EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This article at Our World in Data arguing in favour of "cage free" hens includes this graph from the Welfare Footprint Project (which spoke at EAG 2023) which has a nice breakdown which concludes that cage free aviaries are the most humane option of three types of hen housing studied.

However, according to this analysis, hens in furnished cages have the lowest prevalence of excruciating conditions- not cage free.

Moreover I am not convinced the tables for disabling and excruciating conditions are correct. The underlying data is very limited; where there is data "analysis," TFA uses almost no statistical technique; in some parts the "confidence intervals" mostly consists of rounding to the nearest 5. Sometimes it's even worse than that and is mostly guessing.

Therefore the analysis is very subject to the researcher's own biases. I think it's very plausible the amount of time [...]

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Outline:

(01:34) Excruciating conditions

(01:38) Vent injuries

(02:36) Peritonitis

(05:42) Disabling pain

(06:10) Keel bone fractures

(06:54) Nest deprivation

(08:02) Which is the most humane?

(13:20) Comment

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First published:

October 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/soz6CerTGpEWFXLeZ/is-cage-free-really-the-most-humane-option-for-egg-laying

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I’ve been a policy researcher (aka “think tanker”) for eight years.[1] Over this time, I’ve learned how good scholars conduct and share their research, build and manage their teams, and push their ideas into public policy. I’ve also seen some scholars struggle—falling prey to partisanship, corruption, or simply poor research or management practices.

This post lays out my thoughts on how to be a good policy researcher. The first section describes useful skills, practices, and behaviors. The second section explores how good think tankers write reports, build useful stuff, engage with the media, and host events. The third and last section examines several common failure modes by which policy researchers may lose productivity and influence.

I hope this post helps to inform new and aspiring policy researchers on how to succeed in this field, and perhaps even remind established scholars of best practices.

TL;DR:

• Learn to read [...]

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Outline:

(01:40) I. Personal: What are useful skills, practices, and behaviors?

(03:23) Discipline

(04:21) Teamwork

(06:09) Creativity

(07:04) II. Products: What do you write, build, say, and organize?

(07:11) Reports

(10:10) Tools, games, & graphics

(11:10) Media engagement

(12:56) Events

(15:12) III. Failure Modes: What should you avoid?

(15:29) Forgetting your audience

(17:31) Corruption

(18:20) Writing in a bubble

(19:05) Conclusion

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

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First published:

October 26th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w4L9xi48gAbTXmPAj/career-advice-for-policy-researchers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Would I be doing something wrong significantly undercutting other potential hires ?

Some of what I’m thinking about is echoed in points made in this post previously, although I think my situation pertains more to the ethics of competing rather than the ethics of donating via salary-sacrifice. While @ElliotJDavies's post makes a strong case for EAs considering lower salaries as a form of donation, I’m trying to find answers to the specific ethical and practical questions around how to navigate this during the hiring process, especially when I’m able to dramatically undercut other applicants.

Context:

Thus far in my life the most important things to me about work are not compensation - things like novelty, intellectual stimulation, working on high EV projects, and career capital are. Compensation has been more important to me in the past than it is now: I’m super fortunate to be able to live super [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Would I be doing something wrong significantly undercutting other potential hires ?

(00:45) Context:

(02:17) Questions (mostly for people making hiring decisions):

(03:32) Scenarios I can see my situation being publicly known being a positive:

(04:01) Im Really interested in hearing what people think / open to advice etc.

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First published:

October 27th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bHAeqZnsHJFjLcWew/should-i-tell-ea-orgs-i-ll-work-for-much-less-than

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

• As part of our ongoing work to study how to best frame EA, we experimentally tested different phrases and sentences that CEA were considering using on effectivealtruism.org.

Doing Good Better taglines

• We observed a consistent pattern where taglines that included the phrase ‘do[ing] good better’ received less support from respondents and inspired less interest in learning about EA.
• We replicated these results in a second experiment, where we confirmed that taglines referring to “do[ing] good better” performed less well than those referring to “do[ing] the most good”.

Nouns and sentences

• Nouns: The effect of using different nouns to refer to EA was small, but referring to EA as a ‘philosophy’ or ‘movement’ inspired the most curiosity compared to options including ‘project’ and ‘research field’.
• Sentences: “Find the most effective ways to do good with your time, money, and career” and “Effective altruism asks the question of how we [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(01:23) Method

(02:18) Taglines (Study 1)

(03:40) Doing Good Better replication (Study 2)

(05:23) Sentences (Study 1)

(06:45) Nouns (Study 1)

(07:41) Effectiveness focus

(07:55) Conclusion

(08:56) Acknowledgments

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First published:

October 27th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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AI Safety is an area that emerged from the EA community. EAs made the first significant efforts to build this field, and I’d say they have done a pretty good job overall. The number of people working on AI Safety has been increasing exponentially. However, many believe that the field-building efforts were not perfect. One example is that the talent pipeline has become over-optimized for researchers.

We now seem to be entering a similar stage with AI Welfare. Following Longview's recent grants, the number of people working on issues related to digital sentience is starting to grow. Field-building efforts are likely to begin during this period, and we may soon see a new area that is closely connected to EA developing and becoming an independent field, much like AI Safety.

AI Welfare is a complex area. Empirical research is difficult and requires deep philosophical reasoning. Communication can be seen [...]

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First published:

October 27th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TxkxN4EdMZaHGrCcv/what-were-mistakes-of-ai-safety-field-building-how-can-we

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

It's that time again — Giving Season, 2025. We’ve got a packed schedule of events on the EA Forum, aimed at eliciting more and better donations, as well as reaching new audiences. In this post, I’ll tell you what to expect, and how you can help.

If you do one thing after reading this post, consider making it this:

Donate to the donation election fundOverview

Throughout giving season I'll be encouraging posts on effective giving relevant topics, looking for earning-to-give-ers and organisations who might run relevant AMAs, etc... On top of this, we also have back-to-back events for Forum users to take part in.

DatesNov 10-16Nov 17-23Nov 24-Dec 7Dec 8-14Dec 15-EOYEventFunding Strategy WeekMarginal Funding Week

Donation Election

‘Why I donate’ week

Donation Celebration Banner

November 10th to 16th

A week for discussing questions around funding strategy (broadly construed). For example:

• How can we diversify funding in EA?
• [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) Overview

(01:13) November 10th to 16th

(02:09) November 17th to 23rd

(02:49) November 24th to December 7th

(03:22) A couple notes on eligibility

(04:03) The donation election fund, and rewards

(04:48) December 8th to 14th

(05:52) December 15th to the end of the year

(06:26) Whats next?

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First published:

October 24th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RzdKnBYe3jumrZxkB/giving-season-2025-announcement

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Crosspost of a blog here.

1

She remembered the day he was born.

He was born, like all children are—wriggling and kicking and screaming. From the first time she set eyes on him, she knew she had birthed an angel. She marveled at how this creature—this small, delightful, adorable bundle of goodness and happiness, with his gurgles, his cries, and his laughs—had come out of her. If there are miracles, surely that is one.

She remembered the day he began to crawl. Oh how proud he was of the crawling. He’d bop around, always wanting to be wherever the action was. Propelled by his little limbs, nothing seemed to give him more joy than crawling. She often marveled at how rapidly those tiny little limbs were able to propel him.

She remembered the day he spoke his first words. His small, uncertain, little voice, uttering the word for mother. [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) 1

(01:56) 2

(03:31) 3

(05:31) 4

(07:44) 5

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First published:

October 24th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FgApaghPKrX6vgQiM/on-what-is-prevented

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

I used to think that a dollar in my DAF[1] was approximately as good as a dollar in my normal bank account for making the world a better place. Lots of orgs try to measure or increase “charitable dollars,” with an implication that a 20-40% boost in charitable dollars via tax planning strategies[2] is highly worthwhile.

But in the political giving world, charitable money is worth quite a bit less than more-flexible money and so if you are thinking about doing political giving you may not want to put so much into a DAF, because it restricts your options quite a bit.

(When I say “charitable” I mean money that is restricted to granting to 501c3 orgs, and that's opposed to what I call “flex” money which has no such restriction. And yes, I acknowledge that this post is very US-centric.)

Political giving is a [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) Charitable money is hard to use politically

(01:35) Campaigns buy a lot of advertising

(02:39) Timing

(03:30) So what are PACs anyway?

(04:18) Beyond individual campaigns

(05:56) PACs are even more flexible

(06:36) Don't forget parties

(07:40) Overall

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First published:

October 24th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A77ppsymJMR4kDgFA/dollars-in-political-giving-are-less-fungible-than-you-might

Linkpost URL:
https://lincolnquirk.substack.com/p/when-is-a-dollar-not-a-dollar

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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(Thanks to Lizka's recent post for the inspiration!)

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI. We're hiring for two roles running our flagship Fellowship Program:

1. Program Manager/Director to lead the program — building the community of expert journalists who will hold frontier AI companies accountable, investigate emerging risks, and shape how the world understands transformative AI.
2. (Senior) Program Associate, working with our Program Manager/Director to execute our fellowship at scale: vetting 2,000+ applications, teaching core skills (either journalism craft or AI fundamentals), and mentoring fellows through their placements at outlets like Bloomberg, The Guardian, and Time.

Cillian asked that I write a post like this, but he did not review it in advance. As such these are entirely my personal thoughts and don't necessarily represent the views of Tarbell or my coworkers.

I'm not going to spend [...]

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Outline:

(01:28) Why does news matter?

(02:19) News reporting is the foundation of all other communication

(04:20) What does this mean for AI?

(06:02) What its like working at Tarbell

(09:18) Conclusion

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First published:

October 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RfMnyftBpg5XAtCDC/some-personal-thoughts-about-working-at-tarbell

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

tl;dr: ACS Research is hiring for several full-time research positions in macrostrategy, LLM psychology, and ML. 1-2 year contracts in Prague, London, or San Francisco Bay Area, $80-300k. This could be a Pareto-optimal option for some of you based on research topics, incentives, salary, collaborators, and research environment. Details and applicartions here - deadline approaching soon.

Also please do refer people to us: we don't offer referral bounties, but hope you can tell people to apply just because it is good idea. In the rest of the post is a bit more about the roles, why you may want to apply and why not.

A bit longer form about the roles

Gradual Disempowerment Research Fellow We're looking for polymaths who can reason about civilizational dynamics. This role comes with a lot of intellectual freedom - it could mean economic modelling, theoretical work on multi-agent dynamics, historical analysis, and more.

[...]

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Outline:

(00:56) A bit longer form about the roles

(01:51) Why work at ACS and why not

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First published:

October 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pCr9uSuWNA3BtZL5F/acs-is-hiring-why-work-here-and-why-not

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.