EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Article in Fortune by Jake Angelo:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-actively-convincing-billionaires-174212328.html

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First published:

March 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h4r4dw6rjMizifk8E/peter-thiel-is-actively-convincing-billionaires-to-abandon

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Article in Fortune by Jake Angelo:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-actively-convincing-billionaires-174212328.html

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First published:

March 17th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/h4r4dw6rjMizifk8E/peter-thiel-is-actively-convincing-billionaires-to-abandon

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Overview

The mission of the Effective Giving & Careers fund at Coefficient Giving is to support people to have a greater positive impact through their donations and careers.

We launched the program in 2022. Since then, we’ve made over 60 grants totaling >$30m across four main areas:

• Effective Giving:  Raising funds for highly cost-effective global health and development programs
• Talent:  Helping people transition into impactful careers
• Incubation: Launching new high-impact nonprofits
• Research: Improving how we evaluate impact in giving and careers

Our early results have been encouraging. In the effective giving area alone, organizations we support have collectively moved hundreds of millions of dollars to cost-effective charities.

Over the past year, we’ve updated toward a broader view of impact. In addition to direct ROI, we’ve seen how this ecosystem can contribute to larger wins by influencing major funders, strengthening policy relationships, incubating organizations that later secure large-scale funding, and building a talent pipeline for high-impact work.

These wins have made us more ambitious about what this program could become.

2025 highlights

We grew our Effective Giving portfolio by running our first Request for Proposals (RFP) for Effective Giving organizations. Following that process, we funded [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Overview

(01:37) 2025. highlights

(04:21) Our strategy for 2026

(04:51) 1. Scale up existing high-performing grantees

(05:40) 2. Run 2-4 focused RFPs

(06:32) 3. Seed new efforts

(06:52) Effective Giving

(07:40) Effective Careers

(08:31) 4. Support the ecosystem in additional ways

(08:49) Effective Giving Ecosystem

(09:11) Effective Careers Ecosystem

(10:58) A note on incubation and research

(12:24) Key uncertainties

(13:30) What success could look like in 3-5 years

(15:25) We want your feedback

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First published:

March 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i3iXBWfvRoGAHBrmD/going-bigger-how-we-re-scaling-effective-giving-and-careers

Linkpost URL:
https://coefficientgiving.org/research/going-bigger-how-were-scaling-effective-giving-careers-in-2026/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a crosspost from my blog post.

In this post, I’m going to offer a series of criticisms of William MacAskill's What We Owe The Future (or WWOTF for short.) It has been almost four years since the book was released, but I still think it's worth criticizing since it remains a foundational text for longtermism. (For those who don’t know, longtermism is the view that working to positively shape the far future is a key moral priority of our time.)

In the first section of this post, I will offer criticisms of WWOTF as a justification for a worldview. In the second section, I will offer criticisms of WWOTF as a piece of persuasion for a general audience. Then, in the final section, I will offer some additional thoughts.

(As an aside, since it has been so long since WWOTF was released, MacAskill and many of his fellow researchers have changed some of their views on longtermism. If I know of something MacAskill has written or said since the release of the book that differs, I will point it out.)

Criticisms of WWOTF As a Justification For a WorldviewGeneral Criticisms

1. We may not be able [...]

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Outline:

(01:12) Criticisms of WWOTF As a Justification For a Worldview

(01:18) General Criticisms

(05:38) Chapter Specific Criticisms

(12:32) Criticizing WWOTF As A Piece of Persuasion For A General Audience

(13:39) Additional Notes

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First published:

March 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mvfhYfQgrFwdNDuLN/criticisms-of-what-we-owe-the-future

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Background

On March 10th, 2026, DayOne announced that it will build biological data centers in Singapore and Melbourne. "Biological" here means that the computational infrastructure will involve live human neurons grown on silicon chips, maintained by life support systems that keep the cells alive through nutrient delivery and waste removal. Human brain cells are efficient information processors, and it is not surprising that commercial interests have begun to take notice. Cortical Labs, the "Wetware-as-a-Service" company discussed in prior posts (here and here), is the company supplying the CL1 biocomputers. DayOne's Singapore facility has the potential to scale up over time to house 1,000 units of CL1, representing a deal that could grow to be worth tens of millions of dollars.[1]

DayOne is one of the fastest-growing data center operators in the world, with plans to raise a $5 billion IPO in the United States later this year at a targeted $20 billion valuation. By shifting workloads from pure silicon to increasingly sophisticated configurations of human brain matter, companies like DayOne may be able to offer cloud computing services in a more energy-efficient manner. They can frame these operations as sustainability initiatives, given that, as they state in their official [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Background

(02:41) The Problem

(03:32) Proposal

(03:43) Next Steps

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First published:

March 15th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j5DoCeiedvNgYmgM2/brain-farming-is-no-longer-hypothetical

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic status: A bit sad (I know that's not an epistemic status)

The best development Forum on the internet?

3 years ago a headline “FTX SBF blah blah blah” triggered my memory “oh that's right, that effective altruism thing”.

A few years earlier I had read “Doing Good Better” in our Northern Ugandan hut, and was excited by how the ideas matched my experience of seeing the BINGOs [1] on the ground here doing not-much-good at all. Soon after my wife dragged me to Cambridge for a year and I joined an EA group. I was drawn in to a beautiful crew of good, ernest people trying to do the best they could with their lives -[2] something I’d only seen before among a few people at church. I was most impressed by their veganism, practising what they preached.

But after going back to Uganda I forgot about the whole EA thing. But 3 years later the FTX headlines and a google search led me to the EA forum, which to my delight turned out to be the best place on the internet to discuss global health and development. My first foray was a not-very-good post [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) The best development Forum on the internet?

(01:29) A steady decline

(02:59) Why?

(04:34) Is this fine?

(05:02) Is this less fine?

(06:29) How to Boost GHD discourse?

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First published:

March 15th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4jbbjTTJ87baMrkY4/ghd-discussion-here-is-slowly-dying

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Core premise: for many impact-focused programs, it's not enough to have a plausible theory of change; you also need buy-in from your users. All products/interventions have users, even if they’re not your intended beneficiaries. Successfully meeting real user needs is usually a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for scaling a cost-effective program; users who are bought-in are more likely to follow through with the recommended high-impact actions, and programs with strong demand can scale more easily.

A useful way to think about this is that you want to seek “product-market-impact fit”. This means building programs that users genuinely want to engage with and that create cost-effective impact. The phrase is stolen from Peter McIntyre, based on the startup concept of product-market fit. It's a process I’ve been learning, implementing, and refining through my ~7 year career in impact-focused talent search and community building, as co-founder of Animal Advocacy Careers → Managing Director at Leaf → Courses Project Lead at the Centre for Effective Altruism.[1]

But it's not just important for community building. For example, some researchers produce rigorous work that nobody acts on, because they never asked decision-makers what they needed. Others orient their research around the needs of [...]

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Outline:

(02:24) Why: You have users too

(05:32) How: Find user needs, then work out how to address them through pilots/MVPs

(05:40) In theory

(07:58) In practice

(11:42) FAQs

(17:39) Try it out

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First published:

March 13th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DyncXLQ2ysb9K9dfR/you-need-user-buy-in-to-scale-your-impact

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This post is a summary of our literature review of seabream, seabass, and small rainbow trout electrical stunning studies, which you can find on RP's website. It was cross-posted from our Substack.

Rainbow trout, gilthead seabream, and European seabass are the top three most farmed fish species in Europe, by number of individual fish. We estimate that ~400 million gilthead seabream, ~200 million European seabass, and ~200 million small rainbow trout were slaughtered for European consumption in 2021. Current standard slaughter methods for these Mediterranean species, mainly asphyxia in air or ice slurry, are widely considered inhumane due to the prolonged suffering they induce.

Major retailers and producers (1, 2) have made commitments to transition to electrical stunning methods by 2027–2028. Additionally, leading aquaculture certification bodies are updating their standards to mandate these practices, encouraging industry-wide adoption within the next few years.

The problem

While electrical stunning has gained rapid policy and commercial acceptance with reported operational benefits, the scientific evidence for whether it actually achieves humane outcomes for these species is surprisingly sparse.

Humane stunning means rendering fish immediately insensible and keeping them that way until death. In practice, achieving this standard - and confirming that achievement [...]

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Outline:

(01:20) The problem

(02:53) What we did

(03:38) Our results

(05:10) Finding 1: Electrical stunning remains unproven for seabream and seabass

(05:57) Finding 2: Electric stunning may be more promising for rainbow trout

(06:56) Finding 3: Thin evidence means our findings are more speculative than we would like

(08:21) Implications of our findings

(08:25) Electrical stunners could improve rainbow trout welfare

(09:27) More research is needed on stunner performance in commercial settings

(10:24) Our recommendations on how to advance fish welfare at the time of slaughter

(12:48) Acknowledgements

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First published:

March 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y2pEQKcWmDisXtxfs/electrical-stunning-does-not-yet-ensure-prolonged

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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EA has been an unusually high-trust community. This has pros and cons. That trust comes with a lot of what makes EA great: people are unusually likely to help each other if they think it will be good overall, reports can discuss with managers whether they should leave for another job, and grantees can be unusually frank with grantmakers.

As discussions grow on the forum about Anthropic employees potentially donating large amounts of equity to EA charities, I want to discuss below a few risks I worry about:

1. A collective action problem of everyone pitching Anthropic staff directly.
2. Engaging in dishonest or disingenuous behaviour to better fundraise.

Avoiding both these issues matters for two reasons. First, Anthropic staff deserve to be treated with honesty and respect. Second, I think it's good for impact for several reasons, including the value of trust and transparency in maintaining donations over many years.

Collective Action Problem 1. Pitching directly

Individual orgs and fundraisers each have rational incentives to pitch Anthropic employees directly. From any single org's perspective, reaching out once seems fine. But when there are hundreds of orgs potentially worthy of donations, if pitching a donor directly gets you an edge [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) Collective Action Problem 1. Pitching directly

(02:29) Collective Action Problem 2. Dishonesty

(04:43) My recommendations for high-integrity fundraising:

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First published:

March 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Gmf5qaW3wKtuPbjCS/incoming-money-integrity-and-collective-action-problems

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.

Subtitle: How to crack the cruelty collective action problem

Last month, eight large UK fast food chains — including KFC, Nando's, and Burger King — scrapped their pledges to adopt higher-welfare chicken standards under the Better Chicken Commitment. They blamed supply shortages, demand shocks, even the climate impact of the promised reforms.

But suppose the reforms had been profitable. Does anyone really think these chains would have found those obstacles insurmountable? The reasons were rationalizations, not motivations.

Most cruelty to farm animals today persists for one simple reason: it is profitable. That logic explains far more than the press releases do. The familiar arguments about why cages are “necessary,” mutilations are “for the animals’ benefit,” and slower-growing breeds are “impractical” speak more to the creativity of PR firms than the realities of reform.

It wasn’t always this way — and it need not always be. The agricultural industrial revolution trapped farming in a cruelty collective action problem. How can we solve it?

When cruelty didn’t [...]

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First published:

March 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2fZwHSua53d2LekNy/make-cruelty-unprofitable-again

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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