EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This is a link post.

Updated: Jan 16, 2026

Digital minds are artificial systems, from advanced AIs to potential future brain emulations, that could morally matter for their own sake, owing to their potential for conscious experience, suffering or other morally relevant mental states. Both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind can as yet offer no definitive answers as to whether present or near-future digital minds possess morally relevant mental states. Though, a majority of experts surveyed estimate at least fifty percent odds that AI systems with subjective experience could emerge by 2050,[1] while public expresses broad uncertainty.[2]

The lack of clarity leaves open the risk of severe moral catastrophe:

• We could mistakenly underattribute moral standing; failing to give consideration or rights to a new kind of being that deserves them.
• We could mistakenly overattribute moral standing; perhaps granting rights or consideration to morally irrelevant machines at the expense of human wellbeing.

As society surges toward an era shaped by increasingly capable and numerous AI systems, scientific theories of mind take on direct implications for ethics, governance, and policy, prompting a growing consensus that rapid progress on these questions is urgently needed.

This quickstart guide gathers the most [...]

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Outline:

(03:12) Quickstart

(04:18) Introduction

(04:45) Select Media

(05:35) In Depth Material

(12:24) Intermediate Resources

(25:36) Further Resources

(25:43) Digital Minds Landscape

(25:47) Orgs

(27:19) Conferences & Events

(27:38) Online Communities

(28:06) Career Pathways

(31:20) Internships & Fellowships

(31:53) Parting Thoughts

(34:19) Glossary of Terms

(48:31) Acknowledgments

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

January 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/p7BtTgrX8WLXr2mAu/digital-minds-a-quickstart-guide

Linkpost URL:
https://aviparrack.substack.com/p/digital-minds-a-quickstart-guide

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

EA thinking is thinking on the margin. When EAs prioritise causes, they are prioritising causes given the fact that they only control their one career, or, sometimes, given that they have some influence over a community of a few thousand people, and the distribution of some millions or billions of dollars.

Some critiques of EA act as if statements about cause prioritisation are absolute rather than relative. I.e. that EAs are saying that literally everyone should be working on AI Safety, or, the flipside, that EAs are saying that no one should be working on [insert a problem which is pressing, but not among the most urgent to commit the next million dollars to].

In conversations that sound like this, I've often turned to the idea that, if EAs controlled all the resources in the world, career advisors at the hypothetical world government's version of 80,000 Hours would be advising some people to be postal workers. Given that the EA world government will have long ago filled the current areas of direct EA work, it could be the single most impactful thing a person could do with their skillset, given the comparative neglectedness of work in the [...]

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First published:

January 16th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MZ5g33fXuxd6bSgJW/if-ea-ruled-the-world-career-advisors-would-tell-some-people

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

If you're passionate about effective giving and want to help close the funding gaps for many charities, setting up an EA community within organizations might be your goal for this year.

Summary

Start an intracompany EA community to support EA organizations. By informing colleagues and those responsible for community engagement programs about effective giving, you can massively multiply your impact. The more donors prioritize effective charities, the more quickly we can collectively make a dent in the world's problems, improving the lives of many more people and animals. There are many opportunities inside large organizations to increase funding for effective organizations. We share from a real case example on how we convinced hundreds of colleagues with high incomes to donate more than $850k in just three years to effective charities and started a growing community with over 100 members.

Introduction

Talking about where to give (or why to give) can feel strange, or even scary, especially to your colleagues. At the coffee machine it is easier to discuss the weather or last weekend's sports results than to discuss world problems and how to potentially solve those. Donating to effective charities is one powerful way to contribute to effective altruism. [...]

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Outline:

(00:21) Summary

(01:07) Introduction

(03:33) Case example from a fairly large corporate (~40,000 fte)

(04:04) Community groups are an excellent tool

(05:53) Making it part of the corporate strategy

(07:17) Tips to get started within your organization

(09:59) Our learnings and potential next steps

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RhoLNcb4o6Xzhvbqj/your-donations-matter-but-your-colleague-s-even-more

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Hi all,

I’ll start with the bottom line – I wrote a guidebook on how to give career advisory that is EA-oriented, especialy Probably Good-oriented philosophy. I found many resources that help EA job seekers with advice, and as a newcomer to the field, didn’t find resources oriented to EA career advisors. The Career Advisory Guidebook is my attempt to remedy this gap.

https://guideflow-co.lovable.app/

Based on it, I led a workshop in the recent EA Israel conference for ~80 people and have gotten very positive reviews.

I have been the EA Israel Career Fellowship instructor for the past 6 months. In the process, I have been guiding small cohorts through a curriculum loosely based on the High Impact Professionals workbook. Also in the process, I have done a few dozen 1:1 advisory sessions.

In the beginning, it went horribly.

Well, not horribly, but I felt like nothing good came from it. What I was aiming for, was people leaving with excitement and clear directions towards an EA-oriented goal. This didn’t happen. So I asked for feedback. I read materials from 80K Hours, Probably Good, and High Impact Professionals. I watched every video in EA Connect [...]

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qWkTjGHywXnwpsWBF/we-have-a-lot-of-study-resources-for-job-seekers-but-not

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

At GiveWell, we've been experimenting with using AI to red team our global health intervention research—searching for weaknesses, blind spots, or alternative interpretations that might significantly affect our conclusions. We've just published a write-up on what we’ve learned, both about the programs we fund through donor support and about how to use AI in our research.

We're sharing this to invite critiques of our approach and to see if others have found methods for critiquing research with AI that work better. Specifically, we'd love to see people try their own AI red teaming approaches on our published intervention reports or grant pages. If you generate critiques we haven't considered or find prompting strategies that work better than ours, please share them in the comments—we'd be interested to see both your methodology and the specific critiques you uncover.

Our process

Our research team spends more than 70,000 hours each year reviewing academic evidence and investigating programs to determine how much good they accomplish per dollar spent. This in-depth analysis informs our grantmaking, directing hundreds of millions in funding annually to highly cost-effective, evidence-backed programs.

Our current approach for supplementing that research with AI red teaming:

1. Literature review stage [...]

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Outline:

(01:01) Our process

(02:21) Our prompting approach

(03:40) What we learned about using AI for research critiques

(05:07) Improvements weve considered but not pursued

(06:20) Why were sharing this

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7tXSRGJJ3FxhXjmfL/ai-red-teaming-at-givewell-what-we-ve-learned-and-where-we-d

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

At GiveWell, we've been experimenting with using AI to red team our global health intervention research—searching for weaknesses, blind spots, or alternative interpretations that might significantly affect our conclusions. We've just published a write-up on what we’ve learned, both about the programs we fund through donor support and about how to use AI in our research.

We're sharing this to invite critiques of our approach and to see if others have found methods for critiquing research with AI that work better. Specifically, we'd love to see people try their own AI red teaming approaches on our published intervention reports or grant pages. If you generate critiques we haven't considered or find prompting strategies that work better than ours, please share them in the comments—we'd be interested to see both your methodology and the specific critiques you uncover.

Our process

Our research team spends more than 70,000 hours each year reviewing academic evidence and investigating programs to determine how much good they accomplish per dollar spent. This in-depth analysis informs our grantmaking, directing hundreds of millions in funding annually to highly cost-effective, evidence-backed programs.

Our current approach for supplementing that research with AI red teaming:

1. Literature review stage [...]

---

Outline:

(01:01) Our process

(02:21) Our prompting approach

(03:40) What we learned about using AI for research critiques

(05:07) Improvements weve considered but not pursued

(06:20) Why were sharing this

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7tXSRGJJ3FxhXjmfL/ai-red-teaming-at-givewell-what-we-ve-learned-and-where-we-d

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Because the donation election fund raised $15,000 dollars, the Forum unlocked the collective prize: "The Forum audience will propose and vote on a debate week topic next year, and I’ll run it during Q1."

This thread is your opportunity to propose the debate topic.

What's an EA Forum Debate Week?

Here are the debate weeks I have run on the EA Forum before:

• AI Welfare Debate Week (July 2024) – debated "AI welfare should be an EA priority"
• Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week (Oct 2024) – debated "It would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health"
• Existential Choices Debate Week (March 2025) – debated "On the margin, it is better to work on reducing the chance of our extinction than increasing the value of futures where we survive."

As you can see, each of them revolved around a statement, which Forum users could signal their level of agreement/ disagreement on. The statements were then posted on the banner at the top of the EA Forum, on a debate slider like this:

The EA Forum should hold more debate weeksPlace your vote or view results.disagreeagree

Alongside the central debate, which happens in a thread [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) Whats an EA Forum Debate Week?

(01:37) How this works

(02:26) A reminder

(02:53) Writing a good debate topic

(03:55) Some ideas

(04:07) Cause prioritisation

(04:37) Tactics

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First published:

January 13th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lsb8LDZnckqrYTobe/propose-a-debate-topic-i-ll-run-one

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

I often see claims of an area being neglected, under-supported, or underfunded. But what do these claims really mean? They tend to break down into two categories: 1) neglected compared to how it should be, 2) neglected compared to other areas. I think both these ways of viewing neglectedness are pretty undescriptive and not very useful for making real decisions in philanthropy. However I do think there is a more useful way of considering neglectedness.

Neglected absolutely

“It would take $9.2 trillion per year to stop climate change and we are only spending $15 billion a year on it!”

This pretty common claim is that X area is neglected relative to how it should be funded. In many ways this claim is objectively true! 0 people should die due to lacking a $3 bednet; no easily and cheaply prevented disease or suffering should be around. But really, when a charity makes an appeal like this, it is equally true for virtually every issue in the NGO sector. We can whine all day that the NGO sector should be bigger and more should donate (I agree with this more than most), but in practice charitable giving [...]

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZrbFLcaXbJZP64naP/everything-is-neglected

Linkpost URL:
https://measuredlife.substack.com/p/everything-is-neglected

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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Summary

• Our new book, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians, will be published in April 28 2026
• The book introduces effective altruism–style thinking to a Christian audience, framing effectiveness, cause prioritization, and evidence-based action as expressions of loving God and loving one's neighbor (Matt. 22:37–39)
• Authored by @dominicroser, @DavidZhang and me (JD).
• You can best support this project by pre-ordering a copy or free intro here

Praise for All the Lives You Can Change

“Effective altruism asks us to extend our empathy beyond our immediate circle to include distant strangers and future generations. All the Lives You Can Change argues powerfully that this ‘radical empathy’ is at the very core of the Christian faith. Inspiring, intellectually rigorous, and deeply practical, this is an essential guide for Christians who want to ensure their compassion translates into the greatest possible impact for the world's most vulnerable people. It's a beautiful, moving book.”

— @William_MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future and Doing Good Better

“I couldn’t put this book down. It manages to be both inspiring and practical. It blends cutting-edge research with careful theological discussion. . . . Essential reading for Christians who are [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(00:49) Praise for All the Lives You Can Change

(02:50) Longer Summary

(04:30) About the book

(04:55) Table of Contents (Overview)

(06:31) Why This Might Be Relevant to the (Secular) EA Community

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First published:

January 14th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E7RqRc3fLNm2syzAh/announcing-all-the-lives-you-can-change

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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.

Earlier today I had a board meeting for the nonprofit I founded, ALTER—and it was a good one. Most of the board showed up. People had looked at the materials. I presented our recent update, funding, budgets, and our plans for the coming year. There were thoughtful questions: what's the path to impact for working on standards, some skepticism about collaborating with non-aligned organizations, and a few suggestions for adjacent things we might consider. No one was asleep. No one was hostile. No one was performatively disengaged.

But when the meeting ended, no strategic direction had been set. The board didn’t tell us what to prioritize next year. They reviewed the presented plans, and the priorities I suggested, but didn’t weigh tradeoffs between mission drift and focus. They didn’t say “this seems off” or “this is the wrong hill.” What they mostly did was react: to updates, to explanations, to decisions that had already been made elsewhere. Their feedback was real, but incremental—more like local gradient information than a global objective.

I’m on a few small organization's boards, and at ALTER I have a board I am responsible to, and I don’t think what happened is particularly unusual. This [...]

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Outline:

(01:54) Who sets priorities?

(04:33) Who depends on What

(08:20) Ambiguity isn't the problem. Unowned outcomes are.

(10:29) Questions I don't yet have answers to

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First published:

January 12th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BdiCvi4o9zwokQLnG/who-sets-my-org-s-agenda

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.