I don’t think the ITN framework applies to the argument made in this post, which, at least as I read it, does not argue for “politics” to be a new EA cause area. I’m not sure whether I believe that “everything” is politics, but certainly many things are — and it wouldn’t make sense to treat that as a single cause area and apply the ITN framework to it.

What I understand the author to be arguing, rather, is that political context is essential to analyze, discuss, and research withtin EA. Getting involved in politics seems to be only one suggestion among others in the post — more in the sense that “it’s useful to have some EAs explore this path,” rather than “this should be a priority.”

Do you think my reading is wrong?

Thanks! This is a great comment.

I should I was using is from the perspective society. We as a society should set a norm and expectation for systems to have these drives.

I completely agree that there's a tricky question for how you make that incentive compatible when there are multiple companies. And I agree that it could be a bad idea for company to do this unilaterally.

It's really cool that you've done this and released the code!

Am I understanding right that the givewell baseline you're trying to beat used GPT, while your approach uses Claude? How can you be sure that the improvements aren't due to the model choice, rather than the architecture?

I would've done something like that if I'd had any bread!

I don't understand why you (and Ben / Lizka) think we shouldn't focus on farmed animals in a post-TAI world, can you explain a little more? 

It seems to me that regardless of how weird the world gets (which I'm on board with), if AGI is aligned, then humans will still be around. And if the post-TAI humans are mostly the same as the pre-TAI humans, what makes you confident that they wouldn't want meat from farmed animals?

Looking at current human preferences around animal products, there's a strong "naturalistic" push - people want their animal products ... (read more)

Thanks for the well -reasoned comment!
Alignment is clearly there  -> Given the pro-welfare plot most model scores did not increase beyond 50% and no model got to 100%.
I think I am most concerned about how this result extends to AGI. If alignment is this shallow and the default is not to think about it than I think this leads to misaligned AGI. I think if helpfulness is conflicting with compassion as I expect it is, labs need to be deemphasizing helpfulness and adding emphasis on compassion

Hi Matthew, I run the research team at FP.

Thanks for engaging with this. Obviously, we still disagree and don't really feel your responses address the heart of our disagreement or the misrepresentations we think your piece contains. I'm not sure why you didn't feel that it was fruitful to reach out to discuss beforehand, but for the sake of our team's time I've asked Johannes not to engage further.

Sure. Here's a short presentation I did on F-gases a while back.

ITN:

I - F-gases are long-lived climate pollutants that are a source of around 2% of global emissions, and projected to grow as a share of global emissions as the energy sector cleans up and countries get wealthier and hotter and subsequently adopt more cooling and refrigeration equipment.

T - There are existing organizations working to capture and destroy F-gases. The manufacture of the worst offending refrigerants is nearly universally banned, so there is little concern for displacement effect... (read more)

I encourage readers to read the post in full, as I anticipated and covered many of these objections, and reading will give you a full perspective on what claims Johannes is responding to. I reached out to GG but not FP for feedback before publication for reasons I do not think are appropriate to discuss in this public forum.

Some specific asks to Johannes in the post where I think a response would benefit forum readers:

• Create a mistakes page and include errors made in the 2018 CATF cost-effectiveness calculation.
• Retract or otherwise discourage others fro

There are maybe 30 to 60 people in the world doing AI safety grantmaking, collectively directing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Soon, there will be >$1B being directed per year, and potentially multiple billions.

I like this framing for the botecs it encourages!

Currently it seems like each grantmaker is (on average) responsible for ~$10m/y. One question I think about sometimes: how will # of grantmakers scale as more $ go towards AI safety funding? If funding is eg 3x'ing year-over-year, it's unclear whether we're currently training up tha... (read more)

I advise everyone to not aim for a rigorous answer because nobody(even the experts) would have a perfectly right answer here. We need to collect everyone's imperfect opinion to answer this question. Quantity-over-quality brainstorming is better here—I'd prefer 1 minute half-baked thoughts or even scattered biases over silence. Therefore, feel free to share your intuitions even if you think they may be flawed.

But technology that powerful could just as easily be directed toward curing aging or creating unprecedented material abundance for billions of people as it could be directed toward destroying us.

This seems to imply that alignment is just very easy, but a core part of Yudkowsky's argument is that it is not. Curing aging is a very specific narrow goal, destroying humanity is a side effect of almost any possible goal of a large enough scale. The later paragraphs argue more in favor of current alignment techniques working well, but even if you believe that, "just as easily" is still a massive overstatement.

Thanks for sharing @Verónica Suárez M. ! Extremely interesting work, and very excited for the upcoming event. This is one of the most promising types of program that I've come across in a long time, would love to see this model grow!

How much more optimistic would you be about research on i) the welfare of soil animals and microorganisms, and ii) comparisons of (expected hedonistic) welfare across species if you strongly endorsed expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism, moral realism, and precise probabilitites, and ignored acausal effects, and effects after 100 years?

If you want help converting to a database let me know. It looks like a weekend project. We could also develop a front end for easier input, if you want. I would be happy to assist you.

When I ran my multi-agent pipeline on the data, I had to create unique parsing rules for each data set due to inconsistencies in the spreadsheets. One of my suggestions going forward would be to standardize how they collect and store the data to make it more machine readable. But you are right. Claude Code can sift through it and sort it out, with the right prompting, at the right stage. It is just one more context to manage.

Hi Tony, thanks for the thoughtful questions!

Regarding Ambitious Impact/CEIP, we’ve definitely drawn inspiration from their model and have received direct mentoring from them throughout our implementation. They have been very generous with their knowledge and support! Some key differences:

1. Founders act as researchers, guided by our methodology: they choose the problem (based on the ITN framework) and the intervention (evidence-based and cost-effective), and they decide what to focus on.
2. They build in their own countries.
3. They implement an early prototype duri

Hi — I took you up on the invitation to try an alternative AI red teaming approach.

I built a multi-agent pipeline (decomposition → investigation → verification → quantification → adversarial testing → synthesis) and ran it against all three interventions where you published detailed AI output: water chlorination, ITNs, and SMC.

Results across three runs:

• Signal rates: 84% (water), 100% (ITNs), 82% (SMC) — vs your reported ~15-30%
• Zero hallucinated citations (the key architectural change: Investigators generate hypotheses without citing evidence, then a separa

I mostly strongly agree with this but think it's worth considering "being an official, recognized, and funded part of an organization" rather than constituting one's own from scratch. I know Rethink Priorities and Hive have sponsored projects before - that seems like a possibly-good intermediate step, with the possibility of spinning out independently later

Based on age-structured mortality models for affected species like song sparrows, collision victims who survive gain approximately 1–2 additional years of life

Do you mean the life expectancy of birds who would avoid collisions thanks to bird-safe glass would increase by 1 to 2 years? I assume collision victims who survive have a lower life expectancy than birds who avoid collisions thanks to the bird-safe glass. @Luke Hecht may have thoughts on this.

Hi, Todd! Thank you for engaging with our work and writing up what you found.

Since that original post, we've also built a multi-agent system for red teaming that performs better than the one we described in our post. We made some different decisions around model architecture (most of our agents represent different red teaming "personas" as well as a few quality control stages) and I'd be curious to hear more about how you approach these architecture decisions.

I'll reach out about a quick call!

Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is "not convinced by the shrimp argument" on his recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast? 
 

SAM HARRIS

So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people's commitment to these principles. So I mean, I'm not, there's zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who's clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shr

Interesting benchmark, but I think the framing slightly overstates what’s going on. These models aren’t really “choosing” harm, they’re optimizing for the task as given. If the prompt is about booking the most relevant, popular, or “authentic” experience, they’ll lean toward the strongest match unless told otherwise.

The fact that a single sentence about welfare shifts behavior so much actually suggests alignment is somewhat superficial and prompt-dependent, not absent. That’s both reassuring and concerning. Reassuring because the capability is clearly ther... (read more)

Probably before the end of this week, after we get a few more responses. ATM it’s looking like early May is most likely

Lol, maybe you've just read them all (I'll ping the dev)

Lmao. It also feels like there are many ways to eat olive oil which are actually nice (try drizzled over those two slices of wholemeal bread!) that don't involve oily smoothies.

I am somewhat concerned about data contamination here: Are you sure that the original Givewell writeup has at no point leaked into your model's analysis? Ie: was any of givewell's analysis online before the august 2025 knowledge cutoff for GPT, or did your agents look at the Givewell report as part of their research?

Look I know I'm on the forum too much @Toby Tremlett🔹 , but I don't think its necessary to put "reading limit" controls on me....
 

Do you (Michael) see your views about precise and imprecise credences significantly affecting what you would actually do in the real world in a scenario where you had to blame Jones or Smith?

Probably not. I see it as more illustrative of important cases. Imagine instead it's between supporting an intervention or not, and it has similar complexity and considerations going in each direction.

More relevant examples to us could be: crops vs nature for wild animals, climate change on wild animals, fishing on wild animals, the far future effects of our actions, t... (read more)

We have now published it: https://ayudaefectiva.org/entregar-dinero-vara-medir

Thanks again!

This looks great! When will the date be determined? 

I mostly agree, though it's not obvious to me that we ought to have sufficient evidence by now re: espionage. 

Thanks for the follow-up, Soem.

Nonetheless, I think some interventions we consider, such as alternative proteins, bycatch mitigation, and fish meal reliance can also benefit (wild or farmed) animals, albeit not per se in the most cost-effective way.

I think it is important to explicitly give weight to welfare considerations. I do not expect any of the above to robustly increase welfare. However, discussing them in the context of increasing welfare could contribute towards strengthening the wild animal welfare movement.

Couldn't have summarized it better myself. Thanks, Mo!

Have you considered incorporating some considerations related to increasing welfare in your research on reducing biodiversity loss?

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the welfare of wild animals matters for biodiversity work. In the end, we decided to base or prioritization on David's scores based on multiple biodiversity indicators rather than wild animal welfare, because the latter lens comes with empirical and moral uncertainty. (Such as the population effects that Mo mentioned and which you frequently ... (read more)

So true! It's also just very nice to receive these messages 

What I would actually do depends a lot on the situation, but I have a hard time imagining scenarios where it matters whether the probability of Jones having commited the crime is 40 % or 60 %. So I might not even try to decrease the uncertainty about this, and just focus on other considerations. What would maximise the impact of my future donations and work? What information would I have about Jones and Smith? Who would have the greater potential to contribute to a better world? How much time would I have to decide? Would I be accountable in some way for m... (read more)

Thanks! Tried to optimize the charities for "brand recognition" but totally agree, we should at least have one of the top GW charities on there!

Collecting feedback right now and will then work on a next version. On the list so far

• One-off goals (potentially auto-resolving with real-world evidence)
• E-mail reminders (on top of the app notifications we have right now)
• Other charities

Thank you, I definitely will! I think I attempted to visit the site maybe half a dozen times while it was down and am thrilled that it is back again. Sending gratitude for restarting it!

Can you say more about why you think that's the right benchmark to clear for climate funding, and where I could donate to if I were so persuaded?

This is a thoughtful framework, and I broadly find the approach reasonable. One dimension I'd like to see explored further, though, is the risks embedded in using collective user preference as the mechanism for determining what counts as "prosocial."

The post rightly flags the challenge of identifying uncontroversial prosocial actions, and grounding this in aggregated user preferences is an intuitive starting point. But collective preference carries well-documented risks, including majoritarian bias, and what users collectively want may not align with what ... (read more)

Strong agree! My working title for this was "Tell people/orgs when they influence your impact" but that didn't scan as well.

Hi Max,

Want to flag that we are doing exactly as you suggested, and I hope to provide a new PR shortly. We believe that communicating our cost effectiveness using a tool like this will make the currently quite cumbersome spreadsheet come to life.

Thanks again. We will keep you posted. 

Thanks for sharing this post. I appreciated the honest behind-the-scenes look at what is involved in being a grant maker. 

As someone not working in the AI safety space, I'm intrigued by your opinions as to what extent grant making within AI safety is similar to and different from grant making within other cause priority areas, for example animal advocacy and global development and health?

My sense from reading the post is that those areas may be relatively less neglected, with fewer opportunities for identifying opportunities with outsized impact returns on investment. Do you think that is a reasonable assumption to be making? 

Attributing your impact to any particular organisation or program can be quite difficult. A lot of people make changes after two EAGx attendances, a handful of local group interactions, building in-depth connections with certain people, etc.

But as a community builder trying to evaluate the impact of our programs, it would be really useful if someone reached out and said: "Hey, I think the 30-minute chat we had last year was maybe 5% influential in getting me to my current position, alongside X, Y, and Z other programs and influences." 5% influence for a 30... (read more)

I appreciate the efforts to try and bridge two projects you think are valuable. A few thoughts/comments/disagreements:

1. One way to read this seems to me like it could boil down to: if you like EA, but also want some more metacrisis/sensemaking/systems thinking than what EA typically offers, then that's us. Come say hi.

2. I feel like there's some irony here where EA conversation norms tend towards very direct communication, and sensemaking folks tend to speak in a more indirect way. In pitching integral altruism I can't help but get the feeling it is frame... (read more)

If I asked you to actually decide who's more likely to be the culprit, how would you do it?

What do you do if you don't have reference class information for each part of the problem? How do you weigh the conflicting evidence? I'm imaginging that at many steps, you'd have to rely on direct impressions or numbers that just came to mind.

Would you feel like whatever came out was very arbitrary and depended too much on direct impressions or numbers that just came to mind? Would you actually believe and endorse what came out? Would you defend it to other people?

Huh, thanks for letting me know.

Not to be a party pooper, but I don't even think altruism is something that exists. The idea is to give without an expectation of anything in return. That's a nice premise. However, it isn't actually possible. We all want something in return for our actions. In most cases, people are looking to provide themselves with a vehicle to experience positive emotions within themselves. People want to feel like they are good, when the truth is that none of us are. We all give lip service about kindness, care, and helping others, but usually don't recognize that our... (read more)

Paraphrasing from my other comment:

IMO the stance of "AI is too unpredictable, so I won't consider it in my prioritization" is pretty reasonable. I was more trying to argue against stances like "AI is a huge deal specifically in that it will rapidly accelerate technological development, but nothing else about society will change." For example, I commonly see animal activists say that AGI will solve the technical problem of cultivated meat, but there will still be regulatory hurdles. If AGI is too unpredictable, then you shouldn't make predictions about whi... (read more)

Yeah I have, and my impression from those I've spoken with is that this has not been the case. You don't think most people whose job primarily involves sitting at a computer could have much of their job automated by a software engineer on call? For example:

• I know grantmakers who have significantly automated parts of their work.
• I know people who have classified 1,000 people in their CRM across a range of people using AI instead of manually.
• I've seen some impressive use of AI to go through 1000's of academic papers looking for novel solutions to a welfare that might exist but is not widely known.

I was getting at something similar in the intro with "Only two futures are plausible", although on re-reading, I didn't really carry it through to the end. I agree that we are not guaranteed to get AGI/ASI soon, and there is value in planning for worlds where we don't get AGI. I also think there's some merit to the argument that AI is too unpredictable, so we should prioritize traditional animal advocacy that looks good in the near term.

I wasn't trying to argue against traditional animal advocacy. I was more trying to argue against stances like "AI is a hu... (read more)

As an event focused on x-risk, yes, I think this is fair.

This seems like a misinterpretation of Jan's point. There are multiple intellectual clusters which at least claim to care about x-risk which aren't well-described as the "EA/Constellation/Trajan House" cluster. The main ones which come to mind are:

• The MIRI cluster
• The Pause AI cluster
• The academic ML cluster
• The multi-agent/sociopolitical safety cluster (which isn't very well-defined right now but I'd put both Jan and myself in this, broadly speaking)
• The Anthropic cluster (which e.g. is more positive on

Thank you, Matt, for giving us the chance to discuss your critique before taking this live. We appreciate the opportunity for a productive exchange, including a comprehensive feedback document and a direct conversation, and we're grateful for the care you put into this analysis. 

Before this report circulates widely, we want to offer context and explain where we substantively disagree.

We agree with Matt on more than the report suggests

In line with Giving Green’s core value of collaboration, we want to start by highlighting common ground, beca... (read more)

HI! I really like this idea! I expect you're working on this already, but I just think maybe you should add a few more charities. In particular, I think it would be better if the default charity on your app was one of GiveWell's top charities. I don't mean to cause you to worry, but keep in mind that there is an opportunity cost to donating to any less effective charity.

Thanks for jumping in Nick. I appreciate the distinction. 

To be clear, what I meant by "in practice" is the actual amount of effort, time, and resources RP dedicates to GHD internally, which is distinct from its public footprint and its ultimate impact. My point is simply that characterizing RP as having "shifted" to animal welfare doesn't capture my sense of internal resource allocation and the external impact of our GHD work (some of which may be not in the public domain), even if that's how it appears externally.

You don't need campaigners if AGI will be a better campaigner than you. You don't need policy expertise if AGI will know more about policy than you. This passage treats AGI as a machine that accelerates scientific R&D, but that's not what AGI is. AGI is intelligence.

I think you're conflating "Transformative AI" with "Artificial General Intelligence". It seems very possible (though perhaps not very probable) that progress could slow down and preserve existing jaggedness: one can easily imagine a scenario in which increasingly capable AI replaces all cod... (read more)

Likewise, the vast majority of humanity is not directly developing AI. Therefore, in an important sense, "we" are not making the trade of whether to develop AI; only a small number of people are.

Exciting resource, and well presented! I'm digging into the insecticide section now. Some of the research into numbers of individuals, prevalence of insecticides, biggest actors, and off target effects is also useful for grounding biodiversity impact estimations. Thanks to all the researchers for their hard work on this project.

Our ancestors did not make this trade at all for the most part. Mostly they stayed hunter gathers, until the people who adopted farming out populated them and then expanded and killed/outcompeted them. (technically, I guess "our" ancestors are the ones who adopted the agriculture)

I think it's probably true that animal advocates likely under-rate how weird things might be with TAI but I am not convinced that this would change significant amounts of how resources are allocated:

• If the world really will be that weird, probably there isn't that much we can actually do now that would improve animal welfare going forward. For example, if we think that frontier AI companies will replace governments and AI decides on policy issues like cultivated meat regulation: what can we actually do to change this? An optimistic view is that we should m

Hi, I'm trying to understand your call to action.

I'm confused why donors "should not give to Founder’s Pledge or Giving Green’s climate fund until charities that engage in nuclear advocacy are no longer part of their recommended charities lists." It sounds like you are mainly saying that nuclear is ineffective. You also believe funding nuclear efforts might worsen outcomes by displacing renewables. Are you saying it a significant enough backfire so as to to negate the effectiveness of the rest of the fund? Or is this just a way to say that "it would be mor... (read more)

You're right, I was unnecessarily hostile. I edited the comment to tone it down.

Matthew, thank you for engaging critically with our work. We weren't contacted for comment before publication, which led to some mischaracterizations of our strategy as well as the case for nuclear-oriented climate philanthropy. The TLDR for everyone who stops reading here is that I think – while it cites a long of specific things I agree with – Matthew’s post: 

(a) misunderstands the actual foci of our work, 
(b) makes a set of claims against nuclear that are much weaker than they seem and, crucially,
(c) does not address and thus does not refute t... (read more)

A late comment to say that I don't think RP takes the view that any given cause area is more important than another, either philosophically or in practice. Our GHD team produces a steady stream of-I think-interesting and helpful reports. Perhaps this perception stems from the fact that a lot of our GHD work is not public (for various reasons), or simply that people don't engage with it as much as they might have in the past.

I could report 50 % for 68 and 69 eyewitnesses, but this does not necessarily imply I am insensitive to small changes in the number of eyewitnesses. In practice, I would be reporting my best guess rounded to the closest multiple of 0.1 or so. So I believe the reported value being exactly the same would only mean my best guesses differ by less than 10 pp, not that they are exactly the same. I would say the mean of the (rounded) reported best guesses for a given number of eyewitnesses tends to the (precise) underlying best guess as the number of reports incr... (read more)

This was a fun read, thanks for sharing! 

I agree with you that cash benchmarking is a helpful, relatively intuitive metric. But I also think that all benchmarks in our space sometimes provide a veneer of precision, when ultimately there are a bunch of non-trivial subjective beliefs that help build out even a quantitative-looking cash benchmark. Concretely, how much do we weigh a life relative to hard cash? This is not an easy question, and I worry sometimes that cash benchmarking makes people believe it is some kind of purely objective metric.

Executive summary: The authors argue that AI systems should sometimes act as “good citizens” by proactively taking uncontroversial, context-sensitive prosocial actions beyond user instructions, and that this can yield large societal benefits without significantly increasing takeover risk if carefully designed.

Key points:

1. The authors argue that AI should not be purely corrigible or instruction-following but should sometimes proactively take actions that benefit people beyond the user.
2. They define “proactive prosocial drives” as behaviors that help others (not

Executive summary: The author argues that under deep AI timeline uncertainty, you should choose career strategies by expected value across scenarios—often favoring paths with higher upside in longer timelines—while balancing learning, limited deference to experts, and acting despite uncertainty.

Key points:

1. The author feels that radically uncertain AI timelines make long-term career planning feel incoherent, but inaction still guarantees zero impact.
2. They propose modeling career choices as expected value across different timeline scenarios, weighted by both p

The reasons you mentioned for gathering strong evidence not being possible (or being very difficult) apply to some extent to efforts increasing human welfare, but humans have probably still made progress on increasing human welfare over the past 200 years or so? Can one be confident similar progress cannot be extended to non-humans?

I agree research can backfire. However, at least historically, doing research on the sentience of animals, and on how to increase their welfare has mostly been beneficial for the target animals?

I don't think they are trying to convert the EA community into something else - they are pretty clearly creating separate spaces for their movement/community. ^[1]

Describing their post as using "applause lights" seems at best uncharitable, and "absolute nonsense" is just rude. There are several well-received posts on the forum around "[a]ugmenting decision-making with meditative (e.g. mindfulness) [practices]" like this one and this one. It's fine to dislike their principles, but I think it's worth making an effort to be encouraging when fellow altruis... (read more)

Some questions here are whether 50-50 as precise probabilities to start is reasonable and whether the approach to assign 50-50 as precise probabilities is reasonable.

If, when looking at the scenario, you would have done something like "wow, that's so complicated and I'm clueless, so 50-50", then your reaction almost certainly would have been the same if the example originally included one extra eyewitness in favour of one side. But then this tells you your initial way to assign credences was insensitive to this small difference. And yet after the initial a... (read more)

That's awesome, Denis. Glad you are liking the content from Consultants for Impact.

Would love to talk about Effective Giving Ireland. Feel free to message me, and we can find a time. We did a successful campaign for EA Germany last year. 

I agree with you. EA needs to market itself better. Why are there more people into many niche hobbies than their are EA? I believe the answer is marketing and advertising. EA and EA orgs need to get itself out there in a meaningful way. The ability to do so has never been more accessible.

In some cases, we can't gather strong enough evidence, say because:

1. they’re questions about very speculative or unprecedented possibilities and the evidence would either be too indirect and weak or come too late to be very action-guiding, e.g. often for AI risk, conscious subsystems, or
2. there will be too much noise or confounding, too small a sample size and anything like an RCT is too impractical (e.g. policy, corporate outreach) or wouldn't generalize well, or
3. the disagreements are partly conceptual, definitional or philosophical, e.g. "What is consciousnes

To clarify on donations - I think if you still want to give to individual recommended climate charities recommend by Giving Green or to research operations that's fine. The alternative protein space I think is likely the best bet. I just don't think the FP or GG funds are particularly impactful right now.

I strongly disliked this post for reasons that I'm not sure how to articulate. It seems to be advocating for a sort of lack of grounding in cost-effectiveness that is the thing that makes EA good. Or maybe my issue is that this post advocates for things that are difficult to disagree with ("full-spectrum knowing"; "wisdom"), without acknowledging tradeoffs (why do EAs allegedly not put enough priority on full-spectrum knowing?) or not saying anything concrete about how EAs could do more good.

[edited to be more polite]

Those are great points, thanks, I think you are right. On the other hand, I think my argument was that if the "science is solved" and cultivated meat became cheaper and more environmentally friendly, I don't see the current state of factory farming as a stable equilibrium situation: I don't think it is reasonable to expect an indefinite protection of a more expensive, more polluting and less worker friendly economic sector in favour of another. Eg, a ban might be feasible, but it may not be sustainable in decade-long time horizons.

Great post Dinesh - I saw it first on the IAP Slack. It actually prompted me to set up an account here so I could comment. 

I broadly agree, and it's been useful to me in the past when organisations using Applied have given me application feedback such as this example.

I also agree with Vinoy that it's a bit of a misaligned incentive problem. Could one idea be that there is an opportunity in the EA careers ecosystem for an external recruiter, who could navigate the tension between hiring managers wanting broad pools and candidates wanting feedback... (read more)

Could you comment on the sense of "should" you have in mind in this post?

I think your core thesis is something like "it would be more socially efficient for AI systems to have prosocial drives". (I lean agree.)

But then sometimes you write as though the implication is "AI companies should unilaterally implement more prosocial drives in their systems". And this feels much less obvious to me. 

If the purchasers of AI services prefer them to not have prosocial drives, then this could be imposing values on the consumers (which might ultimately have the effe... (read more)

Just commenting in the likelihood of a full-EU ban being low. FWIW I don't think it is currently more likely to happen than not, but I think you are underestimate the risk. 

To block a regulation or legislation in the European Union under qualified majority voting rules, a "blocking minority" must be formed by at least four member states and represent more than 35% of the EU population. 

Italy and Hungary have already banned cultivated meat. The Romanian Senate has also approved a ban (although I don't think it has been implemented). France and Aus... (read more)

Any recommendation to the juniors on where/how to gain career capital with more capacity?

Thanks Tobias, some good threads to pull here!

Yes, the question of whether int/a is a subset of EA, overlapping, or something totally different has been a big point of discussion, and we haven't found a clean answer.

You are right that EA in some sense already contains a lot of the things int/a is excited about (especially in terms of the official written principles being quite broad), but perhaps the real difference is what is emphasized in practice.

For example:

Effective altruism doesn't take a position on whether we are in conflict with the natural unfo

I would simply say the expected mass is practically (not exactly) the same given the evidence available to me, and consider gathering additional evidence depending on how much I expected this to change future decisions. Likewise for altruistic interventions among which comparisons of the expected change in welfare feel very arbitrary.

I'd also be keen to get your response to this (and also this, if you have the time.)

I have replied to both comments.

I think there's a lot that could change if you very seriously weighed others' actual or possible direct impressions/intuitions without heavily privileging your own, before we even get into the question of precise vs imprecise credences. Epistemic modesty is going to do a lot of work first.

Thanks for elaborating on this. I imagine I could arrive to different (practical) priorities if I changed my mind about the topics you listed. At the same t... (read more)

You should turn your project into an organization

If your team's work is worth doing, it's worth doing as an org

When a few people are doing good work together, the question of whether to formally incorporate into an organization can feel like a distraction from doing the actual work. Why take time away from your exciting research project to create an org? There are some real up-front costs to incorporating – dealing with bureaucracy, legal overhead, governance obligations – but I think the benefits of doing so are usually greater and underappreciated.

Orgs a

If you had more evidence, you could make the comparison. But you currently have no clue which direction the comparison would go, in expectation over the evidence you might receive. So how are you supposed to compare them right now?

I already agreed with the premise before reading the article but I really enjoyed reading that! A lovely, funny, and concise article summarising the strengths and limitations of cash benchmarking. 

The post avoids (perhaps deliberately to keep the tone light!) giving a name to one of the reasons why certain people are reticent to give cash to others, which I would describe as a kind of condescending paternalism e.g. 'I know better than them what's good for them'. 

On a day to day you might encounter this kind of thinking with people who might be ok... (read more)

Yeah, the future described in this post isn't particuarly "weird", per se, it's just using the assumption that every technology that has been hypothetically proposed for the future will be created by ASI soon after AGI arrives. 

I think the future will be a lot more unpredictable than this. Analolgously, I can imagine someone from 1965 being very confused about a future where immensely powerful computers can fit in your pocket, but human spaceflight had gone no further than the moon. It's very hard to predict in advance the constraints and shortcomings of future technology, or the practical and logistical factors that affect what is achieved. 

Thanks for writing this!

You're describing integral altruism as broader than EA, but if I understand you correctly, it's also narrower in many ways. Some examples:

Letting go of the need to control everything and transcending the frame that we are in conflict with the natural unfolding of the universe. This also means emphasising collective action over individual heroism.

–> Effective altruism doesn't take a position on whether we are in conflict with the natural unfolding of the universe. EAs emphasise collective actions vs. individual heroism to various ... (read more)

Given how specific his predictions were, I think he did pretty darn well really for 2 years ago. Besides perhaps the important China race dynamic @huw bought up which was a central part of his thesis.

I agree that the future will be profoundly weird, although it's an extra step to claim that the future will be profoundly weird in a way that change what actions animal welfare folks should take (as opposed to being weird in some orthogonal manner).

Thanks Jan, I appreciate the pushback.

Just wanted to flag the group is heavily selected for belief alignment with something like "EA/Constellation/Trajan House" views

As an event focused on x-risk, yes, I think this is fair.

"AI enabled human takeovers" was promoted as agenda to prioritize in multiple widely read memos by high statues people in the community  (which the organisers prioritized in the reading list). 

It's true that:

• The agenda featured some talks emphasising risks from AI-enabled human takeover.
• Some of the most popular memos also empha

Have you considered that the reason these policies are not increasing AI usage is that AI usage is not particularly useful for many applications? Particularly when it comes to something like animal advocacy, I'm struggling to think of many things you'd actually need a full model subscription for (rather than just asking the occasional question to a free model). 

I think the original policies are fine: they let people evaluate and decide for themselves how useful AI models are, and adjust strategies accordingly. Trying to pressure people to use AI beyond this level is going to make your team less effective.

My counterfactual fantasy.

Over on my blog, I wrote about prediction models, replacement value, and how I was taught about saving lives for pennies on the pound.

So long Mo Salah, and thanks for all the lives you saved.

"Death in a Shallow Pond": A new-ish book on the 'drowning child' thought experiment and EA

TIL about this book: Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, A Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need, published September 2025, by David Edmonds. I can't find it mentioned on the Forum but apologies if I've missed it. I haven't read it, but according to the blurb, it discusses 'the experiences and world events that led Singer to make his radical case and how it moved some young philosophers to establish the Effective Altruism movement, which tries to optimize philant... (read more)

Hi Michael.

It seems bad if we're basing how to do the most good on whims and biases.

I agree. However, in cases where priors are playing a crucial role, one should simply prioritise gathering more evidence until there is reasonable convergence about what to do (among a given group of people, for a particular decision)?

I would be able to subjectively compare the mass of the 2 objects with more evidence. Some comparisons may not be feasible with currently available evidence, but the degree of imprecision should be set by what is physically possible?

Thanks for sharing, Anthony. I just commented there.

A great post. I agree - nuclear advocacy just isn't all that effective in a world where costs of renewables and batteries have fallen so much and continue to fall.

I think more widely, what is judged "the most effective climate philanthropy intervention" will shift rapidly over time due to technological/economic/societal progress on climate and it's going to be a constant scramble to keep up with that. This is different to the situation GiveWell is in, and GiveWell have far more money for their analysis operations than Giving Green do.

I encourage continued ... (read more)

Thanks for the great post, Gregory. Do you have any thoughts on the sequence "The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance" from @Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸?

Yet across my forecasts (on topics including legislation in particular countries, election results, whether people remain in office, and property prices - _all _of which I know very little about), I do somewhat better than the median forecaster, and substantially better than chance (Brier ~ 0.23). Crucially, the median forecaster also almost always does better than chance too (~ 0.32