EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

High Impact Professionals (HIP) is launching a brand new Entrepreneurship Track inside our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). It's built specifically for experienced professionals who are considering starting their own high-impact organization, whether that means founding a high-impact non-profit or for-profit organization, or starting a Founding to Give company.

Applications for the next IAP round are now open until Sunday, June 7. To apply for the Entrepreneurship Track, simply select the Entrepreneurship option within the main IAP application.

Apply to the IAP Entrepreneurship Track

Why We're Launching The Entrepreneurship Track

We’ve now run eight rounds of the IAP, and one pattern has stood out: some of the biggest impact came from participants starting their own organizations.

To date, IAP alumni have:

• Founded 16 new charities, 9 independently and 7 after subsequently going through incubators, including Ambitious Impact's Charity Entrepreneurship & Founding to Give, Sheldon Labs, and more. This includes:
  • 8 direct impact non-profit organizations
  • 3 direct impact for-profit organizations
  • 7 Founding to Give organizations
• An additional three have been accepted into Charity Entrepreneurship scheduled to start later this year
• Organizations cover a wide variety of cause areas: AI Safety, Global Health, Animal Welfare, Alternative Proteins, and Meta/Comms

It's clear that entrepreneurship [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) Why We're Launching The Entrepreneurship Track

(02:18) Program Overview

(03:10) How Does This Differ From Other Entrepreneurial Programs?

(03:38) Who Should Apply to the Entrepreneurship Track

(04:57) Important Dates

(05:33) Know Someone Who Should Apply?

(05:59) Questions?

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First published:

May 20th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8mmxH5yoGykC5dW7e/announcing-the-iap-entrepreneurship-track-a-new-path-for

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This article was written with the aid of AI for research, structure, and phrasing. It may contain >10% AI-generated text.

What Has Nature Done For Me Lately?

In this sequence I try to determine the most valuable aspects of nature, after observing that lots of people find it valuable. One of the major candidates is “ecosystem services,” a term describing benefits we get from nature.[1] I find that the total value of all ecosystem services is high, but the marginal unit wouldn't meaningfully diminish the benefits we receive.

In this post I explore

• How valuable ecosystem services are (about $45 trillion per year)
• What those ecosystem services are (nutrient cycling, etc)
• How possible it is to get those same benefits from other sources besides nature
• And whether biodiversity is providing the instrumental gain we get from nature. 

A quick clarification: Biodiversity is a measure of how many distinct species exist in nature (although it ambiguously can refer to local density of species, total extant global species, diversity within a species, and/or variety of ecosystems). Biodiversity is not equivalent to ecosystem services - as I demonstrate in this post.

Breakdown of Ecosystem Services

The estimated dollar equivalents of [...]

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Outline:

(00:19) What Has Nature Done For Me Lately?

(01:31) Breakdown of Ecosystem Services

(03:53) The Value Estimates In This Table Are Flawed

(06:00) Some Other Ideas for Measuring Value

(08:16) Option Value

(09:19) A Case for Biodiversity as a Biotech Resource Library

(14:07) Conclusion

(16:03) References:

(16:06) Sources for my Claims about Ecosystem Services

(16:26) Nutrient Cycling

(18:24) Water Supply

(19:00) Pest Control

(19:44) Wild-Caught Fish

(20:22) Pollination

(20:43) Disease Control

(21:40) Flood Control

(22:21) Water Purification

(22:52) Major Assessments of Current Value from Nature:

(22:58) Recent Assessments:

(24:31) Older Assessments:

(25:19) Other Assessments:

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First published:

May 20th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z7AYzXSW3JGQvPSzi/present-day-benefits-of-nature-to-humanity

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I used AI while writing this, though I have spent 5 - 15 hours on it and I take responsibility for every word and all numbers.

Every time there is a report of sexual harassment within EA there is a lot of introspection. I want to push back on this, not to dismiss the experiences described, which sound genuinely painful, but because I am unsure the evidence supports the belief that EA is uniquely bad here.

So what do we know? In 2022, CEA's Community Health team reported handling around 19 interpersonal harm cases the previous year, ranging from uncomfortable interactions to serious allegations, across a community of thousands. On my read, 3–6 of those 19 clearly involve sexual misconduct across a community of 4,700–10,000 EAs, putting a narrower rate at around 0.03–0.13%.

Alongside this there have been perhaps 3–5 high-profile public cases on the Forum in the last five years. The TIME piece in 2023 cited 7 women, though at the time it was disputed how clearly the cases related to EA. These data don't seem clearly outside of the above range.

The cleanest peer numbers come from universities' Title IX offices, which publish annual [...]

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First published:

May 21st, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Gr3owHS3fyDfnZ3nb/ea-sexual-harassment-where-s-the-evidence-we-re-worse-than

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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This is a link post.

I’m not the first to say this, but I’ll say it again: I’m worried about Anthropic's and OpenAI's (possible) IPOs.

Tl;dr: there's a good chance that Anthropic and/or OpenAI becomes a publicly traded company in the near future. Somehow this makes a lot of capital that was previously solid melt into a liquid. That liquid capital can then be given to whatever the people who own it want it to be given to. That's many billions of dollars in annual funding at the very least, which is orders of magnitude more than organizations are used to receiving. I’m thankful many of these people want to give their money away, though really that should be the bare fucking minimum for billionaires. But I’m also worried.

We are all attracted to money like moths to a flame. Even I feel the temptation: with all these billions of dollars, what kind of good could we do? We spin great yarns about the kinds of impact we will have on the world and exchange congratulations on our ratiocinations. Yet the more I’ve thought about this, and the more I’ve read what people have had to say, the more worried [...]

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First published:

May 20th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DcsmaCXG227n9eiyB/i-need-you-to-understand-that-moving-fast-and-breaking

Linkpost URL:
https://layabolitionist.substack.com/p/i-need-you-to-understand-that-moving

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR

Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks.

Key highlights from this post:

• We believe that strategic cross-cause prioritization is an important step in doing good at scale.
• This fund is for donors who want their donation to go where a marginal dollar is likely to do the most good across cause areas, all things considered.
• We modeled key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritization: moral weights, time discounting, risk attitudes, aggregation across ethical views, AI-related uncertainty, and empirical uncertainty within each giving opportunity.
• We present the current recommended allocation of marginal resources across high-impact funds in each of the three cause areas mentioned above.
• In addition, we’re introducing you to the first version of the Donor Compass, a tool to help donors explore cross-cause giving, powered by our cross-cause prioritization model. It is a short quiz that outputs custom giving allocations based on the user's moral and empirical assumptions.

You can dive deep into our rationale and methodology for the CCF in the announcement below, or [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) TL;DR

(01:46) Cross-cause prioritization in effective giving is underdeveloped

(02:22) Giving is full of moral and empirical uncertainty

(04:27) How EA has historically handled this

(06:29) Why thinking in cause areas isn't enough

(06:34) Why not just pick the best cause and fund it?

(07:18) At the end of the day, interventions are what's funded -- not causes

(08:37) What would address the prioritization problem

(08:55) We need explicit modeling

(10:36) The barriers to cross-cause prioritization are lower than they once were

(11:59) Our solution: an explicit and transparent cross-cause prioritization model

(12:06) The model

(14:03) Giving opportunities currently included in the model

(16:10) The Cross-Cause Fund

(16:35) Who is it for?

(17:42) How does it work?

(18:39) Our current recommended allocation across cause areas

(20:15) Donor Compass

(20:19) What is it?

(20:51) How to use it

(21:41) Methodology behind our model and tools

(22:10) Fund selection

(22:55) Fund-by-fund cost-effectiveness estimation

(24:43) Data Viewer

(25:01) Defining worldviews

(26:48) Outputting an allocation

(28:03) Future cross-cause prioritization plans

(31:03) Support the research behind the cross-cause prioritization model

(31:46) Conflicts of interest statement

(32:25) Acknowledgements

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First published:

May 20th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YgbTWGyfwkoBtvT2R/announcing-the-rethink-priorities-cross-cause-fund

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first.

Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction. More money, more people willing to start things, more urgency.

But the conclusion I draw is almost the opposite. The new philanthropic wave shouldn't go hunting for new problems. Far more of it should go to animals. There are literally trillions of lives suffering so gravely in all corners of the world. The future is still incredibly grim; AI can impose even more significant suffering if we don't do it right. "Animal welfare" isn't one solved issue to cross off: it's where most of the sentience and suffering is, and where we should be looking.

Animals are not one solved issue. It's not one issue

EAs recognized the importance of animal suffering – factory farming, wild animal suffering – long before the rest of the world, which still has not really recognized its importance. That was the insight. And [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) Animals are not one solved issue. It's not one issue

(02:03) The problems are staring right at us

(04:12) AI x Animals

(05:23) Stop looking past them

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First published:

May 20th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HFkrGGGjbM7gFcQGD/after-making-sure-we-don-t-all-die-this-should-be-the-first

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This report was written by Christian de Weerd for Rethink Priorities. It was primarily meant to inform our own thinking about the merits of biological naturalism about consciousness. However, as Christian did such an excellent job on the report, we thought it might be worth sharing more broadly. We should mention that, at least as far as we know, Christian won't be monitoring the comments.

Executive summary

• Only a couple of years ago the idea that AI systems may be conscious was widely regarded as a far-fetched and purely hypothetical scenario. Recent rapid developments in AI capabilities, however, have caused a surge of interest in the question whether conscious AI may actually be realized sometime soon.
• Most researchers agree that consciousness is relevant to moral status in one way or another. Therefore, finding out whether AI systems can be conscious is of great practical importance.
• Researchers generally agree that the most promising scientifically-informed approach to answer questions about AI consciousness consists in assessing whether AI systems have the right kind of internal organization to realize consciousness.
  • One influential version of this approach assumes that computational functionalism is correct: The view according to which implementing the right computations [...]

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First published:

May 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5n6aJrFc6vvbdvedv/can-ai-be-conscious-biological-naturalism-as-a-research

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We are excited to announce a new Request for Proposals (RFP) for effective giving organizations, defined as initiatives that raise funds for highly effective charities. Through this RFP, we aim to identify and support additional efforts in the effective giving space and streamline the application process for potential grantees.

Motivation

Our Effective Giving & Careers Fund has historically supported a variety of effective giving organizations across multiple countries. Examples of current grantees include Giving What We Can, Effektiv Spenden, and Doneer Effectief (you can find other recent grants here).

Effective giving currently comprises ~70% of our portfolio, reflecting its central role in our broader funding strategy. In the past few years, we have been surprised by the growth of the effective giving ecosystem: new initiatives have launched worldwide, and existing efforts have successfully channeled substantial funds to promising opportunities.

Based on our internal analysis, we estimate that our current grantees deliver an average adjusted return on donations of 6x across our effective giving portfolio, with some grantees as high as ~10x. We believe that additional organizations we’re not currently supporting may be poised to generate similar impact. Through this RFP, we hope to:

1. Invite and encourage new [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) Motivation

(01:54) Eligibility

(02:41) Additional considerations

(03:29) Funding amount and grant structure

(04:22) Ideas we'd be excited about:

(05:09) Selection criteria and evaluation process

(05:51) Application logistics

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First published:

May 19th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5xwZJwGiBXkFXpy9d/request-for-proposals-effective-giving-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Tldr;

• EAs seem more focused on non-extinction risks from AI than they used to be
• I haven’t seen much discussion of why, making reference to the very longrun  
• Changes in the world this might be responding to are: alignment seeming more promising than it used to, the speed of AI progress, and concerns around US governance.
• There are also plausible sociological reasons for the shift, so I feel unsure how far to update

What's the change and why care about it?

My sense is that there's been a significant shift in how much longtermists prioritise non-extinction risks over the last few years. A decade ago people who were trying to ensure the flourishing of the universe trillions of years from now were very often focused on avoiding events that would kill all humans. My sense is that now they’re much more often focused on situations which they don’t think pose a risk of human extinction, such as extreme power concentration.

This change has felt confusing to me for a couple of reasons:

• There's reasonably little written about why longtermists should change their prioritisation in this direction. The notable exception is this paper by Will MacAskill.
• To [...]

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Outline:

(00:40) What's the change and why care about it?

(03:23) Differences in the world that motivate the change

(05:45) How much of an update should we make?

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First published:

May 19th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wTXAbzbkAxZrLv5Cg/why-are-longtermists-so-much-less-focused-on-human

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

[Subtitle.] Automating R&D is not sufficient for superintelligence

This is a crosspost for The Goodhart Singularity by Tom Reed, which was originally published on Thomas's Substack on 7 May 2026.

Buyer beware: bombastic claims advanced, often flippantly.

AI systems are starting to build themselves. Because each generation of model will be better at building its successor than the last, it seems plausible that the full automation of AI R&D could rapidly lead to an exponential growth in overall AI capabilities. A natural inference is that domain-general superintelligence arrives shortly after AI research is automated.

This natural inference is, indeed, almost the default story of AI progress, as well as the strategy of those pursuing it. Where the AI industry once distinguished itself by the search for general intelligence, it has in recent years converged on a narrower path: the targeted pursuit of coding and AI research. For Sam Altman, “perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we can now use [AI] to do faster AI research”.

To many, the (ostensibly imminent) automation of AI research looks sufficient for the rapid subsequent development of other world-changing capabilities. It would constitute, in Jack Clark's [...]

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First published:

May 18th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Doew7ieJ3XACfovKs/the-goodhart-singularity

Linkpost URL:
https://meagreprotestanthistory.substack.com/p/the-goodhart-singularity

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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