As someone who hires people (I am hiring right now, see bottom of the post), I often get emails asking whether someone should apply for a role I've listed.
If you're considering contacting a hiring manager to ask if you're a good fit for the role, you should just apply.
Why?
Notable exceptions, where you should email:
To be clear, the urge to send an email to check if you should apply is totally normal (I have done it before), and anyone who has done this has nothing to worry about. However, I would strongly recommend applying despite your reservations. You can just do things!
Also, if you want to apply to become Access to Medicines Initiative's Head of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Data, JOB DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATION HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nqOz2a5bTQs5W361G5gpJ3brLEf6xuG0
TLDR: I've updated towards pausing further AI development indefinitely.
When Scott Alexander proposed regulating AI like clinical drugs, many (including myself) balked at this given the sclerosis of FDA or related bodies. Yet HF updates me towards treating frontier AIs as nuclear. There onerous regulation is likely good.
In general, most bureaucratised regulatory regimes are bad. In some cases, like nuclear technology or ensuring planes are safe to fly on, they're welfare improving. It's clear that AI belongs in the latter category.
Also trace inversion is a thing, so you can get open source weights to be roughly similar to that of Fable/Mythos. The slowdown camp were right. At bare minimum, all labs should pause training, further development, and releases indefinitely until we figure out how to align AIs and regulate them (and their use by humans).
I reckon the current capabilities we have now are sufficient for accelerating progress towards curing cancers etc. So my balance has shifted towards minimising the existential risks now.
Pause AI advocates are correct. If governments could coordinate internationally to achieve such (big if), I'd support it. I used to be highly sceptical of doomer arguments, yet Hugging Face is almost a textbook LW scenario and no one knows how to spot or prevent such scheming. Sandboxing, guardrails, constitutions etc. don't work.
I believe there is immense untapped potential in narrative change through the applications of "short-form video marketing tactics" to the Animal Welfare movement.
What do I mean by "short form video marketing tactics".
Specifically I mean clipping campaigns the likes of which have helped launched the career of some of the 2020's most popular musicians including Sombr, Alex Warren, Geese, and Oklou.
Clipping campaigns essentially pay people on a per view basis for tiktok, instagram reel, and youtube shorts. Anyone can create a clipping campaign and usually they use a combination of Adobe After Effects and other video editing software to create a "Narrative Campaign" to bring the creator into the zeitgeist. Plenty of twitch streamers do this too including IShowSpeed who grew to becoming the most watched streamer of all time and performing at the World cup. The beauty of this marketing strategy is that it creates the feeling of "tons of people are posting about this person and its infiltrating my foryoupage so it must be a big deal."
I believe the same could be done for clips from animal rights documentaries that highlight the atrocities of factory farming conditions. One example is this video with over 9k upvotes on r/moralityscaling showing a U.S. Factory Farm: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoralityScaling/comments/1w22qlo/morality_of_the_us_factory_farm_practices/
The beauty of a clipping campaign is you're essentially creating an incentive for video editors from around the world to find the best ways to bring the content to the forefront of people's fyp. I understand awareness is not the epitome of change, but I do wonder if people would care as much about Israel and Gaza if there was no short-form photo or video of the situation.
I think short-form video has heavily contributed to people on the right and left shifting their political positions on the issue.
What's a good heuristic for knowing if you're being self-sacrificial to the point of negative returns for the thing you're being self-sacrificial for? I'm interested in things people have actually used and found to work in practice, either for themselves or others.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for the question and sorry for the slow reply.
The overall process was to combine two estimates of THL's cost-effectiveness through weighting them in a Guesstimate model, along with some assumptions about the speed-up time of the intervention and the marginal cost-effectiveness relative to the past average cost-effectiveness.
The more detailed steps were:
1. Gather two estimates: THL review by ACE from 2025, wherein cage-free work has an estimated 2 to 44 hens affected per dollar (best guess of 11); THL self-published report from 2025, which reports 2 hens freed per dollar spent between 2015 and 2024.
2. Make assumptions: The THL self-published report was conservative in that it didn't include a counterfactual speed up assumption. So, we assumed that the interventions THL carried out each affected 6 to 15x as many hens than reported on average through speeding up the timelines to hens becoming cage-free. Then, since the marginal cost-effectiveness in 2026 is probably much less than the average cost-effectiveness from 2015-2024, we discounted the resulting THL self-reported estimate by 70%. This is a rough guess.
3. In a Guesstimate model, I combined the two estimates (giving equal weight to each) to get an overall estimate of THL's cost-effectiveness on the margin (caveat below). (The ACE estimate was encoded as a lognormal distribution between 2 and 44 hens/$, which had a mean of 14 which is slightly better than their best-guess, which could be a median or mean, I'm not sure). This produced an estimate of 10 (3.6 to 29) hens/$. The method isn't perfect, since these estimates might not be independent so the variance could be artificially reduced, but for our initial version, we felt it was a good enough estimate (other factors matter more to the CCF).
Upon looking back, I realize that I made a typo in the methodology -- it should be 3.6 to 29 chickens per dollar spent, not 3.6 to 22. So thanks for pointing my attention to this! I've now fixed it.
On the more important question, I agree that the marginal cost-effectiveness is definitely the important question, and I'd like to have this. However, the best estimates we could find for the first version of the CCF were for average cost-effectiveness of past spending. We plan to improve upon these estimates in the future, such as through considering more evidence. If you know of any good marginal cost-effectiveness estimates, or other cost-effectiveness estimates, please do link them below!
Hope this is helpful! Also, I'll look into how to change the settings so you can copy text, I'm not sure why it's like that
Thank you for writing this, Tom and Rocky. I think this is an important caution, and I appreciate the way you are framing it.
As someone directly involved in a welfare-tech-style intervention, I actually agree with much of your core argument. I also strongly believe that good tech interventions can be extremely impactful, partly for some of the reasons you outline: they can sometimes bypass certain barriers that exist for other welfare work, and they can make it possible to help very large numbers of animals relatively quickly. But I also agree that, when looked at from the outside, they can be falsely perceived as silver bullets, so I want to share three insights from SWP about electrical stunning for shrimp.
I’ve also posted a more direct response to “Animal Welfare Has an Evidence Problem,” which you refer to in the post, to clarify some of these points.
First, at SWP, our work on shrimp stunning has been much more complex than simply deploying stunners at scale. The Humane Slaughter Initiative does involve getting electrical stunning equipment used on farms, but in practice, we are doing much more than that: coordinating and funding welfare research and R&D, collecting field data, working with scientists, developing and refining slaughter protocols, iterating on the technology with existing equipment providers, negotiating with industry, engaging corporate stakeholders, building and maintaining producer relationships, training staff, educating farmers… Much of this work is not visible from the surface, but it’s central to making the intervention possible. The tech matters, but it does not operate in a vacuum.
Second, on shrimp stunning specifically, I think you captured something important. SWP entered this space aware that there were uncertainties, and we’ve been proactively trying to reduce them. Some of that work is public, but much of it happens through industry collaborations, field implementation, and producer relationships, which are often necessarily behind closed doors or covered by NDAs. That can make the work less visible from the outside, even though it is central to what we are doing.
This is one reason I think treating our intervention too simplistically, as merely putting stunners on farms, can lead to exactly the kind of disillusionment and backlash you describe.
Third, I feel some of the issues you describe are not limited to tech interventions. Many ambitious attempts to change existing systems seem to have an early phase where progress looks relatively fast, followed by a harder phase where problems become more complex, uncertainty can increase, coordination costs become bigger, and resistance from affected stakeholders becomes stronger. That does not necessarily mean the intervention – tech or otherwise – was a mistake; it can be a natural progression of an ambitious project.
Thanks again for writing this! It’s an important reminder that welfare tech can be genuinely promising and, in some cases, extremely impactful, but it should not be treated as a silver bullet.
I think that this diagnosis is basically on target; it points to something that seems relatively under-resourced, despite some focus by think tanks, and something that the major AIxBio safety groups are not as focused on. I also agree that we don't know if AGI will subsume this, and that it's plausible but uncertain if other bottlenecks matter more, but that's an uncertainty we can't resolve without simply waiting for the outcomes, and so this seems very high value in expectation.
I'm less certain about the object level questions, and don't have strong intuitions - so I think that conditional on not hearing from someone more informed about this that there are additional questions or concerns, or literature you should look at, the best way to figure out whether this is needed, and what the risk is, is to start the work - good luck, and I'd be happy to chat about this more!
"Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy." -- Dwarkesh Patel
...Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: It’s a major warning shot, and might be the last one we get
This week, METR and Redwood Research published the report on...
Compared to the reward hacks we know of from just six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.
That's scary. What do you think the mechanism would be? Here are some options:
It seems like most of these options would not be available in the next 6 months.
Across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), millions of children attend school but learn very little. The vast majority do not even learn to read by age ten. This is not a marginal issue; it is one of the most binding constraints to global development. Without being able to read, it is nearly impossible for individuals to acquire employability skills, navigate public health guidance, h...
I find your article interesting but believe I am slightly biased as I find the topic of education endlessly fascinating. Curious if you've heard of the work over at the Center for Education Progress and if you've read The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley
This post summarizes a new preprint on alternative proteins from the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab: New alternatives, same orders. We investigated 19...
I believe there is immense untapped potential in narrative change through the applications of "short-form video marketing tactics" to the Animal Welfare movement.
What do I mean by "short form video marketing tactics".
Specifically I mean clipping campaigns the likes of which have helped launched the career of some of the 2020's most popular musicians including Sombr, Alex Warren, Geese, and Oklou.
Clipping campaigns essentially pay people on a per view basis for tiktok, instagram reel, and youtube shorts. Anyone can create a clipping campaign and usually they use a combination of Adobe After Effects and other video editing software to create a "Narrative Campaign" to bring the creator into the zeitgeist. Plenty of twitch streamers do this too including IShowSpeed who grew to becoming the most watched streamer of all time and performing at the World cup. The beauty of this marketing strategy is that it creates the feeling of "tons of people are posting about this person and its infiltrating my foryoupage so it must be a big deal."
I believe the same could be done for clips from animal rights documentaries that highlight the atrocities of factory farming conditions. One example is this video with over 9k upvotes on r/moralityscaling showing a U.S. Factory Farm: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoralityScaling/comments/1w22qlo/morality_of_the_us_factory_farm_practices/
The beauty of a clipping campaign is you're essentially creating an incentive for video editors from around the world to find the best ways to bring the content to the forefront of people's fyp. I understand awareness is not the epitome of change, but I do wonder if people would care as much about Israel and Gaza if there was no short-form photo or video of the situation.
I think short-form video has heavily contributed to people on the right and left shifting their political positions on the issue.
Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Revisiting a prediction ten months early
On Jan 14th, I made predict...
"the calendar time it takes a large team of humans to do a task might be a better proxy for “intrinsic difficulty” than the time it takes one human working alone."
This seems to be on something very important and general! Most of history in parallel, not in series.
WorkStream Nonprofit is a nonprofit dedicated to removing operations bottlenecks to impact. We’re an operations support organization for mission-driven nonprofits. Most of our work is hands-on: back office operations + fractional COO work, financial management, hiring support, and operations training and coaching.
GRIP, our Growth Readiness Improvement Program, is a program we developed in 2025 to make that impact more accessible: it’s a lightweight diagnostic and improvement program de...
I agree to an extent-- building redundancies into systems and institutional memory is both important and a luxury for resource-strapped orgs. Nonetheless, if an org has experienced a notable process improvement that they then lose upon employee turnover, they will likely be motivated to add capacity back to cover that lost process. This experience with process improvement may well inform the qualities they look for in their next hire. So still very much a net gain along the organizational maturity ladder!
The Affective Ceiling Approach is a structured, evidence-based way of estimating the highest intensity of Pain that members of a species could plausibly experience, using human affective intensity categories as explicit reference points.
This post is the third in a short series about sentience, ceilings of Pain and Pleasure intensity (‘affective ceiling’, or ‘affective capacity’), and how to make interspecific welfare comparisons more explicit without creating false preci...
Update, August 2026: We have revised the title and some terminology in this post to place greater emphasis on the Affective Ceiling Approach, which is the underlying scientific contribution, rather than on its current implementation as a Custom GPT. We have also renamed the tool the Affective Ceiling GPT.
These are changes in framing and naming. They do not alter the post’s substantive claims, evidence, reasoning or conclusions.
The Custom GPT is an experimental and temporary way of making the approach available. The Affective Ceiling Approach is independent of that particular platform and can be applied by researchers directly or implemented through other, more capable tools as they are developed.
Yesterday, Shreyas published their “meander around the topic of altruism” whose aim is to “describe [their] complicated opinion on altruism”. The piece starts:
The earlier draft was a long-winded diatribe against effective altruism (EA) […] I softened my stance after a chat I had with an hardcore effective altruist.
As the ‘hardcore effective altruist’ who cha...
EA is a “pseudo-religion” is not flattering.
Whether they are called "religions" or "moral ideologies," if we want to promote the moral evolution of society, we must acknowledge the fact that we need to construct symbolic content capable of influencing psychologically a growing number of people to adopt sacrificial attitudes in the sense of benevolence and altruism... and this will only be effective if those acting feel emotionally rewarded by it. So-called "compassionate religions" represented enormous progress in this direction in the past. Reflecting on this could pull the EA movement out of its current stagnation. The great value of altruistic behavior is that it offers a rationalization of altruistic behavior detached from the irrational constraints of religious and political traditions.
I do think it is immoral that I do not increase my percentage donations. Is this incoherent or hypocritical? Maybe. But as of now, I am comfortable with this ‘level of immorality’
Whether someone feels comfortable with a particular style of behavior is a consequence of that person's social and emotional conditioning. What factors could make the greatest possible number of people feel comfortable engaging in the greatest possible amount of altruistic action? That should be the primary focus now of those who advocate for the rationalization of altruistic behavior.
A person donating 10% for forty years, helping neighbours, caring for family, making art and being a decent colleague might do considerably more good than someone who spends three years trying to become morally optimal, burns out, becomes a husk, and never wants to hear the word altruism again.
But a person who could dedicate their life to altruistic work (at 30%, 40%, or 90%) and also derive emotional fulfillment, inner peace, and affection from it—similar to how millions of people have experienced it within the traditional (and irrational) altruistic ideologies of the past (and which are still languishing today)—would accomplish far more good than the cognitively unmotivated conservative.
Evolution is "copy plus modification." Denying the evidence of the cultural changes that may yet come is pure superstition, the very opposite of what EA aims to be. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uaGR6yhpEmdtgncuZ/altruism-and-minority-influence
How impactful would it be to copies of @Garrison's new book Obsolete to elected officials who belong to its political target audience (Dems, particularly left ones) and might not have been responsive to traditional x-risk-centric comms (e.g. IABIED)?