens of articles) to feel like you get the key claims of a single theory. At Clearer Thinking, we just launched a new tool called Society Explained to make understanding key ideas from these theories much faster and easier.

The way it works is that you simply pick from over 100 thinkers, and then get to see the key causal claims that they are making laid out in a visual diagram format, with explanations alongside that make it easy to understand what the key elements are and how they connect together. If you're curious to try it, click here (it's free).

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First published:

June 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PNADjwhywMqr5F82K/society-explained-a-new-tool-for-efficiently-exploring

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

On Friday, May 22, after a field-building itch, I posted a 'Plea to the Laid-off' on LinkedIn, leveraging my voice as a former Googler. With tremendous support from the community, I got 27 inbound calls in 24 hours & received a small Rapid Grant from BlueDot to fund the post as a Linkedin ad for 12 days.

Note: While I’ve been funded by Coefficient Giving for my EA SF efforts, this specific project was on my own accord and outside my grant period.

Some stats from the article (as of June 2, 12 days post)

• 2.2 thousand views
• 423 social engagements (269 reactions)
• 118k Impressions (# of times content appears in front of a user's screen)
• 105 saves & 8 sends
• 120 followers gained (and about that many connection requests)

Actual engagement

• 27 inbound calls
• 13 airtable intake submissions (after closing my calendar after Day 1)
• ~10 Linkedin messages w/ varying degrees of engagement
• BlueDot/80k/AI in Context Re-directs: ?
  • Lesson: Link tracking is your friend

Sankey of airtable and real-time coaching calls

I categorized people into various stages:

• 1 - No background of AIS
• 1.5 - Adjacent background (but not quite GCR/AIS) incl. Trust & [...]

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Outline:

(02:29) Expectations vs Reality

(03:53) Observation 1: What even IS AI Safety?

(05:16) Observation 2: Paradox of Choice -  AIS resource guides are too much for a low-context individual to navigate.

(06:25) Outcomes & Impact

(08:08) Some conclusions, hypotheses, and questions I don't have answers to:

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First published:

June 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EhLhrrEEG6Jo9kYJv/learnings-from-a-viral-linkedin-post-what-ai-safety-means-to

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

This is a crosspost from the Forward Pass substack with the author's permission.

What should you expect your life to look like in the future? Almost everybody is overconfident about what their life will look like in the next 30 years. For most people this is due to an underappreciation of the transformative potential of AI, but for others it's due to an underappreciation of how unique their current positions are.

For anything, the greater change you anticipate, the more you should widen your range of possibilities to expect. When walking in a random direction, a good guess for how your surroundings will look tomorrow is what they look like today. But if you’re flying a plane in a random direction, where you are today tells you very little about what your surroundings will look like tomorrow. A better estimate would be the average of what surroundings look like everywhere on Earth. Visually, this looks like a smearing out of our expectations about the future.

Similarly, the more change we expect from AI (and we should expect a lot), the more we should expect our lives to resemble the average baseline of a life [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) How should we be more uncertain about the future?

(02:25) Income

(04:53) Geopolitics

(06:07) Further widening

(07:25) A fog over the future

(08:09) A Veil of Ignorance

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First published:

May 30th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gzrw7wttzucP2bq6Z/the-singularity-is-a-veil-of-ignorance

Linkpost URL:
https://theforwardpass.substack.com/p/the-singularity-as-a-veil-of-ignorance

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Crosspost.

(I think this is one of the most important things I’ve written, so I’d appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it. And if you know what's at stake, and just want to know what to do, skip to the end).

What's at stake

Sometimes, the operations of factory farms are so wicked that if they were described in a work of fiction, you’d think it was a cartoonish caricature of evil. Perhaps there is no better example of this than gestation crates. Pregnant mother pigs are penned up in tiny crates without enough room to turn around, for many months. Their feces piles up around them, so that these animals with amazing senses of smell must inhale shit all day. They have no source of enjoyment, no ability to live any kind of real life—all they can do is bite the bars of the cage and pine for a freedom that will never come.

Why would the farms do this? What could be the point of this cruelty? The main reason is that the industry saves on food costs when their animals don’t move around as much. If you’re kept in a cage where you can’t [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) What's at stake

(07:47) What can be done

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First published:

June 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bcydy5nNv7kZgcA8H/the-most-important-decision-for-animals-in-american-history

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

These days, I often run across whippersnappers excited to do something for AI safety — but aren’t quite sure what. One of the fun things about the Future Fund era were the big lists of project ideas; as we enter a new era of crazy money sloshing around, it might be time to bring back the lists!

Note that these ideas range from “very confident this is good” to “completely harebrained”; I’m not telling you which are which.

If you’re excited for ideas like these, consider joining Surplus, our upcoming software incubator: https://manifund.org/surplus

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Already, the top problem for most AI safety orgs is hiring good people. Vast torrents of funding will only exacerbate the imbalance between available money and people to hire. So now is a great time to figure out how to discover new talent & match people to jobs.

1. Triplebyte for AI safety jobs

Triplebyte would interview a tech candidate once, then forward the results to a bunch of different companies. This would reduce the O(MN) problem in hiring between M orgs and N people to O(M+N), saving applicants and interviewers time. Most obviously, you could just do this [...]

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Outline:

(00:44) Jobs, jobs, jobs

(01:06) 1. Triplebyte for AI safety jobs

(01:55) 2. Database of every single AI safety person

(02:48) 3. Intro AI safety megaconference

(03:50) 4. Unionize the lab employees

(05:22) 5. Safety scorecards to inform job applicants

(06:11) 6. Help people move to US (and maybe Bay Area specifically)

(06:47) Cargo-culting from academia

(07:13) 7. AI Safety Nobel Prize

(08:27) 8. University of AI Safety

(09:09) 9. Good AI safety research journal

(09:33) 10. Legit, academic AI safety conference

(10:07) Products I would consume

(10:22) 11. Turn the AI 2027 TTX into a mass market product

(11:29) 12. "Lighthaven/Constellation/Mox in DC"

(11:37) 13. Common application for AI safety funding

(11:57) 14. Givewell for AI safety

(12:21) 15. In-depth profiles of AI safety leaders

(13:16) 16. "what-is-agi.com"

(14:16) Questions to generate project ideas

(16:11) Other notes and advice

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First published:

June 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EvfQ8Dy5ewXGTnEyv/sixteen-schemes-for-ai-safety

Linkpost URL:
https://manifund.substack.com/p/sixteen-schemes-for-ai-safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.