EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TL;DR

• When surveyed, the EA community and leaders think ~18-24% of resources should go towards animal advocacy. The actual figure is about 7%.
• We as the EA ecosystem are putting less resources (money and time) into animal advocacy than the movement thinks we should when surveyed.
• This disparity could be because of loss of message fidelity, it's a harder cause area to pitch donors, or the role of large funders, but I'm honestly not too sure.

My job at Senterra Funders involves making the case to EA/EA adjacent prospective donors that they can do a tonne of good by donating to animal advocacy charities. As part of this work I’ve noticed a certain level of inconsistency in the EA ecosystem: I encounter a lot more people who want the animal advocacy movement to 'win' than people working in or donating to the space.

It turns out this intuition is backed up by survey data.

Sources (see Appendix for extra details):

• Meta Coordination Forum (MCF; 2024) / Talent Need Survey on ideal allocation of financial resources
• EA Community survey data from 2023 on jobs by cause area I obtained in private correspondence with David Moss.
• Historical EA [...]

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Outline:

(01:07) The numbers

(02:37) Accounting for the disparity

(05:04) Appendix 1. Data Sources

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Note: This article was originally published on the Fish Welfare Initiative blog.

While this piece is more narrative-driven than a typical Forum post, Haven (FWI's ED) suggested I crosspost it here. I found the experience of small-scale helping (like rescuing a puppy) and working in high-scale intervention (improving fish farm conditions) to be useful for rounding out my understanding of being "effective" in practice.

I try to address bridging the gap between abstract EA principles and the basic practice of 'doing good' when the opportunity arises, while also illustrating my experience interning with a cost-effective animal organisation.

When I arranged my internship at Fish Welfare Initiative, I had a standard list of expectations: farm visits, operations and project work. I arrived wanting to see how a cost-effective organisation functions in real life. However, the clearest lesson I learned about FWI's ethos didn’t happen in an office or at a fishpond. It happened on the motorway to Vijayawada.

On a weekend outing, as Haven, Jennifer, and I were heading down the highway, we approached a knot of cars; not out of the ordinary for India – until we saw a man lying in the road, surrounded by a crowd. We [...]

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Summary

• My new book “The High-Impact Professional's Playbook: How to turn your career, income, and influence into doing good” will be published on January 26, 2026 by Books of Change
• Pre-orders for the digital version are available now at highimpactprofessionals.org/book
• If you're planning to buy it for yourself or for a professional you know, pre-ordering now or ordering in the first week of launch helps significantly with launch momentum
• All author proceeds go to High Impact Professionals

Intro

I’ve written a book called The High-Impact Professional's Playbook: How to turn your career, income, and influence into doing good to help professionals have as much impact as they can, whether through a career switch, through their donations, running workplace initiatives, or joining the board of a high-impact organization. The book will officially launch on January 26, 2026 through the publisher Books of Change.

The book combines everything I have learned coaching, mentoring and advising professionals over the past 8 years both through my time co-founding and running High Impact Professionals (HIP), helping professionals make career switches to high-impact organizations, but also my time as a Managing Director at Founders Pledge and most recently as COO and Head of Grantmaking at Ambitious [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Summary

(00:51) Intro

(02:11) What the book is

(03:58) How you can help

(04:01) If youre planning to buy the book for yourself or someone you know:

(04:57) If you work at or run an EA organization:

(06:01) If you have a professional network:

(06:38) Book Launch Details

(07:10) More About High Impact Professionals

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With the EA Forum's giving season just behind us, it's a natural moment to look back on your donations over the past year and think about where you'd like to give in the year ahead. We (Tristan and Sergio) rarely spend as much time on these decisions as we'd like. When we tried to dig a bit deeper this year, we realized there are a lot of big questions about personal donations that haven't been crisply put together anywhere else, hence the post.

We've tried to make some of those questions clearer here, to highlight things that you might want to consider if they haven't occurred to you before, and to encourage comments from others as to how they think about these factors. Some of these factors aren’t original to us, and in general we’re aiming to bring together considerations that are scattered across different posts, papers, and conversations, and present them in one place through the lens of personal donation decisions. Happy giving!

This post focuses on five considerations that arise as you try to deepen your giving, especially as you give to specific opportunities rather than just to a fund. Those are:

• Deference: Funders have [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) TLDR

(03:25) 1. Deference

(04:23) When is reasonable to deviate

(05:50) 2. Indirect Effects

(06:25) The cluelessness problem

(07:20) 3. Moral Uncertainty and Diversification

(09:24) Career vs donations

(10:25) But coordination matters

(11:01) 4. Timing

(11:21) Approach 1: A steady drip of donations

(12:02) Approach 2: Reserve for pivotal moments

(12:44) Approach 3: Patient philanthropy

(13:58) 5. Moral Seriousness

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First published:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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With the EA Forum's giving season just behind us, it's a natural moment to look back on your donations over the past year and think about where you'd like to give in the year ahead. We (Tristan and Sergio) rarely spend as much time on these decisions as we'd like. When we tried to dig a bit deeper this year, we realized there are a lot of big questions about personal donations that haven't been crisply put together anywhere else, hence the post.

We've tried to make some of those questions clearer here, to highlight things that you might want to consider if they haven't occurred to you before, and to encourage comments from others as to how they think about these factors. Some of these factors aren’t original to us, and in general we’re aiming to bring together considerations that are scattered across different posts, papers, and conversations, and present them in one place through the lens of personal donation decisions. Happy giving!

This post focuses on five considerations that arise as you try to deepen your giving, especially as you give to specific opportunities rather than just to a fund. Those are:

• Deference: Funders have [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) TLDR

(03:18) 1. Deference

(04:16) When is reasonable to deviate

(05:43) 2. Indirect Effects

(06:20) The cluelessness problem

(07:15) 3. Moral Uncertainty and Diversification

(09:25) Career vs donations

(10:27) But coordination matters

(11:03) 4. Timing

(11:23) Approach 1: A steady drip of donations

(12:04) Approach 2: Reserve for pivotal moments

(12:45) Approach 3: Patient philanthropy

(14:00) 5. Moral Seriousness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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A question I asked myself recently was "How much, and to whom, do I have to donate in order to offset the measurable negative impacts of my lifestyle?"

This was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so I decided to do some research and make a website to make it easier for other people to answer the same question.

https://leavenoharm.org

I'm a firmware engineer by training and profession, NOT a professional writer, cause evaluator, or philosopher, so I'll try to let my website do most of the talking–but I'll try to answer some questions here, and would love to talk about this idea in the comments if you find the website engaging.

What's the basic idea of leavenoharm.org?

The goal of leavenoharm.org is to make donating easier, specifically to impact areas where a persons lifestyle has a net impact. This means clear recommendations to

1. Animal Welfare through FarmKind.
2. Climate Impact through Giving Green.
3. Habitat Destruction through Rainforest Trust.
4. Plastic Waste through Plastic Bank.

My thesis here is that many people want to do more good to "make up" for the negative impacts that they know their lifestyle causes, like non-human animal harm because of their diet [...]

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Outline:

(00:45) Whats the basic idea of

(02:16) Why should I use leavenoharm.org

(02:48) Is moral offsetting good? What about...?

(03:55) Are you sure your math is sound?

(05:02) What are your future plans for this?

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Cross-posted from my website.

You may have seen this graph from Chris Olah illustrating a range of views on the difficulty of aligning superintelligent AI:

Evan Hubinger, an alignment team lead at Anthropic, says:

If the only thing that we have to do to solve alignment is train away easily detectable behavioral issues...then we are very much in the trivial/steam engine world. We could still fail, even in that world—and it’d be particularly embarrassing to fail that way; we should definitely make sure we don’t—but I think we’re very much up to that challenge and I don’t expect us to fail there.

I disagree; if governments and AI developers don't start taking extinction risk more seriously, then we are not up to the challenge.

Thomas Savery patented the first commercial steam pump in 1698.[1] The device used fire to heat up a boiler full of steam, which would then be cooled to create a partial vacuum and draw water out of a well. Savery's pump had various problems, and eventually Savery gave up on trying to improve it. Future inventors improved upon the design to make it practical.

It was not until 1769 [...]

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Outline:

(05:32) What if you use the aligned human-level AI to figure out how to align the ASI?

(06:40) What if alignment techniques on weaker AIs generalize to superintelligence?

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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I am writing a new years update on my efforts to be a full utilitarian, I am going to turn 15 in March (I am a freshman) and when I grow up I am going to donate everything to charity. Since I am trying to maximize my future income, I am currently at the best public high school in my state (magnet hs), and this is the happiest year I have had so far. My grades are pretty good, although it is very hard to get everything done in time. I have decided that it it actually quite unlikely that it is going to be utilitarian to work so hard I hate my life in the future, as that would require me to sacrifice sleep and other things which would cost years off of my lifespan that I could be working. However, I will still do things like living out of a camper van. I am doing 2 hours of track every day, which is pretty fun, I have a 5:49 mile now. I am also a life scout, and learning python. However, because it is unrealistic I make it into a college off of the basis of that [...]

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

Subtitle: No, we don't "have AGI already." But in any case, we should articulate clearer milestones.

Happy New Year! Planned Obsolescence, an occasional newsletter about AI futurism edited by Ajeya Cotra, has moved to Substack.

Every so often, there's Discourse about whether we already have artificial general intelligence (AGI). For example, Dean Ball recently claimed that Claude Opus 4.5 was basically AGI, or at least met OpenAI's definition of AGI. Many AI x-risk people, including me, pushed back on this.

OpenAI's definition of AGI is “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” Wikipedia defines AGI similarly, as “a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” I don’t in fact think Claude Opus 4.5 meets these definitions. There are a number of useful cognitive things people do that Opus 4.5 cannot yet do (e.g. managing a profitable vending machine).[1]

But at the end of the day, I’m not going to fight you much if you want to say [...]

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Outline:

(01:57) A sharper milestone

(03:35) What would it take?

(05:50) What I like about this milestone

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

Subtitle: A free Google doc template for the system I actually use

This template was made by Peter Wildeford and Caroline Jeanmaire.

It's almost a new year and that often calls for some sort of annual planning.

But in my opinion, annual planning operates on too long a timescale. Annual planning and goal setting is too infrequent, so it's easy to lose track. You don’t get fast enough feedback and you risk derailing.

Instead, I suggest adopting a quarterly planning cadence (e.g., set goals for 2026 Jan-Mar). I wanted to provide a template that I’ve used many times before and that many people seem to like.

Here's my template in a Google Doc:

There are a lot of different templates out there to try and I don’t know if this one is better. It works well for me, but I’m not you. But here's some principles I was interested in, and maybe that resonates with you:

• Optimized for something quarterly – rather [...]

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Outline:

(02:08) What's actually in this thing?

(04:27) Tips Before You Start

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