EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas.

TL;DR: A lot of new money is about to enter effective giving. When that happens, the question "Where does a dollar do the most good?" gets harder to answer, not easier. It depends on how much money each area already has, and that amount keeps changing as the money arrives. This is why the model behind the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund doesn't just rank funds once and stop. It tracks how each fund's cost-effectiveness changes as it receives more funding, and re-ranks as it goes. Below, we explain why anyone giving at scale should use similar reasoning.

If you’re a small or mid-sized donor who makes giving decisions independently, it's relatively easy to figure out what your money is doing. For example, when you give your first $1000 to a charity that runs corporate cage-free egg campaigns, your donation will go on to fund corporate cage-free egg campaigns. When you give your second $1000 to the same charity, it will fund…corporate cage-free egg campaigns. And you will never guess what your tenth $1000 goes [...]

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Outline:

(02:37) Modeling diminishing marginal returns

(07:05) Acting as part of a group

(08:48) How the Cross-Cause Fund works

(10:42) Why you can't just follow the highest marginal number

(13:03) Acknowledgements

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Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.

On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT vape pen. J. is chronic—he gets attacks every day—so he never goes anywhere without his vape pen. He has successfully aborted hundreds of attacks with DMT in the two years he's been using it. Many years ago, E. had done DMT recreationally, but he had never used it to abort an attack, despite having had cluster headaches for decades.

“Do a 2-second pull, and hold it in as long as you can,” said J. to E. A few seconds later, E. could feel some effects, but the pain was still there. So he took another 2-second pull. He then stared intently at a tree in front of him for about 30 seconds. Then, his face transformed. He smiled, in utter disbelief. He started laughing and crying. The pain was completely gone. He felt clear-headed. He had never felt the pain fizzle away so [...]

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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.

Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA

I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.

On factory farming

1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last long. This low salience is self-reinforcing: even people who care deeply about it seldom bring it up. Yuval Noah Harari thinks “the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history” — and almost never talks about it.

2. Our main opponent isn't the meat industry; it's inertia. If battery cages and gestation crates had always been illegal, the industry could never have gotten them legalized. Defending the status quo is just far easier than changing it.

3. The meat industry isn't the omnipotent Bond villain some activists imagine, forever scheming to win the grand battle over the future of meat. It's a bunch of middle managers in Tyson fleeces in a business park in Springdale, Arkansas, trying to hit their Q3 targets.

4. [...]

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Outline:

(00:32) On factory farming

(01:54) The future of farming

(03:59) Welfare reforms

(05:27) Unsolicited dietary advice

(06:45) Vegan advocacy

(07:51) Wild animal welfare

(08:25) Effective altruism

(09:49) Inside baseball

(11:08) On strategy

(12:23) Causes for optimism

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In case you haven’t heard, the rogue AI agents are here. From an insider's perspective, the real news is that (rogue) AI is in the news — this is all stuff we’ve foreseen and been trying to warn people about for years.

I expect the new imperative on experts is not just to raise attention but to help explain the situation and offer nuance (while paying close attention to what we can learn from both new information and new perspectives, and staying alert to options for improving things).

With phrases like ‘rogue AI’ and ‘broke out of containment’ on the loose, perhaps it's time to distinguish some important types of rogue AI activity. Without this clarity, people end up talking past each other, and we might counterproductively overreact in some ways, and complacently underreact in others.

I’ll use the widely publicised Hugging Face swarm attack from Spring-Summer 2026 as a running example, as well as a few other comparison points. We’ll look at four key types of rogue activity. The first two have happened already: breaking in, and breaking out. The second two remain hypothetical but perhaps nearby: full escape, and insider infiltration. I won’t touch on why AI [...]

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Outline:

(01:43) Type 1: Breaking In

(04:42) Type 2: Breaking Out

(08:20) Type 3: Full Escape/Self-Exfiltration

(13:03) Aside: Subsistence and maintenance

(14:17) Type 4: (Insider) Infiltration

(16:20) Wrapping up

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Advanced AI could go badly wrong for humanity. Pivotal exists to lower that risk. We try to find the strongest new researchers and put them to work on it with experienced mentors in our fellowship.

TL;DR:

15 weeks of funded, full-time AI safety research in London (January 18 to April 30, 2027), with everything you need to make your research go well: a dedicated mentor, a Research Manager, budget for food/housing/compute/travel, and a healthy £15-18k stipend.

Projects span technical safety, technical governance and AI governance. Apply by 23:59 Sunday November 1 (AoE). Apply here.

Know someone who might be a good fit? If you refer someone who gets accepted because of you, you’ll earn $1,000.

What the fellowship is

For 15 weeks, fellows work in person at LISA on a research project with an external mentor. Each fellow gets weekly 1:1s with their mentor, weekly support from a Pivotal Research Manager, who helps with scoping, blockers, and career planning, and a cohort of ~40 peers working on adjacent problems. Our last 4 cohorts received an average peer recommendation of 9.0/10, and an average satisfaction of 8.7/10.

Fellows already rate the program highly but we’ve made Pivotal bigger and hopefully [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) TL;DR:

(01:13) What the fellowship is

(04:01) Should you apply?

(04:56) Apply

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Crosspost

Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciation for expertise has been eroded over time. Large parts of the political spectrum do not trust experts, unless, of course, they agree with what they already believe. Western democracies have often been derided for being technocratic and giving too much power to so-called experts. The scientific experts invited to participate in the political decision-making process are frequently derided for straying beyond their field of expertise. While there is a risk in that, of course, it is a largely unrealized one compared to a much more significant risk: that of the ignorant straying beyond their field of competence.

But there is a difference between a public intellectual and an expert. Public intellectuals, for the most part, have won prestige and recognition for their intellectual contributions in one area of intellectual inquiry, whether that is history, economics, psychology, philosophy, and so forth, and have used this credibility to become household names and participate in the public debates of our day. For the most part, they are a welcome corrective to [...]

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This post was cross posted from LessWrong

TL;DR:

• If you enjoy LessWrong (and/or do EA/AI safety field building), you should consider starting a rationality reading group at your university. It's fun, cheap, and a good way to meet like-minded friends, and it can reach rationalist-ish people who’ve never encountered EA or AI safety.
• Starting one can be as easy as grabbing a couple friends, picking a time, place, and reading, sending an email blast, and bringing food. The ACX Meetups Everywhere call (organizer form due October 9th) can be a good way to find an initial group.

Context: this post was loosely based on a memo originally written by Noah Birnbaum, and I (Carolanne Jiang) most of the current version. “I” in this post refers to Carolanne, and “we” refers to Carolanne and Noah.

Also, UChicago Rationality is still going! If you are a student at UChicago interested in joining, meetings this quarter are on Wednesdays from 6 :00 – 7:00 PM in the Reg. Noah and I are both no longer at UChicago–for more information, please reach out to Will Kyle at [email protected]

UChicago Rationality was a huge success: it was very fun, a great place to make [...]

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Outline:

(01:59) The backstory of UChicago Rationality

(02:58) More reasons on why you should consider running a rationality group

(04:46) Q: I am sold. How do I go about starting one?

(06:08) Appendix

(06:11) Counters arguments to why a rationality group might not contribute to field building for AI safety and/or EA

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Hey folks --

At EA Forum next week, I'd like to engage with people who are interested in epistemic security -- the ability of a society to reliably avert threats to the processes that produce reliable information.

I feel current threats to reliable information are both critical and at least somewhat neglected. The topic is covered deeply in this report from the Alan Turing Institute:
epistemic-security-report_final.pdf

Information is infrastructure and requires infrastructure, physical, digital and cultural. Without reliable information, I submit that all of EA's priorities are at risk.

Let me know if you'd be up to kick this around in New York. Happy to engage online as well.

Regards,
David
None of this was written by AI.

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Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand.

Cross-posted from my website and Substack.

Verifying an international agreement pausing AI development needs evidence of how compute is used. Cryptography can give protocols that run in software on the chips already installed, without trusted hardware checking each computation. This post is a literature review of one such tool, proof of useful work (PoUW), with which a GPU proves that it did a given amount of work, here typically matrix multiplication. In contrast with inference verification, PoUW has been developed almost exclusively in relation to cryptocurrencies in order to use a more useful computation instead of the useless hashing used in Bitcoin. PoUW could be used to show remotely that chips are kept busy on useless tasks during an emergency shutdown, or, together with a zero-knowledge proof of the workload, that they run only declared inference.

I describe the two existing constructions, by Komargodski and Weinstein for matrices over a finite field, and by Pearl Research for the FP8 format used in AI, verifiable for now [...]

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Outline:

(02:15) Cryptography for verification

(11:05) How PoUW works and what it is for

(14:11) Why useful work is harder than useless work

(17:26) Komargodski-Weinstein: hiding the instance behind low-rank noise

(24:12) Pearl: quantization removes the shortcut but needs a new assumption

(29:37) Deployments and related protocols

(32:31) Deployment in a treaty

(35:31) Limitations of KW and their current status

(36:01) Open problems for mathematicians

(39:31) Outlook

(40:44) Acknowledgments

(41:30) References

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For years I had a blindspot in my thinking. I dismissed policy and advocacy work as “in another [lower-status] category” because I’m obviously a technical person! Even when I felt super pessimistic about my ability to do research that meaningfully contributes to addressing the threat of extinction from AI.

I’m not the type of person who would be “good at comms”. I’m an autistic math guy. Luckily comms has learnable skills, and I have gotten better through practice.

I’m now prioritizing advocacy, which currently seems a lot more promising than research.

I got lucky because, thanks to Coxon, AI extinction became mainstream shortly after I started. Even so, I've been very surprised to have become the biggest anti-extinction expert voice in Finland as a young person. This happened because:

• I have a background in AI safety research and active work affiliation with an AI safety org, showing credible expertise
• Finnish journalists want to hear from Finnish experts
• Finnish academics in media have been mostly dismissive of extinction, and
• other genuinely concerned Finnish experts were hardly speaking up.

So far, most notably, I…

1. Published an expert op-ed in the most prestigious slot in Finland (co-authored with @So8res).
2. Did four [...]

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