EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Epistemic status: hot takes. I have thought quite a bit about EA community building strategy over the past two years, but the style of this post is not "well reasoned and explained". I have been planning to publish something like this for months, kept pushing it back, and now I just want to get it out.

Why I am writing this

For two years now I have been a full-time community builder at EA Switzerland. In those two years I have seen very little high level public discussion about EA Community Building (EA CB) strategy. With this post I hope to spark that discussion and to add my two cents.

With "EA CB" I mean what national or city groups like EA Switzerland do, or should do.

TL;DR

General takes

• "EA community building" is a fuzzy term. It is not clear what it actually means: which programmes count as "general EA CB" and which are "something else".
• EA CB is an unattractive career path. Low pay, yearly grants, low social acceptance outside the bubble.
• It is hard to get funding for EA CB work.
• If the third wave of philanthropy is coming and "the ecosystem" is actually excited [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) Why I am writing this

(01:01) TL;DR

(03:52) Overview of the field and the current situation

(06:24) Assumptions

(06:52) 1. Positive impact: it does not matter whether the hours are worked by "an EA"

(07:57) 2. Scouting, not converting

(10:12) 3. Cause-area-first outreach produces career changes far more efficiently than principles-first

(12:01) 4. The community people need to boost their productivity is small

(15:01) 5. Once a field is mature, coordination across cause areas has limited value

(18:18) 6. Way more people apply for jobs than for funding

(19:01) 7. If you don't look into what should exist in your region, nobody will

(19:28) What EA CB orgs (regional meta EA orgs) should do at the moment

(20:13) 2. Provide a productive environment, aka a co-working space

(22:56) 3. Build a "captains school"

(23:47) 1. What incubating new projects looks like

(27:57) Doubts

(29:26) Summary: what I want to see less of, and what I want to see more of

(31:52) Thanks

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

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First published:

September 4th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2BdSe6Szf4Naxz65i/regional-ea-groups-should-be-incubators-not-communities-hot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time

Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.

I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky's ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn’t feel that real. And I didn’t do that much about it.

And then I got more involved with EA and AI Safety, and I read more and more, and I found myself feeling more convinced by the more measured, moderate approach to AI risk - AI is going to be transformative, but in a “it’ll destabilise the economy / mass job loss / mass surveillance“ kind of way, and I felt increasingly unimpressed by the OG Yudkowsky/MIRI worldview that we were doomed.

I was distinctly underwhelmed by If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and in the process of us making a video on it, I began to find it increasingly silly.

[...]

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Outline:

(00:09) The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time

(02:49) AI is real

(04:19) Progress really isn't slowing down

(04:47) The current models are not aligned by default

(06:17) The companies are really really bad

(07:38) Society is still mostly not waking up to any of this

(09:24) So where does that leave me?

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First published:

September 9th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aN7MS6zCtxBNhAznv/updates-from-the-swarm

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crossposted from my Substack.

~

Suppose the President summons the AI CEOs and his top national security advisors to an emergency meeting at the White House.

He has become extremely concerned about superintelligence — the possibility that AIs far smarter than humanity combined slip beyond our ability to correct or shut down. If that happens, there is no way back. The President is concerned humanity could become permanently out of the driver's seat of its own future. He wants to figure out what to do.

The reaction is panic, chaos, confusion.

The President asks questions. The AI companies are blazing toward superintelligence at high speed — can we slow down as we approach the dangerous thresholds? …Some of the AI companies say they don’t have a good plan to slow down or stop, especially as their competitors may just undercut them if they do. What's that about?

What's going on with China — can we get them to pace as well? Can we get a deal without Beijing sneakily catching up and maybe surpassing us? And if there's no deal to be had, what then?

More like the Cuban Missile Crisis than the NPT

I sometimes hear people [...]

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Outline:

(01:21) More like the Cuban Missile Crisis than the NPT

(03:24) A scramble and then three phases

(05:18) The scramble: What questions does the President ask?

(09:39) The mechanics of Phase 1

(12:37) A lot of verification work right now is focused on the wrong things

(14:49) What ought we do?

(17:36) Getting to a good scramble

(18:20) Footnotes

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 7th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DQn8SFd829xYEpNso/the-scramble-getting-in-position-to-pace-the-frontier

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.

Background

At least 70 million dollars has gone into AI safety talent programmes so far, but we still can’t really say much about their impact. Notably, Kairos has just raised 50 million dollars on a self-described "shallow retrospective" that looked at "around 80 people". I decided to do a deep dive into how AI Safety Talent programmes self-evaluate their impact.

Disclaimer, these programmes are small, fast, and generally run by people with no evaluation training and no slack. The oldest one was only established in 2018 (AI Safety Camp, as far as I can tell). Most last less than 6 months. When timelines are genuinely short and urgent, then time spent evaluating is time that could be spent building. I am not criticising any individual programme.

Having said that, there are retrospective evaluation designs that could be run cheaply without slowing anything down. And a field that funds talent pipelines at this scale without knowing whether they work is not moving [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) Background

(01:52) The audit

(04:52) Thoughts on the counterfactual impact of talent programmes

(08:37) Proposed design

(12:04) Conclusion

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 7th, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5yBGo4fnqm2zKMKj/do-ai-safety-talent-programmes-work-nobody-has-run-the-study

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Grouper (Epinephelus sp.). Groupers can host a wide range of parasites, including anisakids and myxozoans. Photo: LDLP.

This post was originally published on my Substack. I’m sharing it here because parasite–host interactions in wild fish may have substantial and largely neglected welfare implications, while we still know remarkably little about the experiences of the animals involved. The post is intended mainly to highlight this empirical gap and some potentially tractable directions for further research.

Introduction

Cataracts cover much of both eyes of a fish who is still feeding and moving normally. A bird approaches from above, unseen. The attack succeeds. If anyone is keeping count, the fish is recorded as a death from predation.

This is not a hypothetical case. In fish from Kalmar Sound, the trematode Diplostomum, whose larvae settle in the lens of the eye, was found in 86 of the 88 fish examined, while all 88 had detectable eye-fluke-induced cataracts. Cataracts covered more than half of both eyes in 35% of the sample. Among those tested against a simulated attack from above, none with more than half of both eyes covered responded by fleeing. This does not prove that they were caught more often in the wild [...]

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Outline:

(00:49) Introduction

(02:59) Weishan: even the census fails

(04:56) Ligula: presence alone is not enough

(06:22) Anisakids: parasites we study for another reason

(08:39) What if the parasites suffer too?

(11:21) How many individuals does this happen to?

(14:16) The numbers do not decide on their own

(15:38) My bet

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qXW3QgcpTkhcu63Fc/we-know-who-lives-inside-wild-fish-we-don-t-know-what

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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[...]

“Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That's why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control — at home and around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.”

“If we allow Artificial Superintelligence to be built, it could risk the security, freedom, and lives of Americans,” Casar said. “Despite its potential deadly consequences, cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck. That must change. In just four years, we have gone from the first version of ChatGPT to AI models so powerful they cannot be properly controlled. Congress should immediately ban [...]

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vt5nzkkjecXH4yYf7/sen-bernie-sanders-i-vt-and-rep-greg-casar-d-tx-introduce

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

These AIs are getting pretty smart. Maybe smart enough to help you think about your career? I was skeptical when first pitched on the project before joining 80,000 Hours. Turns out AI progress is a good train to hook yourself onto and AI has gotten pretty good at career advice.

It has some advantages compared to a human advisor:

• The AI will spend as much time with you as you need
• It can start now, without a delay
• It can know about all the jobs and opportunities on the Job Board, even the niche ones
• It can work with you over time to build up knowledge of what jobs you’re thinking about and what skills you have
• Telling it more about yourself can, if you choose, add data to our headhunting database. 80,000 Hours has a team that searches this database for hiring managers, including for non-public roles. We’ll say more in a forthcoming post.

(Humans still have their own advantages and you should still apply to advising or talk to your friends.)

Introducing the 80,000 Hours AI advisor

Chat with the AI advisor

What you’re getting is similar in some ways to a regular chatbot. It's currently powered [...]

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Outline:

(01:17) Introducing the 80,000 Hours AI advisor

(03:45) The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

(04:38) FAQs

(04:41) Why not use [my favorite way to talk to a generic AI]?

(06:08) Will it push me towards AI safety?

(06:26) How's it made?

(07:20) Feedback, etc.

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n8hatzAuoicJxJP4q/ai-uplift-for-careers-free-80-000-hours-career-advising

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Me and @Lily Curry launched an EA group at Binghamton University (a SUNY school with no prior EA presence) in August 2026. In two weeks we went from zero to ~500 Instagram followers, got 100+ tabling sign-ups, 59 people in our GroupMe, and ~40 people at our first general interest meeting. Our Instagram is now larger than the established EA groups at Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and NYU. This post is primarily about the factors we think led to our success.

James C. Scott's has this idea called legibility. Essentially, the part relevant to recruiting is the reversal of Scott's idea. Scott's idea is essentially that institutions have to be able to abstract a complicated social reality into discrete categories that it can analyze and act upon. So, for example, an institution can't remember “Micah, who is sort of like this in this context but actually completely different when he is around these people and has this weird specific relationship to these three other people.” It needs to have information like: Micah Zarin, age 18, resident of X, income Y, student, etc. In doing so, it removes important particular details of individuals. After all, the word abstract [...]

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First published:

September 2nd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Hw4vNeW6RgvtutSAm/the-case-against-acting-professional-when-starting-an-ea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to me. It's more personal than what I’d usually share publicly, but I thought I’d post it here in case it resonates with anyone else.

I’m very grateful to the many readers of this forum who dedicate so much of their time and energy to these problems.

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When I was 12 years old, I found out that many people in other parts of the world died of easily preventable diseases, and it was possible for wealthy people to donate relatively small amounts of money in order to stop that from happening.

As one example, it costs a few dollars to buy a malaria net, and on average around 5,000 dollars can prevent a death which would otherwise have happened.

As a 12-year-old, I saw the world in black and white, and I didn’t like what I saw. As far as I could tell, people's decisions about how much and where to donate would literally determine whether some real humans [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oicth6zSSP5B6vpMH/alone-again-facing-the-possibility-of-ai-takeover-as-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

At a conference on post-AGI futures earlier this year, I proposed a session titled “What's next for impact markets?” The conference speakers included the godfather of impact markets Paul Christiano himself, and noted supporters like Scott Alexander, Oli Habryka, and Andrew Critch — so I was hopeful that there would be some interest.

…

Zero people signed up for my session.

Before everyone writes these off as some EA fad of the early 2020s, or a pie-in-the-sky dream requiring impossible levels of funder buy-in: I’d like to give my account of what we’ve learned about impact markets, and where we can go next.

A brief oral history of Manifund

Our 501c3 entity “Manifold for Charity Inc.” was originally started with a narrow thesis: it’d be good to let Manifold prediction market traders donate winnings to a charity of their choice. See our original grant proposal to the FTX Future Fund, which they approved with a 500 thousand dollar grant around April 2022. But at the time, this was just a side project of Manifold.

Manifund proper was made with the explicit mandate of “make impact markets happen”. Scott Alexander was interested in trying out new mechanisms for funding projects [...]

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Outline:

(00:56) A brief oral history of Manifund

(03:34) Wait, so, what do you think about impact markets now?

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First published:

September 1st, 2026

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m84eEGu3t2jgMBNmC/what-happened-to-impact-markets

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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