EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

ERA, in partnership with the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub, is launching a new 8-week, full-time AIxBiosecurity research fellowship dedicated to tackling biosecurity risks amplified by recent advances in frontier AI capabilities. This fully funded programme equips researchers to investigate ways to reduce extreme risks from engineered and natural biological threats amid rapidly advancing biotechnology and emerging AI capabilities.

The deadline to apply is November 5th, 23:59 UTC —-> Apply here.

If you are interested in mentoring fellows on this programme, please submit this expression of interest form.

If you know other people who would be a good fit, please encourage them to apply. We find that people are much more likely to apply if they are recommended to do so, even if they have already heard of the opportunity.

If you are a leader or organiser of relevant community spaces, we encourage you to post an announcement with a link to this post.

Key details at a glance:

• Duration: 8 weeks full-time, during 26th January - 20th March
• Location: Cambridge, UK
• Application process for potential fellows:
  • Written application - deadline 5th November (Apply here)
  • First interviews held week starting 10th November
  • Final offers sent week [...]

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Outline:

(01:12) Key details at a glance:

(01:39) Why are we running this programme?

(02:22) What we provide

(03:01) What we are looking for

(03:48) Who are we looking for

(04:45) Questions?

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16 minute read

We update our list of Recommended Charities annually. This year, we announced recommendations on November 4.

Each year, hundreds of billions of animals are trapped in the food industry and killed for food —that is more than all the humans who have ever walked on the face of the Earth.1

When faced with such a magnitude of suffering, it can feel overwhelming and hard to know how to help. One of the most impactful things you can do to help animals is to donate to effective animal charities—even a small donation can have a big impact. Our goal is to help you do the most good for animals by providing you with effective giving opportunities that greatly reduce their suffering. Following our comprehensive charity evaluations, we are pleased to announce our Recommended Charities!

The Humane League (working globally), Shrimp Welfare Project (in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and India), and Wild Animal Initiative (global) have continued to work on the most important issues for animals [...]

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Outline:

(03:54) Charities Recommended in 2025

(03:59) Animal Welfare Observatory

(05:44) Shrimp Welfare Project

(07:38) Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira

(09:41) The Humane League

(11:22) Wild Animal Initiative

(13:15) Charities Recommended in 2024

(13:20) Aquatic Life Institute

(15:25) Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği

(17:34) Dansk Vegetarisk Forening

(19:18) The Good Food Fund

(21:19) Sinergia Animal

(23:20) Support our Recommended Charities

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(Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.)

Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude's character/constitution/spec. This post reflects on my time at Open Philanthropy, and it goes into more detail about my perspective and intentions with respect to Anthropic – including some of my takes on AI-safety-focused people working at frontier AI companies.

(I shared this post with Open Phil and Anthropic comms before publishing, but I’m speaking only for myself and not for Open Phil or Anthropic.)

I joined Open Philanthropy full-time at the beginning of 2019.[1] At the time, the organization was starting to spin up a new “Worldview Investigations” team, aimed at investigating and documenting key beliefs driving the organization's cause prioritization – and with a special focus on how the organization should think about the potential impact at stake in work on transformatively powerful AI systems.[2] I joined (and eventually: led) the team devoted to this effort, and it's been an amazing project to be a part of.

I remember [...]

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Outline:

(00:51) On my time at Open Philanthropy

(08:11) On going to Anthropic

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Cross-post from Good Structures.

Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes:

Candidates generally have a terrible time
Work tests are often unpleasant (and the best candidates have to complete many of them), there are hundreds or thousands of candidates for each role, and generally, people can't get the jobs they’ve been told are the best path to impact.

Organizations are often somewhat to moderately unhappy with their candidate pools
Organizations really struggle to find the talent they want, despite the number of candidates who apply.

Organizations can't find or retain the recruiting talent they want
It's extremely hard to find people to do recruitment in this space. Talented recruiters rarely want to stay in their roles.

I think the first two points need more discussion, but I haven't seen much discussion about the last. I think this is a major issue: recruitment is probably the most important function for a growing organization, and a skilled recruiter has a fairly large counterfactual impact for the organization they support. So why is it [...]

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Outline:

(01:33) Recruitment is high leverage and high impact

(03:33) Organizations struggle to hire recruiters

(07:52) Many of the people applying to recruitment roles emphasize their experience in recruitment. This isnt the background organizations need

(08:44) Almost no one is appropriately obsessed with hiring

(10:29) The state of evidence on hiring practices is bad

(13:22) Retaining strong recruiters is really hard

(14:51) Why might this be less important than I think?

(16:40) Im trying to find people interested in this kind of approach to hiring. If this is you, please reach out.

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Cross-posted from my website.

Epistemic status: This entire essay rests on two controversial premises (linear aggregation and antispeciesism) that I believe are quite robust, but I will not be able to convince anyone that they're true, so I'm not even going to try.

If welfare is important, and if the value of welfare scales something-like-linearly, and if there is nothing morally special about the human species[1], then these two things are probably also true:

(Historically, people referred to these beings as "hedonium". I dislike that term because hedonium sounds like a thing. It doesn't sound like something that matters. It's supposed to be the opposite of that—it's supposed to be the most profoundly innately valuable sentient being. So I think it's better to describe the beings as Welfareans. I [...]

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I often use the following thought experiment as an intuition pump to make the ethical case for taking expected value, risk/uncertainty-neutrality,[1] and math in general seriously in the context of doing good. There are, of course, issues with pure expected value maximization (e.g. Pascal's Mugging, St. Petersburg paradox and infinities, etc), that I won’t go into in this post. I think these considerations are often given too much weight and applied improperly (which I also won’t discuss in this post).

This thought experiment isn’t original, but I forget where I first encountered it. You can still give me credit if you want. Thanks! The graphics below are from Claude, but you can also give me credit if you like them (and blame Claude if you don’t). Thanks again.

Thought experiment:

Say there's this new, obscure, debilitating disease that affects 5 million people, who will die in the next ten years if not treated. It has no known cure, and for whatever reason, I know nobody else is going to work on it. I’m considering two options for what I could do with my career to tackle this disease.

Option A: I can become a doctor and estimate [...]

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TLDR: I went through the entirety of the career choice, career advising, career framework, career capital, working at EA vs. non-EA orgs, and personal fit tags and have filtered to arrive at a list of all posts[1] relevant to figuring out the career aspect of the EA journey[2] up until now (10/25/25).

The “Career Choice” section walks through: different career frameworks (how to go about making a career), career factors (aspects specific to yourself which change what sort of career you might have), cause area advice (focusing on how one might make a career in various causes), graduate school and career advice (what studies or careers might be pathways to impact, and what working in them looks like), and community experiences (how others have made career choices and lessons learned). The “Job Search” section walks through searching, applying, and getting rejected from jobs, as well as a section on how EA recruitment works (to better understand the process), and on the EA job market (how it's looking now and how it has changed over time).

Behold! After trudging in the hellscape of tabs for many hours (see my atrocious window below) and trying to craft an overarching structure [...]

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Outline:

(01:17) Introduction

(06:02) General Advice

(10:22) Career Choice

(10:26) Resources

(11:43) General

(14:33) Career Frameworks

(14:37) By Cause Area (path) ala 80k

(19:24) By Career Aptitudes ala Holden

(22:36) Career Factors

(22:57) Cause Prioritization (incomplete)

(25:40) Career Stage

(34:37) Personal Fit

(36:38) Location

(37:38) Working Outside vs. Inside EA

(47:53) Other Factors

(49:59) Cause Area Advice

(50:03) Animal Welfare

(53:00) AI

(01:02:22) Biosecurity

(01:03:22) Community Building

(01:05:47) Earning to Give

(01:10:19) GCR Reduction

(01:11:10) Global Health

(01:12:08) Meta EA

(01:16:26) Nuclear

(01:16:55) Graduate School Advice

(01:18:58) Specific Career Advice

(01:20:13) Projects

(01:22:52) Charities

(01:23:12) Communications

(01:23:28) Consulting

(01:25:13) Grantmaking

(01:25:29) Managing

(01:25:42) Operations

(01:28:42) Policy

(01:35:24) Research

(01:39:51) Startups

(01:40:49) Other Careers

(01:46:31) Community Experiences

(01:56:57) Job Search

(01:57:08) The Search

(02:01:42) The Application

(02:04:08) The Rejection

(02:06:38) How EA Recruitment Works

(02:08:39) The EA Job Market

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Our Mission: Rapidly scale up the size and influence of the community trying to make AI and other transformative technologies go well for sentient nonhumans.

One of the key ways we do this is through our events. This article gives insight into our most recent event, AI, Animals and Digital Minds NYC 2025 including:

• Lightning talks
• Topics and ideas covered
• Attendee feedback
• Event finances
• Lessons for future events
• Acknowledgements
• More information on our community

Our next conference, Sentient Futures Summit Bay Area 2026, is now confirmed for February 6th-8th (the weekend before Effective Altruism Global)! You can register here (Early Bird tickets valid until December 1st), and there is more information at the end of this article.

We will continue pairing our conferences with EA Global events going forwards – so join our community to stay updated!

Overview 

AI, Animals & Digital Minds (AIADM) New York City took place from October 9th-10th 2025, at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen. It was both our first event in NYC, and our first event that was exclusively an ‘unconference’ – a format which allows attendees to pitch their own ideas for talks, discussions and workshops during the event.

The [...]

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Outline:

(01:40) Overview

(02:39) Content

(02:46) Lightning Talks

(04:37) Unconference Sessions Highlights

(07:36) Event Feedback

(09:58) Finances

(11:35) Lessons for Future Events

(13:30) Acknowledgements

(14:39) Get Involved

(15:32) Contact

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By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript

Episode summary

Whatever your skills are, whatever your interests are, we’re out of the world where you have to be a conceptual self-starter, theorist mathematician, or a policy person — we’re into the world where whatever your skills are, there is probably a way to use them in a way that is helping make maybe humanity's most important event ever go better.

— Holden Karnofsky

For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you could find any way to help, the work was frustrating and low feedback.

According to Anthropic's Holden Karnofsky, this situation has now reversed completely.

There are now large amounts of useful, concrete, shovel-ready projects with clear goals and deliverables. Holden thinks people haven’t appreciated the scale of the shift, and wants everyone to see the large range of ‘well-scoped object-level work’ they could personally help with, in both technical and non-technical areas.

In today's interview, Holden — previously cofounder and CEO of Open Philanthropy — lists 39 projects he's excited to see happening, including:

• [...]

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Outline:

(00:19) Episode summary

(04:17) The interview in a nutshell

(04:41) 1. The AI race is NOT a coordination problem -- too many actors genuinely want to race

(05:30) 2. Anthropic demonstrates it's possible to be both competitive and safety focused

(06:56) 3. Success is possible even with terrible execution -- but we shouldn't count on it

(07:54) 4. Concrete work in AI safety is now tractable and measurable

(09:21) Highlights

(09:24) The world is handling AGI about as badly as possible

(12:33) Is rogue AI takeover easy or hard?

(15:34) The AGI race isnt a coordination failure

(21:27) Lessons from farm animal welfare we can use in AI

(25:40) The case for working at Anthropic

(30:31) Overrated AI risk: Persuasion

(35:06) Holden thinks AI companions are bad news

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I'm putting together Metaculus' first animal-focused forecasting tournament, and am reaching out to ask for your support in making this happen.

What is it?

This tournament will generate probabilistic forecasts on decision-relevant questions affecting animals, from alternative proteins and animal welfare policy to AI impacts and wild animal welfare. The goal is to help funders, researchers, and organizations in our community make more informed strategic decisions.

Why it matters

Most forecasters will be from outside the animal movement, bringing fresh perspectives to questions we care about. Better forecasts can lead to better prioritization of interventions and ultimately better outcomes for animals.

How you can help

I'm raising funds on Manifund to create a prize pool that will incentivize quality forecasting. The minimum funding goal is $3,000, with an ideal goal of $15,000.

You can support here.

For more context, I previously posted a call for questions for this tournament.

Any support, whether funding or spreading the word, would be hugely appreciated! Very happy to answer any questions in the comments.

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Outline:

(00:19) What is it?

(00:41) Why it matters

(00:57) How you can help

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