EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Bostrom's Maxipok principle suggests reducing existential risk should be the overwhelming focus for those looking to improve humanity's long-term prospects. This rests on an implicitly dichotomous view of future value, where most outcomes are either near-worthless or near-best.

We argue against the dichotomous view, and against Maxipok. In the coming century, values, institutions, and power distributions could become locked-in. But we could influence what gets locked-in, and when and whether it happens at all—so it is possible to substantially improve the long-term future by channels other than reducing existential risk.

And this is a fairly big deal: both because Maxipok could mean leaving value on the table, and in some cases because following Maxipok could actually do harm.

This is a summary of “Beyond Existential Risk”, by Will MacAskill and Guive Assadi. The full version is available on our website.

Defining Maxipok

Picture a future where some worry that terrorist groups could use advanced bioweapons to wipe out humanity. The world's governments could coalesce into a strong world government that would reduce the extinction risk from 1% to 0%, or maintain the status quo. But the world government would lock in authoritarian control and undermine [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) Defining Maxipok

(02:30) Is future value all-or-nothing?

(03:33) The case for Dichotomy

(06:55) The case against Dichotomy

(08:34) Non-existential interventions can persist

(11:26) So what?

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Linkpost URL:
https://www.forethought.org/research/beyond-existential-risk

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But first, scoring my predictions for 2025

Note: This post was crossposted from the Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.

On December 13th, 2024, I registered predictions about what would happen with AI by the end of 2025, using this survey run by Sage. They asked five questions about benchmarks, four about the OpenAI Preparedness Framework risk categories, one about revenues, and one about public salience of AI.

The Sage team has updated the survey with the resolutions, so I went through and looked back at what I said. Overall, I was somewhat too bullish about benchmarks scores and much too bearish about AI revenue — the reverse of the conventional wisdom that people underestimate benchmark progress and overestimate real-world utility (something which I felt like I’ve done in previous years, though I didn’t register clear predictions so it's hard to say).

You can see how I did on benchmark scores in the table below.1 I overestimated progress on pretty much every benchmark other than FrontierMath Tiers 1-3,2 which notoriously jumped from ~2% to ~24% with the announcement of OpenAI's o3, about [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) But first, scoring my predictions for 2025

(03:13) Predictions for 2026

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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There is an insane amount of money being thrown around by international organizations and agreements. Nobody with any kind of power over these agreements is asking basic EA questions like: "What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"

As someone coming from an EA background reading through plans for $200-700 billion in annual funding commitments that focus on unimaginative and ineffective interventions, it makes you want to tear your hair out. So much good could be done with that money.

EA focuses a lot on private philanthropy, earning-to-give (though less so post-SBF), and the usual pots of money. But why don't we have delegations who are knowledgeable in international diplomacy going to COPs and advocating for more investment in lab-grown meat, alternative proteins, or lithium recycling? It seems like there would be insane alpha in such a strategy.

An example: The Global Biodiversity Framework

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted in 2022 to halt biodiversity loss. It has 23 targets, commitments of $200 billion annually by 2030 and $700 billion by 2050, and near-universal adoption from [...]

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Outline:

(01:12) An example: The Global Biodiversity Framework

(02:13) What Is That Money Actually Being Spent On?

(03:02) The Elephant in the Room Literally Nobody is Talking About: Beef

(04:21) The Absolutely Insane Funding Gap

(05:26) The Leverage Point Were Ignoring

(06:47) What Would EA Engagement Look Like?

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TL;DR: The EA movement has yet to fully incorporate ideas, skills, people, and knowledge from existing fields (e.g. monitoring and evaluation). You could potentially have a lot of impact just through stealing these and adapting them to our contexts.

Epistemic status: Quick informal post on something I've been thinking about.

I’m currently basing a large portion of my career (and more importantly, my impact) on stealing ideas, best practices, and people from existing sectors and applying them in new contexts:

• Within both The Mission Motor and my freelance co-work, we’ve been taking monitoring and evaluation (M&E) standards from global development organisations and applying them to EA and animal organisations.
• I was able to step away from Fish Welfare Initiative, in part, because we hired someone with years of experience running research and programs in global development to replace my research-lead function.

• I am founding a charity that takes strategies used by other agricultural development movements (e.g. the organic movements’ use of farmer co-operatives) and tests them for farmed animal welfare.[1]

Effective altruism is still relatively nascent. We also tend to attract people (like myself) who are young and don’t have much experience with best practices from other spaces. [...]

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I've started a substack, so a few more people might encounter my spicy takes - I'll still mostly be here.

USAID is gone. Direct country aid to low income countries is down 25%. So now's a great time to share five ways I think development charity can be done better in 2026.

To state the obvious... none of these ideas will be the best approach all of the time, there's plenty of grey area and nuance. I start a little playful, then get a little more serious.

1. Ditch the Cars

Close your eyes and picture the first thing that comes into your head when I say “NGO”. It might be………… a shiny white Landcruiser

The view from the front window of my hut

But owning cars doesn’t usually make economic sense in low income countries. The ‘real’ market makes this clear. Business rarely buy cars, instead they use public transport or motorbikes. When companies do own cars, its more Corolla than Landcruiser as well.

Cars are often more expensive dollar-for-dollar than in richer countries, fuel cost are high and many NGOs hire drivers, all while public transport is dirt cheap. To move 100km in Uganda [...]

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Outline:

(00:43) 1. Ditch the Cars

(02:49) 2. Fund Solutions not Projects

(07:07) 3. Fund cost effective solutions

(08:06) 4. Fund Bimodal - Test and Scale

(11:59) 5. Pay workers less

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Perhaps my favorite part of my job is that I’m often exposed to mind-boggling accomplishments achieved by people within and around the EA community. Stories of impact remind us why our principles are valuable, inspire an openness to ambitious bets, and motivate altruism. Yet we can’t expect to hear about positive outcomes by default — the problems we solve are neglected, and beneficiaries are frequently voiceless (literally).

That's why @Toby Tremlett🔹 and I would like to invite you to add stories of impact that have inspired you to the banner on the frontpage. They’ll be displayed all week, and the text will appear in the comments under this post. We endorse an expansive definition here: for example, feel free to celebrate your own work or that of your friends, and both smaller-scale and older wins are appreciated!

You could consider:

• What accomplishments seem important or underappreciated to you?
• What stories make you smile?
• What changed your mind about what's possible?
• What work are you grateful for?

I’ll kick off the discussion by listing a few wins from 2025 that stood out to me, but don’t feel like you have to follow my approach. Our community is vast, and [...]

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Some people (including me) have argued that altruists often benefit from leveraging their investments. Recently, it has become easier to use leverage thanks to the emergence of return stacked funds.

This is not financial advice.

Cross-posted from my website. I originally wrote this a year ago and just made some revisions for 2026.

What is return stacking?

Return stacking is a way of getting up to leveraged exposure to multiple return streams simultaneously. For example, RSSB invests 100% into global equities and 100% into US Treasury bonds, effectively giving it 2:1 leverage on a diversified stock/bond portfolio.

A return stacked ETF is a type of leveraged ETF. But whereas traditional leveraged ETFs (such as SPXL) lever up a single index like the S&P 500, a return stacked fund holds multiple asset classes.

Return stacked ETFs have lower management fees than single-index leveraged ETFs, and (with low confidence) they appear to have lower overhead costs for reasons that are not entirely clear to me (my guess is a combination of cheaper borrowing costs + transaction costs).

An overview of return stacking funds

There are four brands of return stacking funds that I [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) What is return stacking?

(01:28) An overview of return stacking funds

(03:47) The true cost of return stacked ETFs

(09:05) 2026. update

(10:21) Pros and cons of return stacked funds

(11:32) Are bonds a good investment?

(14:42) Source code

(14:48) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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High Impact Professionals (HIP) supports experienced professionals to increase their impact through career transitions and effective giving.

This post provides a brief summary of our 2025 impact. The full 2025 Impact Report is available on our website.

Summary of headline metrics from our 2025 Impact Report. Full breakdowns, learnings, and 2026 plans are available in the linked report.

2025 highlights

Across all HIP activities in 2025, we estimate that we supported:

• 50+ high-impact career transitions, mainly through our Impact Accelerator Program
• ~70 new effective giving pledges, including 18 🔸10% Pledges via the HIP Pledge Club
• $2.5M in counterfactual impact, corresponding to a 16.2× impact multiplier

All programs were delivered with a core team of 1.6 FTE, supported by a large volunteer facilitator and mentor network.

Other milestones in 2025

Beyond direct program outcomes, 2025 included several developments that we expect to matter for HIP's future impact:

• Effective giving: For the second year in a row, effective giving pledges made through the HIP Pledge Club are projected to move more counterfactual funding into high-impact organisations than HIP's annual operating costs.
• Talent infrastructure: The Talent Directory grew to 4,500+ professionals and 290+ organisations, with increased use of “Top Candidate” nominations and early evidence of downstream hires and [...]

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Outline:

(00:56) 2025. highlights

(01:34) Other milestones in 2025

(03:07) Notes on measurement

(03:30) Looking ahead

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This post is adapted from an article I published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The original article is more detailed, but also more philosophically dense and likely less relevant to EAs.

Epistemic status: confident about the core argument, less about the examples and details.

TL;DR: Almost all suffering in the world today is experienced by wild animals, yet ecosystems are incredibly complex and it's hard to predict what outcomes any particular intervention will have. This post addresses the concern many people have about uncertainty/risk in this cause area by developing a framework for precautionary intervention that weighs ecological risks against welfare benefits. I then identify types of interventions that promise particularly favorable risk/benefit tradeoffs: eliminating the worst diseases, eliminating certain parasites, pursuing more substantial or experimental interventions in urban areas and ecological islands, and promoting high-welfare ecological regimes.

The Problem

Most wild animals suffer and die young due to three systemic factors:

1. High reproductive rates (evolution favors producing more offspring than can survive)
2. Limited resources
3. Antagonistic behaviors (competition, predation, parasitism, disease)

These factors characterize virtually all ecosystems, from rainforests to deserts to urban environments. While humans cause significant harm to wildlife, natural factors contribute far more [...]

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Outline:

(01:11) The Problem

(01:49) Why Small-Scale Interventions Arent Enough

(03:00) Two Approaches to Wild Animal Welfare Work

(05:42) The Complexity Challenge

(07:31) A Framework for Precaution

(07:53) The uncertain balance of welfare in the wild

(08:56) Reasons for precaution

(11:50) Promising Near-Term Interventions

(12:15) 7.1. Targeting the Worst Suffering (certain diseases)

(13:19) 7.2. Eliminating Redundant Suffering (certain parasites)

(15:09) 7.3. Urban Interventions

(16:04) 7.4. Ecological Islands

(17:17) 7.5. Promoting High-Welfare Ecosystem States

(18:22) What About Gene Drives?

(19:51) Caveats and Future Work

(21:05) Conclusion

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The UK Labour government is currently consulting on banning caged egg production, and this represents an exceptional opportunity for impact that requires minimal time investment.

Why This Matters

According to Our World in Data, caged hens can experience hundreds of days more suffering during their productive lives compared to hens in caged-free aviaries.

A ban on caged housing in the UK would prevent this suffering for millions of sentient beings annually. The UK currently has approximately 10 million laying hens still in cages.

As outlined in the Our World in Data article, caged housing prevents hens from performing deeply motivated natural behaviours like wing-spreading, dust-bathing, perching, and nesting privately. It also causes serious physical health problems including bone weakness and foot injuries.

If successful this policy would have the UK joining Austria, Denmark and Germany in banning caged egg production. This could potentially inspire further countries to make this leap to higher welfare standards for one of the most mistreated species on this planet.

How You Can Help (10 Minutes)

If you are a UK resident/citizen you can fill in the consultation:

https://consult.defra.gov.uk/on-farm-animal-welfare-future-farming-policy/laying-hen-cage-reform/

The Humane League UK has created a comprehensive guide [...]

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