We’ve redesigned effectivealtruism.org to improve understanding and perception of effective altruism, and make it easier to take action. View the new site I led the redesign and will be writing in the first person here, but many others contributed research, feedback, writing, editing, and development. I’d love to hear what you think, here is a feed…

Summary While many people and organisations in the EA community can be great connections, don't assume that just because a person has been in the EA community for a long time, they'll be a good fit for you to work with or be friends with. Don’t assume that just because a project or org has been around for a long time, it would be a good place for y…

Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Obviously, no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." OK, it doesn’t actually start with "obviously," but I like to imagine the commissioners all murmuring to themselves “obviously” when this item was brought up. I’m not sure w…

Introduction I have been writing posts critical of mainstream EA narratives about AI capabilities and timelines for many years now. Compared to the situation when I wrote my posts in 2018 or 2020, LLMs now dominate the discussion, and timelines have also shrunk enormously. The ‘mainstream view’ within EA now appears to be that human-level AI will b…

Are you looking for a project where you could substantially improveindoor air quality, with benefits both to general health and reducingpandemic risk? I've writtena bunchaboutairpurifiersover the past few years, and its frustrating how bad commercialmarket is. The most glaring problem is the widespread use of HEPA filters. Theseare very effective f…

First published: May 16th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LeCJqzdHZZB3uBhZg/the-daily-show-did-a-segment-on-ea-and-shrimp-welfare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Americans, we need your help to stop a dangerous AI bill from passing the Senate. What's going on? The House Energy & Commerce Committee included a provision in its reconciliation bill that would ban AI regulation by state and local governments for the next 10 years. Several states have led the way in AI regulation while Congress has dragged its he…

I am Jason Green-Lowe, the executive director of the Center for AI Policy (CAIP). Our mission is to directly convince Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. As I explain in some detail in this post, I think our organization has been doing extremely important work, and that we’ve been doing well at it. Unfortunately, we have been unable to g…

Or on the types of prioritization, their strengths, pitfalls, and how EA should balance them The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the first in a series of posts examining the state of cause prioritization a…

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. Whither cause prioritization and connection with the good? There's a trend towards people who once identified as Effective Altruists now identifying solely as “people working on AI safety.”[1] For those in the loop, it feels like less of a trend and more of a tidal wave. There's an increasing sense that…

I put on a small one-day conference. The cost per attendee was £50 (vs £1.2k for EAGs) and the cost per new connection was £11 (vs £130 for EAGs). intro EA North was a one-day event for the North of England. 35 people showed up on the day. In total, I spent £1765 (≈ $2.4k), including paying myself £20/h for 30h total. This money will be reimbursed …

If you’re interested in having a meaningful EA career but your experience doesn’t match the types of jobs that the typical white collar, intellectual EA community leans towards, then you’re just like me. I have been earning to give as a nuclear power plant operator in Southern Maryland for the past few years, and I think it's a great opportunity fo…

Introduction In this post, I present what I believe to be an important yet underexplored argument that fundamentally challenges the promise of cultivated meat. In essence, there are compelling reasons to conclude that cultivated meat will not replace conventional meat, but will instead primarily compete with other alternative proteins that offer su…

I’m ironically not a very prolific writer. I’ve preferred to stay behind the scenes here and leave the writing to my colleagues who have more of a knack for it. But a goodbye post is something I must write for myself. Perhaps I’m getting old and nostalgic, because what came out wound up being a wander down memory lane. I probably am getting old and…

I recently read a blogpost that concluded with: When I'm on my deathbed, I won't look back at my life and wish I hadworked harder. I'll look back and wish I spent more time with thepeople I loved. Setting aside that some people don't have the economicbreathing room to make this kind of tradeoff, what jumps out at meis the implication that you're no…

I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community. Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discover…

This is a link post. Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the nextfew months, funded by a $3M grant from OpenPhilanthropy. This will allow us to scaleour early-warning system to where we could flag many engineered pathogens earlyenough to mitigate their worst impacts, and also generate large amounts of datato develop, tu…

[Cross-posted from my Substack here] If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achiev…

Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future. Overview Background This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sa…

SUMMARY: ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructur…

Summary In this article, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of five Anima International programs in Poland: improving cage-free and broiler welfare, blocking new factory farms, banning fur farming, and encouraging retailers to sell more plant-based protein. I estimate that together, these programs help roughly 136 animals—or 32 years of farmed anima…

We are excited to share a summary of our 2025 strategy, which builds on our work in 2024 and provides a vision through 2027 and beyond! Background Giving What We Can (GWWC) is working towards a world without preventable suffering or existential risk, where everyone is able to flourish. We do this by making giving effectively and significantly a cul…

Introduction Four years ago, I commissioned as an Officer in the UK's Royal Navy. I had been engaging with EA for four years before that and chose this career as a coherent part of my impact-focused career plan, and I stand by that decision. Early next year, I will leave the Navy. This article is a round-up of why I made my choices, how I think mil…

In our recent strategy retreat, the GWWC Leadership Team recognised that by spreading our limited resources across too many projects, we are unable to deliver the level of excellence and impact that our mission demands. True to our value of being mission accountable, we've therefore made the difficult but necessary decision to discontinue a total o…

I sometimes worry that focus on effectiveness creates perverse incentives in strategic settings, leading us to become less effective. Here are a few observations illustrating this concern. Effectiveness-focused advocacy creates perverse incentives for adversaries When we conduct cage-free campaigns, the target companies frequently ask us why they a…

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. Matt would like to add: "Epistemic status = incomplete speculation; posted here at the Forum team's request" When you ask prominent Effective Altruists about Effective Altruism, you often get responses like these: For context, Will MacAskill and Holden Karnofsky are arguably, literally the number one an…

Last week, I participated in Animal Advocacy Careers’ Impactful Policy Careers programme. Below I’m sharing some reflections on what was a really interesting week in Brussels! Please note I spent just one week there, so take it all with a grain of (CAP-subsidized) salt. Posts like this and this one are probably much more informative (and assume les…

It is standard form in EA to state one's welcomingness of feedback, both in a personal and professional capacity. Individuals and organisations alike often have many means by which you can deliver feedback, whether through anonymous forms or direct communication, and forum posts will often begin or end with: "I'm open to feedback..." "I'm looking f…

Hi, I’m Tandena Wagner. As part of my research for EcoResillience Initiative (an EA organization searching for the best ways to preserve biodiversity into the long-term future), I’ve investigated several common claims that various resource limitations could be disastrous for civilization – ie, that we’re approaching “peak oil”, or imminently runnin…

For immediate release: April 1, 2025 OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization. "After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokes…

Introduction Misaligned AI systems, which have a tendency to use their capabilities in ways that conflict with the intentions of both developers and users, could cause significant societal harm. Identifying them is seen as increasingly important to inform development and deployment decisions and design mitigation measures. There are concerns, howev…

Hi everybody! I'm Conor. I run the 80,000 Hours Job Board. Or I used to. As of today — April 1 — we are becoming Job Birds! We've been talking to users for the last few years about making this change, and people have overwhelmingly been in favour (remember, there are six or more birds for every human on Earth). Whether it's the daily emails asking …

Epistemic status: highly certain, or something The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity. This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supe…

In a recent Wired article about Anthropic, there's a section where Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei, and early employee Amanda Askell seem to suggest there's little connection between Anthropic and the EA movement: Ask Daniela about it and she says, "I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impressio…

How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals By Martin Gould Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy 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. This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my col…

“I” refers to Zach, the Centre for Effective Altruism's CEO. Oscar is CEA's Chief of Staff. We are grateful to all the CEA staff and community members who have contributed insightful input and feedback (directly and indirectly) during the development of our strategy and over many years. Mistakes are of course our own. Exec summary As one CEA, we ar…

After ~7 years, I am stepping away from being the CEO of AIM and will transition to a board member. My current planned last day is December 1st, giving ample time for a smooth transition. As is true for most times a CEO or co-founder leaves an organization, this is for a pretty large variety of reasons. The biggest three are that: 1) AIM is in a st…

Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have see…

Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’l…

TL;DR In a sentence: We are shifting our strategic focus to put our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI, while keeping our existing content up. In more detail: We think it's plausible that frontier AI companies will develop AGI by 2030. Given the significant risks involved, and the fa…

In my past year as a grantmaker in the global health and wellbeing (GHW) meta space at Open Philanthropy, I've identified some exciting ideas that could fill existing gaps. While these initiatives have significant potential, they require more active development and support to move forward. The ideas I think could have the highest impact are: Govern…

Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA's approac…

*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer. I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can so…

Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar. We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overto…

This is a Draft Amnesty Week post. Last year, an EA community member who was scoping out some projects related to diversity and inclusion in EA noted that one challenge was not knowing what had been tried before. I drafted this summary but never got it out the door. The atmosphere around DEI interventions, in the US at least, is different than it w…

Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions. Speaking so…

By Jim Chapman, Linkedin. TL;DR: In 2023, I was a 57-year-old urban planning consultant and non-profit professional with 30 years of leadership experience. After talking with my son about rationality, effective altruism, and AI risks, I decided to pursue a pivot to existential risk reduction work. The last time I had to apply for a job was in 1994.…

This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. Commenting and feedback guidelines: I'm posting this to get it out there. I'd love to see comments that take the ideas forward, but criticism of my argument won't be as useful at this time, in part because I won't do a…

I feel silly writing this up, but it's draft amnesty week. Caveat: I’ve been a visitor to several EA offices but haven’t worked regularly in any of them, and maybe I'm overly nostalgic about reheated felafel. Some EA offices have catered lunch or lunch cooked on the premises every day. This is nice, but not every workplace can afford it. 5+ years a…

For those in the EA community who may not typically engage with politics/government, this is the time to do so. If you are American and/or based in the U.S., reaching out to lawmakers, supporting organizations that are mobilizing on this issue, and helping amplify the urgency of this crisis can make a difference. Why this matters: Millions of lives…