EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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Previously: Donations, The Third Year / Donations, The First Year

In 2025, like in all previous years, I did what I was supposed to do. As each paycheck came in, before I did anything else, I dutifully put ten percent of it away in my "donations" savings account, to be disbursed at the end of the year.

It is still there, burning a hole in my pocket. I am very confused, and very sad.

EA was supposed to be easy, especially if you're one of the old school Peter Singer-inflected ones giving largely to global health and poverty reduction. You just give the funds away to whatever GiveWell recommends.

But one big thing that came into focus for me last year was that there are large institutional players who make up the shortfall whenever those charities don't fundraise enough from their own donor bases.

It is wonderful that this happens, to be clear. It is wonderful that the charities doing very important work get to have more stable financial projections, year over year. But as an individual small donor, the feeling I get now is that I am not actually giving to the Against Malaria [...]

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First published:

February 8th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zxypSbQSfaogQoiGH/donations-the-fifth-year

Linkpost URL:
https://www.jenn.site/donations-the-fifth-year/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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An adventure through burnout, guilt, and moral obligation

I am re-posting this from my Substack in the lead-up to EAG San Francisco this weekend. It can be hard to find mental health resources from EAs who "get it". I want to help. Feel free to reach out for light support, or just to chat!

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In the winter of 2023, I burned out from animal activism. I had been involved in high-stakes criminal cases against corporate animal abusers and had a front-row seat to legal wins that were covered in national media outlets like The New York Times. I felt on top of the world. But unbeknownst to me, I was about to come crashing to the ground. I quit my job, exhausted and burnt out, and solo traveled the world for a year before returning to animal advocacy.

This is a story of how that happened. It's a story of how we can sometimes do activism for the wrong reasons: in my case, out of moral guilt, and an effort to feel a sense of self-worth that I struggled to find outside of my work.

It's a journey through the wounds that drive [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) An adventure through burnout, guilt, and moral obligation

(01:47) A drowning stranger

(06:08) A burnout-turned-world adventure

(08:59) A turn within

(11:02) A return home

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First published:

February 9th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xxLLoSbREDwyP5Hbz/the-philosophy-paper-that-haunted-me

Linkpost URL:
https://urbananimal.substack.com/p/the-philosophy-paper-that-haunted

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve opened applications for the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program for the following cohorts:

• September 2026 Cohort: September 14th - November 4th, 2026
• February 2027 Cohort: February - April, 2027 (exact dates TBD)

This post summarises the four new charity ideas recommended by our research team for the September 2026 round.

Apply here

Applications close on March 22nd, and successful candidates will receive offers by June 8th. For the full application timeline and program details, visit our website.

How to Apply

Why should you apply to the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program?

If you’re an ambitious, impact-driven individual looking to start a high-impact nonprofit, the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program can empower and accelerate your journey.

Since 2018, we have incubated over 50 non-profits, many of which are field-leading and benchmark-setting across different cause areas and are supported by actors like GiveWell, Founders Pledge, Mulago, Open Philanthropy, and Animal Charity Evaluators. We disbursed $3.6M in seed grants, and many of our incubated organizations are estimated to be as much as 20 to 60 times more cost-effective than top GiveWell charities. These charities have reached more than 75 million humans and have the potential to improve the lives [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) Why should you apply to the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program?

(02:20) Introducing our newest recommended ideas

(04:00) Reducing diet-related disease through taxes on sugary drinks

(04:56) Improving access to pain relief for people in palliative care in LMICs

(05:58) Treating depression with guided digital self-help programs

(06:58) Expanding access to contraception through mobile clinics

(07:59) Apply to our program to help launch these organizations

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First published:

February 9th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WRvWwAituettBohqD/charity-entrepreneurship-program-applications-are-open-and

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We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for technological analogues to ‘angels-on-the-shoulder’: customized tools that leverage near-term AI systems to help people better navigate their environments and handle tricky situations in ways they’ll feel good about later.

We think that these tools could be quite important:

• In general, we expect angels-on-the-shoulder to mean more endorsed decisions, and fewer unforced errors.
• In the context of the transition to more advanced AI systems that we’re faced with, this could be a huge deal. We think that people who are better informed, more situationally aware, more in touch with their own values, and less prone to obvious errors are more likely to handle the coming decades well.

We’re excited for people to build tools that help this to happen, and hope that our design sketches will make this area more concrete, and inspire people to get started.

The (overly-)specific technologies we sketch out are:

• Aligned recommender systems — Most people consume content recommended to them by algorithms trained not to drive short-term engagement, but to meet long-term user endorsement and considered values
• Personalised learning systems — When people want to learn about (or keep up-to-date [...]

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First published:

February 9th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E5XHPNFkbQcTSpxn4/some-angel-on-the-shoulder-ai-tools

Linkpost URL:
https://www.forethought.org/research/design-sketches-angels-on-the-shoulder

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Summary

ACTRA's first year was deliberately ambitious: we partnered with government actors from month two, built a curriculum in record time and ran an in-house Randomized-Controlled Trial (RCT) before our organization was six months old. This gave us unusually fast and concrete learnings, but also created significant overhead and avoidable inefficiencies.

Looking back, we would still choose to design for scale from day 1 — but we would sequence learning more deliberately, separate R&D from scale-oriented delivery earlier, and prioritize learning value per cost more ruthlessly.

This post summarizes our key milestones and eight learnings that we believe are relevant to other early-stage, entrepreneurial nonprofits — especially those aiming to combine rigor, speed, and eventual scale.

Context: ACTRA's key milestones in year one

Acción Transformadora (ACTRA) emerged from Ambitious Impact's (AIM) August-October 2024 incubation round, starting operations in November 2024. The milestones we present here are meant to give context for the learnings, for a broader organizational overview (including funding needs), you can explore our Year 2 plans brochure or November forum update.

• Month 2 (Dec 2024): Confirmed first government partnership
• Month 3 (Jan 2025): Development of an Minimal Viable Product (MVP) curriculum (9 sessions)
• Months 4–5 (Feb–Mar 2025): First implementation [...]

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Outline:

(00:23) Summary

(01:14) Context: ACTRA's key milestones in year one

(02:55) Eight learnings from our first year of implementation

(03:55) I. Implementation

(03:58) 1. Design for scale from day one -- but don't confuse designing for scale with scaling

(05:09) 2. Don't forget that you need a learning lab / R&D space

(07:05) II. Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL)

(07:11) 3. Measure rigorously even if it  feels obvious -- especially early steps in your Theory of Change

(08:28) 4. Maximize early immersion and qualitative learning

(10:40) III. Fundraising

(10:44) 5. Don't overspend resources on formal grants before your org is sufficiently mature

(11:58) 6. Develop long-term project planning early -- but not for all projects

(13:32) IV. HR and team management

(13:37) 7. Hire in anticipation of capacity gaps, not once they are already painful

(14:50) 8. Volunteers are invaluable -- but they should not replace core ownership roles

(16:04) Closing thoughts

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First published:

February 6th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/abgrCyY8XZMEFEpoD/actra-first-year-learnings

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The EA Grants Database is a new site that neatly aggregates grant data from major EA funders who publish individual or total grant information. It is intended to be easy to maintain long term, entirely piggybacking off of existing data that is likely to be maintained. The website data is updated by a script that can be run in seconds, and I anticipate doing this for the foreseeable future.

In creating the website, I tried to make things as clear and straightforward as possible. If your user experience is in any way impaired, I would appreciate hearing from you. I would also appreciate feedback on what features would actually be useful to people, although I am committed to avoiding bloat.

In a funding landscape that seems poised to grow, I hope this site can serve as a resource to help grantmakers, grantees, and other interested parties make decisions while also providing perspective on what has come before.

My post on matching credits and this website are both outgrowths of my thinking on how we might best financially coordinate as EA grows and becomes more difficult to understand.[1] Relatedly, I am also interested in the sort of mechanisms that [...]

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First published:

February 8th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rohYFGfiFjepLDnWC/ea-grants-database-a-new-website

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

I am not a historian! Fact check me please, dear God!

We are at the beginning of another industrial revolution. The first was the automation of muscle, the current one is the automation of mind.

To get into the right frame of mind, I want to step back and imagine:

We are living in the UK[1], the year is 1800, and we are trying to end animal suffering. We know nothing about how the tech is about to develop, nor how the economy or politics is about to be transformed, but there are faint clues.

Steam engines have started powering textile factories and milling grain, but no trains yet, no electricity. There are almost a billion people in the world, and a similar number of livestock living almost entirely on small farms. The first factory farms won't go up for almost 150 years.

Let's go back in time.

Farmed animals

All animals kept for food are living on small farms. The conditions are not great: they have little protection from the cold, no veterinary care, and they are slaughtered crudely[2] and in public. However, compared to life on a factory farm, things look pretty idyllic.

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Outline:

(01:10) Farmed animals

(02:23) Work animals

(03:02) Blood sports

(03:46) Animal testing

(04:57) Fishing and whaling

(05:55) Wild animals

(06:24) Culture and philosophy

(07:21) Data availability

(08:05) Politics

(09:17) Colonialism and (human) slavery

(10:23) Some specific takeaways

(12:49) Conclusion

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First published:

February 5th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CHQdcXjBudqq4QFk9/animal-welfare-at-the-start-of-the-industrial-revolution

Linkpost URL:
https://lovedoesnotscale.substack.com/p/animal-welfare-at-the-start-of-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Running the first meetup for people hoping to accelerate Effective Altruism with AI tools.

Why now?

AI is accelerating productivity across industries.

People who invest learning to use AI tools are able to work much faster and more productively.

As a result, we can accelerate our favourite impactful organisations by helping them adopt these tools.

What will we discuss?

We will discuss

• ​visibility, e.g. building personal sites and blogs - useful for growing luck surface area, raising awareness about productivity gains from these tools
• ​workflow comparisons, e.g. claude skills, plugins, productivity hacks - who's got the best setup, what can we learn from eachother?
• ​implementation e.g. how to network, volunteer well, and scale impact - how can we get plugged in to the right opportunities quicker? 

Come along

Here's the Luma invite. This is an hour long meet-up aimed at any EA actively working to learn to use AI tools.

Can't make it?

If you'd like to advertise a problem you want tech help on, send me a DM

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First published:

February 5th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dkcwuJKw7kA4fWe5H/first-effective-altruism-ai-uplift-meetup

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This is a link post.

[Subtitle.] Sentience and moral priority-setting

This is a crosspost for The shrimp bet: When big numbers outsprint the evidence by Rob Velzeboer, which was originally published on 27 January 2026.

TLDR: Shrimp welfare looks like the ultimate “scale + tractability” slam-dunk: massive numbers, cheap fixes, grim-sounding deaths. But the flagship farmed species—the penaeid shrimp L. vannamei—is an evidential outlier: beyond basic nociception, the sentience case is close to empty, and the limited evidence we do have points the wrong way on key markers. In the report that kicked off this wave, it was included for administrative clarity, not because sentience looked likely. If you let precaution plus expected-value reasoning run on that evidential bar, you don’t stop at shrimp, but you get pulled into insects and the rest of modern life's collateral killing. My view is that we shouldn’t let raw numbers and optimistic assumptions about sentience guide our moral priorities: most weight should go to high-confidence, severe, tractable suffering, and extremely low-confidence beings with high numbers should be treated as explicit research-and-standards bets, unless at least some higher-order evidence actually suggests pain.

“At least I’m not a shrimp.”

It's a line I’d often repeat [...]

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Outline:

(03:37) PART 1: SHRIMP

(03:41) Why focus on shrimp

(08:26) The evidence for shrimp pain

(15:01) Skepticism

(19:11) PART 2: PRIORITIZATION

(19:16) The implications of this view

(25:04) Pain severity

(32:05) Prioritization

(36:18) References

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First published:

February 6th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ruG5GrTcE2DBiCDfW/the-shrimp-bet-when-big-numbers-outsprint-the-evidence

Linkpost URL:
https://robvelzeboer.substack.com/p/the-shrimp-bet

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for AI tools that help with collective epistemics.

We think that these tools could be a pretty big deal:

• If it gets easier to track what's trustworthy and what isn’t, we might end up in an equilibrium which rewards honesty
• This could make the world saner in a bunch of ways, and in particular could give us a better shot at handling the transition to more advanced AI systems

We’re excited for people to get started on building tech that gets us closer to that world. We’re hoping that our design sketches will make this area more concrete, and inspire people to get started.

The (overly-)specific technologies we sketch out are:

• Community notes for everything — Anywhere on the internet, content that may be misleading comes served with context that a large proportion of readers find helpful
• Rhetoric highlighting — Sentences which are persuasive-but-misleading, or which misrepresent cited work, are automatically flagged to readers or writers
• Reliability tracking — Users can effortlessly discover the track record of statements on a given topic from a given actor; those with bad records come with health warnings
• Epistemic [...]

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First published:

February 6th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zMuDoeXA9nBSeAc5g/some-tools-for-collective-epistemics

Linkpost URL:
https://www.forethought.org/research/design-sketches-collective-epistemics

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