EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

TLDR

Longtermists usually focus on lowering p(doom) of total extinction. I argue that

• resource entropy (picking the low hanging fruit) between civilisations is inevitable, and might dramatically reduce p(success) after a catastrophe
• thinking about p(success) requires longtermists to be more explicitly ambitious - not to settle for a civilisation that never leaves Earth
• this ambition ironically makes the case for moving longtermist cause priorities closer to the rest of society's - though perhaps also closer to effective accelerationism

Longtermists think too short term… ly

… about happy futures

The most ambitious form of the longtermist project is a grand vision of a future of human descendants living in some form around billions of stars, or more.[1] The longtermist movement is nominally concerned with maximising the probability of reaching that state, as well as the quality of life in it, but has generally relied on the heuristic of [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) TLDR

(00:48) Longtermists think too short term... ly

(00:54) ... about happy futures

(02:43) ... and about the path through less happy futures

(05:17) The parable of the apple tree

(06:34) A simple equation for p(success)

(09:24) Scrumping from future generations

(15:31) Counter and counter-counterarguments

(15:36) The imminent threat of AGI makes all this irrelevant

(16:54) Reclaimed technology makes tech progress easy for future civilisations

(17:59) R_annual and N_friction might be too low for this to matter

(18:12) Remarks

(20:31) Acknowledgements

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First published:

October 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CxMusuX8E5hiTXEWX/fruit-picking-as-an-existential-risk

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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From July 11–13, 2025, 290 attendees from across Africa and beyond gathered in Abuja, Nigeria, for EAGxNigeria 2025, the region's largest EA conference to date.

Designed to support community growth, deepen cause engagement, and forge collaborations, this convening represented a key milestone in building an EA community that is locally grounded, globally connected, and strategically ambitious.

As part of the global EAGx series and supported by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), our event featured engaging talks, workshops, networking sessions, and community-building activities. It received outstanding feedback from local and international participants and recorded a good number of the Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge sign-ups.

Key InformationAttendance No. of applications received 917No. of approved applications 443No. of attendees who registered on Swapcard 372No. of attendees295No. of volunteers45BudgetTotal event grant$73,350.9Actual expenditure (including staff costs)$61,458.9Travel support$63,653.8Cost per attendee$408.8Team HoursTotal team hours1692.35ContentNo. of sessions (Talks, workshops, and meetups)29

 

 

 

 

 

[...]

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Outline:

(01:29) Strategy and Objectives

(02:08) Admission

(04:40) Attendees' Experience

(04:44) Who Attended?

(05:21) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Bar graph showing likelihood of recommending EAGx, with 145 responses, scale 0-10.

(08:25) Content

(12:05) Which actions do you intend to take as a result of the event?

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First published:

October 21st, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DcqnaBMpNQmBktaMj/retrospective-on-the-first-ever-eagxnigeria-2025

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Abstract

Objections to longtermism often focus on issues like fanaticism, discounting, or classic reasons to doubt the tractability of positively influencing the far future. I argue that another challenge has been underdiscussed relative to those—namely, that posed by unawareness: many of the long-term possibilities most relevant to our actions are unknown to us. I develop this challenge by introducing the notion of determinative unawareness, where unknown outcomes are decisive for whether an action is overall positive or negative. Greaves and MacAskill's responses—treating unawareness as ordinary uncertainty or appealing to catchall states—do not, by themselves, suffice, as it is far from clear how they can avoid arbitrariness. Importantly, I argue that existing cases outlining the relative robustness of some longtermist strategies, such as option value maximization, do not ultimately succeed in sidestepping determinative unawareness. I then discuss two broad ways one could relax the normative views supporting the longtermist thesis [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Abstract

(01:22) 1. Introduction

(10:28) 2. The (determinative) unawareness challenge to longtermism

(15:08) 2.1. Unawareness importantly differs from mere uncertainty

(26:56) 2.2. The challenge of assigning utilities to unknown long-term outcomes

(37:41) 3. More promising avenues for rescuing longtermism in the face of unawareness?

(47:09) 4. Conclusion

(52:59) Acknowledgments

(54:06) Note for the jury of the Essays on Longtermism competition

(54:30) References

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First published:

October 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ygetruijHKYpmkWAs/discussions-of-longtermism-should-focus-on-the-problem-of

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We want to highlight two things in this post:

1. Mike has published an essay in Aeon about the threat from hidden volcanoes, among other aspects, it's got some volcano science, history, climate, pandemics and storytelling in it, so something for everyone I hope! It highlights the global scale of this risk, its underappreciation in terms of governance, monitoring and funding.
2. If you get to the end of the Aeon article, you'll see Lara Mani and I (both volcanologists) have launched the first of its kind charity to mitigate volcanic risk, called the Global Volcano Risk Alliance. We're fully registered with the UK's charity commission (and HMRC - i.e. tax exempt) as of earlier this year, and open to donations and consultancy.

Aeon article

Here's a taster of the article:

Volcanoes are often imagined through icons like Yellowstone or Vesuvius, yet the real danger may lie in places that appear deceptively quiet. In [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) Aeon article

(03:56) Why we started this charity

(06:46) Plans and 2026 Budget

(08:19) What were doing

(09:15) How you can help

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First published:

October 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jAcCjFXYsvmWQsfiu/introducing-the-global-volcano-risk-alliance-charity-and

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

In the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week, and in light of Ambitious Impact currently hiring for staff roles - one recruitment manager (or director) and two researchers - I thought I’d share some of my recent reflections on finding impactful careers as a new recruiter in an EA org.

“Why is it so hard to get hired to do good?”

First, I want to validate this point and say that I totally agree; it is (stupidly) hard. I personally applied to 16 EA orgs and spent >100 hours job searching, doing work tests, interviews, etc., before I got this role. This was after having had four EA part-time roles, served on a board of one EA organisation for two years, and been community-building for years. I am not the only person to have this experience, as you can see from a quick search on the EA Forum here [...]

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First published:

October 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tjJG2hk8iJdhua8gu/applying-to-ea-orgs-my-thoughts-as-a-new-recruiter

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Crossposted from LW. I didn't write this, but I know the author and think they're reasonable; I'm sharing it because it might be helpful. I think the direct effects of large donations strongly outweigh the personal side effects for almost everyone, but (if you don't already donate to Democrats) you should think before donating to Democrats if you really might work in a Republican administration, and if you're planning to donate <$1000 to Democrats you should consider instead donating either zero or >$1000.

I’m close to a single-issue voter/donor. I tend to like politicians who show strong support for AI safety, because I think it's an incredibly important and neglected problem. So when I make political donations, it's not as salient to me which party the candidate is part of, if they've gone out of their way to support AI safety and have some integrity.[1] [...]

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Outline:

(03:05) Background/facts

(10:48) Recommendation

(18:22) Explanation

(22:21) Is it possible you will end up working in government?

(24:00) Other advice

(25:10) Counterarguments

(26:10) Rambling

(27:09) How did you come up with these heuristics?

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First published:

October 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6o7B3Fxj55gbcmNQN/considerations-around-career-costs-of-political-donations

Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8A8g4ryyZnaMhAQQF/considerations-around-career-costs-of-political-donations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Veganism as the Alignment Test for Longtermism

Longtermism asks us to imagine the vastness of the future—trillions of lives, billions of years—and to act today as though those lives matter. It is a stirring vision, but it rests on a fragile assumption: that humanity is capable of aligning on a mission, coordinating across cultures and centuries, and acting with compassion at scale.

Before we leap to the stars, we should ask whether we can pass the first test right in front of us: ending factory farming. Each year, tens of billions of animals are confined and killed in conditions so grim that many philosophers consider their lives net negative. If we cannot align to end this, an atrocity happening in plain sight, what confidence can we have that humanity will succeed in steering the far future somewhere positive?

What the Book Says
Essays on Longtermism acknowledges this point, though [...]

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First published:

October 17th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tcz8ge9gexjMdiXED/if-we-can-t-end-factory-farming-can-we-really-shape-the-far

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Executive Summary

• Donors often navigate difficult choices among projects that have different outcomes and promote different values. Standard cost-effectiveness analyses allow us to see how changing assumptions (e.g., regarding moral weights or probabilities of success) can change our evaluations of individual interventions. However, they are less apt for dealing with uncertainty about these assumptions or navigating disagreements among stakeholders.
• Our Moral Parliament Tool allows users to navigate uncertainty about key assumptions that affect our assessment of interventions. It does so by representing diverse perspectives as delegates in a democratic decision-making process about how to distribute resources to various causes or projects.
• What's new: We have added functionality to the original Parliament Tool, which allows it to be adapted to novel resource allocation problems simply by editing a spreadsheet.
• The tool is not limited to evaluating broad moral philosophies and cause areas. It can be applied to many kinds of worldviews [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) Executive Summary

(03:01) Introduction

(05:35) Making a Moral Parliament

(05:39) Components

(07:38) Specifying the problem space

(09:09) Getting started

(10:16) Acknowledgments

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First published:

October 15th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jMpynJEvYDxuB2tq7/navigating-donation-dilemmas-customizable-moral-parliament

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This post is written as part of the Draft Amnesty Week; it's an idea I've been thinking about for a while. Most of the figures here are rough, “best-guess” estimates, so please suggest improvements!

Summary

• Most global health charities and evaluations focus on Lives Saved or DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years), which generally only focus on post-birth outcomes
• However, according to (in my view) reasonable assumptions, birth is an arbitrary dividing line, and unborn children and potential lives also have moral worth
• I divide worldviews into a simplified "pro-life" person-affecting worldview (early life has moral worth, foetuses count as people) and a simplified "pronatalist" non-person-affecting worldview (the more humans, the better, regardless of whether they exist). I also consider an anti-natalist worldview briefly for comparison
• I focus on global health interventions, and find that:
  • If unborn lives are given moral weight, many mainstream interventions - malaria prevention [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Summary

(01:44) Overview Table

(02:05) Intro

(03:07) Why research this?

(05:05) View A: Early life has moral worth; foetuses count as people

(06:19) Pregnancy Loss Numbers & Causes

(08:26) Hypertensive Disorders

(09:28) Maternal malnutrition and anaemia

(11:39) Infections (other than malaria)

(13:46) Malaria

(14:49) So, AMF?

(17:30) Abortion and explicitly pro-life charities

(19:46) View B: More people = better world; potential lives are intrinsically valuable

(21:20) STI screening and treatment (chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis)

(22:35) Schistosomiasis control

(23:59) Safe delivery and post-abortion care

(25:33) View C... What if youre anti-natalist?

(26:46) Conclusion

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First published:

October 18th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZukwCrrMFcZ8gencR/what-are-the-most-effective-global-health-charities-if-you

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I have some claim to be an “old hand” EA:[1]

• I was in the room when the creation Giving What We Can was announced (although I vacillated about joining for quite a while)
• I first went to EA Global in 2015
• I worked on a not-very successful EA project for a while

But I have not really been much involved in the community since about 2020. The interesting thing about this is that my withdrawal from the community has nothing to do with disagreements, personal conflicts, or FTX. I still pretty much agree with most “orthodox EA” positions, and I think that both the idea of EA and the movement remain straightforwardly good and relevant.

Hence why I describe the process as “senescence”: intellectually and philosophically I am still on board and I still donate, I just… don’t particularly want to participate beyond that.

Boredom

I won’t sugar-coat [...]

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Outline:

(01:00) Boredom

(04:05) What do I have to offer?

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First published:

October 19th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rJqQGD2z2DaupCbZE/my-ea-senescence

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.