EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

A full disclaimer is at the end of this post. In short, nothing here is financial, tax, or legal advice.

TLDR

After five years of giving under the 10% pledge, I’ve found that the most useful shift in how I think about it has been treating it less as a one-off moral commitment, and more as something that benefits from ongoing management. This post shares three practical ideas that have helped me: (1) doing periodic “affordability reviews” for your pledge, borrowing a concept from mortgage lending, (2) running a simplified monthly close on your personal finances, adapted from management accounting, and (3) treating any donation shortfall as a personal tracking item on my balance sheet. These are approaches I actually use, and I think they can help make long-term giving feel more sustainable. That said, this level of detail won’t suit everyone: some people will find a simpler approach works better for them, and that's totally fine.

Who this is for

This post is primarily for people who are already donating regularly or have signed a giving pledge and are now navigating the years that follow. Once the initial excitement of committing to give settles down, what remains is [...]

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Outline:

(00:23) TLDR

(01:14) Who this is for

(02:54) The affordability review: borrowing from mortgage lending (but not the stressful parts)

(05:02) A note on tax relief (which can change the maths quite a bit)

(06:47) The monthly close: a management accounting tool, simplified for personal use

(10:40) The shortfall tracker: a personal reframing that might help with falling behind

(12:56) The reward: looking at what your giving has actually achieved

(14:47) Getting started

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First published:

February 23rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/t7prWzwRfMLfB4J4q/the-operational-side-of-giving-three-frameworks-that-help-me

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We think AI strategy researchers should prioritize questions related to earlier parts of the AI transition, even when that means postponing work on some questions that ultimately seem more important.

In brief, our case for taking this “just-in-time” perspective is:

• There are more open AI strategy questions than we have capacity or time for right now
• At some point, AI uplift (and expanded human attention) will give humanity way more capacity for strategy work
  • This could make the marginal research we can add today OOMs less valuable, unless it helps us before that point (or speeds up/improves AI uplift)
• So the top priority for our strategy work is informing decisions we can’t punt until then
  • I.e. focusing more on the early period of the AI transition[1]  — understanding its dynamics and levers, identifying medium-term states we'd like to steer toward, and clarifying foundational questions

Earlier-period-focused strategy is sometimes treated as resolved (as if the only remaining work is implementation and later-stage questions). We think this is wrong. We sketch out a tentative list of high-priority questions, organized into the following clusters:

1. Understanding the early period — What is the likely trajectory of AI? What will [...]

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Outline:

(03:32) A just-in-time TAI strategy perspective

(06:04) The early part of the AI transition as our responsibility & focus

(07:49) What does this mean about which questions we should prioritize?

(08:34) a) Understanding the early period

(10:31) b) Preparing for early challenges

(12:41) c) Looking ahead (to see what would help later periods)

(14:39) d) Exploring our levers

(16:56) e) Clarifying foundational & ontological questions

(20:35) Which AI strategy questions does this tell us to drop?

(27:20) A final note on asking Which questions matter?

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First published:

February 23rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XNMhYiA8GmJbBLHXg/which-questions-can-t-we-punt

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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Thanks to @Mathieu Duteil for all of his insights in writing this post!

TL;DR

EA has a strong infrastructure for inspiring people to pursue impactful careers. The infrastructure for helping them actually get there, especially in operations, is far less developed. After applying to dozens of operations roles over the past 6 months, I observed patterns suggesting inefficiencies in how EA organizations hire: they run parallel processes for similar roles and screen for overlapping competencies. I propose a shared hiring infrastructure, including a common application layer, candidate process history, and coordination between organizations scoping similar roles.

1. The Gap Between Motivation and Opportunity

EA has built excellent infrastructure for inspiration. Career bootcamps, introductory fellowships, and governance courses help people identify cause areas, understand the landscape, and commit to a direction. For someone transitioning from a different field, these programs are genuinely valuable. I have experienced this firsthand. Since encountering Effective Altruism, I have taken courses on AI governance and biosecurity, participated in the ML4Good governance bootcamp and the CEA Operations Career Bootcamp, and attended EAG and EAGx events that reinforced my motivation to work on these problems. The inspiration infrastructure works. The issue is that there is no structured [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) 1. The Gap Between Motivation and Opportunity

(03:40) 2. What Dozens of Applications Taught Me

(07:29) 3. The Cumulative Cost

(10:26) 4. What could help

(17:14) 5. Similar proposals

(19:22) VI. Where This Analysis May Fall Short

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First published:

February 19th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qsKptzNLvwa5MKxSM/what-happens-after-the-career-advice-2

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?

We are a nonpartisan research organization that evaluates civil society organizations (CSOs); makes recommendations to impact-oriented donors; and produces analysis to help democracy researchers and practitioners improve their understanding of which pro-democracy tactics work and under what conditions.

I've been Research Director at P4Dem for the past year. This post is a reflection on our first major project, what I think we got right, and where we can do better.

Our premise is that structured prioritization and transparent evaluation can improve funding decisions in complex, low-evidence domains, like democracy. A key focus for us is developing better ways to assess whether that premise holds over time.

What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief

Our first project — Effectively Countering Authoritarian Playbooks (ECAPB) — aimed to produce donor recommendations for the founding members of our donor network.

The tactic involves four completed stages and a yet-to-be-completed impact evaluation stage. We started by running two parallel workstreams: prioritizing countries and prioritizing tactics.

Country prioritization used a framework built around four dimensions — Importance, Threat, Tractability, and Opportunity. We combined quantitative data from sources like V-Dem, Civicus, and the World Bank with qualitative country [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?

(01:01) What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief

(03:57) Three Things I Was Asked at EAG SF

(04:18) 1. Can we say anything with certainty about what works to counter authoritarianism?

(05:53) 2. Given limited evidence, is rigorous prioritization still worth doing?

(07:15) 3. Is deep evaluation useful for something as fast-moving as resisting authoritarianism?

(08:42) Whats Next

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First published:

February 23rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xgya2Ld5teqciqRgi/what-i-learned-trying-to-find-the-most-effective-democracy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?

We are a nonpartisan research organization that evaluates civil society organizations (CSOs); makes recommendations to impact-oriented donors; and produces analysis to help democracy researchers and practitioners improve their understanding of which pro-democracy tactics work and under what conditions.

I've been Research Director at P4Dem for the past year. This post is a reflection on our first major project, what I think we got right, and where we can do better.

Our premise is that structured prioritization and transparent evaluation can improve funding decisions in complex, low-evidence domains, like democracy. A key focus for us is developing better ways to assess whether that premise holds over time.

What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief

Our first project — Effectively Countering Authoritarian Playbooks (ECAPB) — aimed to produce donor recommendations for the founding members of our donor network.

The tactic involves four completed stages and a yet-to-be-completed impact evaluation stage. We started by running two parallel workstreams: prioritizing countries and prioritizing tactics.

Country prioritization used a framework built around four dimensions — Importance, Threat, Tractability, and Opportunity. We combined quantitative data from sources like V-Dem, Civicus, and the World Bank with qualitative country [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?

(01:01) What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief

(03:57) Three Things I Was Asked at EAG SF

(04:18) 1. Can we say anything with certainty about what works to counter authoritarianism?

(05:53) 2. Given limited evidence, is rigorous prioritization still worth doing?

(07:15) 3. Is deep evaluation useful for something as fast-moving as resisting authoritarianism?

(08:42) Whats Next

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First published:

February 23rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xgya2Ld5teqciqRgi/what-i-learned-trying-to-find-the-most-effective-democracy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Context: Effective Mental Health is a new group working to improve the field of global mental health along EA principles (and we're running another round of our Global Mental Health Fellowship, see info / apply here!).

Here, we outline the quick & basic case for why field-building work in effective global mental health seems especially cost-effective.

Huge Disease Burden and Neglect

Mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders account for 12% of the global burden of disease when measured in DALYs, yet mental healthcare accounted for just 2.4% of global healthcare spending in 2016. Treatment gaps are massive; most people with mental illness do not receive treatment (only 22% of people with mental illness in high-income countries, and as little as 4% of those in low-income countries, receive treatment).

Cost-Effectiveness 

Promising mental health interventions are cost-effective in both low- and high-income countries. The Happier Lives Institute's investigations into intervention cost-effectiveness find that some mental health interventions are over 5x more effective than GiveDirectly's cash transfers:

Many proven, evidence-based interventions already exist, but are bottlenecked by lack of prioritization, funding, and implementation.

We also expect that there will also be important “paradigm shifts” and approaches (e.g. new substance based [...]

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Outline:

(00:37) Huge Disease Burden and Neglect

(01:08) Cost-Effectiveness

(02:09) New Counterfactual Funding Pools

(02:49) Moral and Epistemic Robustness

(03:41) Note on EA Community Support for Mental Health as a Cause Area

(04:31) Conclusion

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First published:

February 22nd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eatpXeJJBweaF92XB/mental-health-large-neglected-and-more-cost-effective-than

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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

Post drafted and edited by the author. Claude and Grammarly were used for a light copyedit

As AI tools become increasingly useful for communicating research, opinions, or simply sharing ideas, it is becoming important to proactively disclose their use when we communicate with others. Being transparent demands AI-use disclosure. Organizations that communicate externally should embed strong AI-disclosure norms, and so should the forum. If you use AI tools for interpersonal communication, disclose their use in conversation.

The ability of LLMs to draft, re-draft, code, and analyse has been wonderful to see. As a researcher at AIM (views my own), I am certainly using AI tools in my work and exploring the domains in which they may make me more (and less) effective.

I personally enjoy writing, so I doubt I will ever use LLMs for extensive drafting. However, producing "content" (read: anything from a tweet to a book) is becoming increasingly cheaper. Lower barriers are leading to a steady increase in production. AI use speeds up research. Alarmingly, it also makes it easy to produce research that looks legit, but is, to all intents and purposes, slop.

Interpersonal communications can also become stilted, creating an underlying unease that [...]

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First published:

February 22nd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nFsinyn5TowPQz6oi/reasoning-transparency-demands-ai-use-disclosure

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There was a dream that was sports blogging for impact, and it wasn’t built in a day

Not everything should be a rocketship

Mikel Arteta was appointed Arsenal manager in 2019. Before Covid. Before Biden was too old. Before I’d heard of effective altruism, or thought about the tradeoff between a Bayesian approach to impact-maximizing career choices and the organizational stability required to take our best shot at solving the world's most pressing problems.

A disciple of Pep Guardiola, the preeminent soccerball visionary of our era, Arteta arrived with a short CV and Big Ideas. His first season, Arsenal finished 8th in the Premier League, and despite the reservoir of goodwill earned in his former incarnation as player and captain, some fans already wanted him out. Second season, 8th again, he and his patrons mocked as frauds. The owners continued to trust The Process - it would take time to replace a squad ageing ungracefully with younger players more suited to Mikel's methods, time to coach them into the cohesive unit he believed they could be, more time still to iterate his methods in response to real-world feedback - but third season and it's progress only so far as [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) Not everything should be a rocketship

(03:58) Real ones would never

(07:48) Afterward

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First published:

February 22nd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hwzmiqfHuTENtTT52/ea-adjacent-but-not-like-that

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Over the past several years I’ve worked with 258 EA organisations through User-Friendly, most often on branding, websites, and campaigns. Working across this many organisations has given me a fairly wide view of how marketing is currently understood and used within the EA ecosystem. The contexts vary, but the underlying patterns are surprisingly consistent, regardless of cause area, size, or geography.

This post is a reflection on those recurring patterns. It is not intended as criticism, and it is not written from an outsider perspective. It comes from years of being embedded in projects, seeing what organisations request, where projects get stuck, and what tends to make the biggest difference when it is addressed early.

My aim is simply to share practical observations that might help EA organisations use marketing more deliberately, earlier in the process, and in ways that better support their strategic objectives rather than just their communications outputs.

A simple checklist I wish more organisations completed before scaling

If I could encourage every EA organisation to do ten things early, it would be these:

1. Build a market segmentation grounded in real audience data
2. Define a clear positioning statement (one sentence, not paragraphs)
3. Map a full [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) A simple checklist I wish more organisations completed before scaling

(02:21) Why Im sharing this

(03:07) 1. EA organisations are not exempt from basic (human) marketing realities

(03:49) 2. Marketing is usually brought in far too late

(04:45) 3. Branding and websites are visible, but strategy is the leverage

(05:28) 4. There is a heavy over-focus on digital ads

(06:24) 5. Marketing is often siloed into narrow roles

(07:03) 6. AI tools are starting to replace strategic thinking (prematurely)

(07:55) 7. Naming and positioning are consistently undervalued

(08:32) 8. Pretty design is often prioritised over effective communication

(09:04) 9. Marketing budgets are rarely tied to objectives

(10:14) 10. Long-term awareness building is the biggest missed opportunity

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First published:

February 21st, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/faS8gH7CcLkKHSQp4/what-i-ve-learnt-after-working-with-258-ea-organisations-on

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

New paper on plant-based diets for companion dogs and cats: Sustainable Pet Diets: A Leading Effective Altruism Issue.

The paper argues that transitioning companion dogs and cats to plant-based diets is:

1. Important – a full global transition would apparently spare around 7 billion land animals each year (and reduce environmental harm, and improve food security).
2. Tractable – 13 to 19% of guardians are open to plant-based diets for their dogs/cats if their concerns are addressed, according to two recent surveys.
3. Neglected – annual global funding for tranisitioning companion animals to plant-based diets is well below $1m.

If the numbers hold up, the case seems strong! But I'm curious about the counterfactual impact of transitioning companion cats and dogs to plant-based diets, especially given that humans wouldn't eat or use some of the animal-derived food that companion animals are fed. What do people think about that, and how do the numbers and arguments look in general?

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First published:

February 19th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aQzD87AErAvhEdQqi/is-ea-sleeping-on-making-dogs-and-cats-vegan

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.