Executive summary: The author argues that donating to the Berkeley Genomics Project is justified because accelerating safe, beneficial reprogenetics could substantially reduce disease, amplify human intelligence, and lower AI existential risk, and the project targets neglected medium-term technical and social gaps with early field-building traction despite high uncertainty.

Key points:

1. The author claims effective reprogenetics could greatly improve lives by reducing disease risk and enabling parents to make genomic choices for future children.
2. The author argues reprogenetics is the most feasible path to human intelligence amplification and therefore a top-few lever for reducing existential risk from AI.
3. The Berkeley Genomics Project focuses on neglected medium-term technologies, roadmaps, and public discourse rather than competing with large genetics research fields.
4. The project’s activities include summits, recorded talks, articles, networking, and plans for standards-setting, whitepapers, media outreach, and possible research or validation efforts.
5. The author says additional funding would be used for operations, consultants, writing, events, media production, and personal runway, even though minimum operating funding has been met.
6. The author acknowledges major risks and downsides, including regulatory barriers, a small and non-expert team, speculative tractability, and potential negative media attention.

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Executive summary: Drawing on personal experience as a London-based Research Manager at MATS in 2025, the author reflects on research management as a generalist, service-oriented role combining scholar support, mentoring enablement, people management, and internal projects, concluding that it is highly rewarding and impactful despite trade-offs that ultimately motivated a transition to AISI.

Key points:

1. The author frames research management as “servant leadership” plus “radical candor,” focused on helping scholars set goals, unblock progress, and receive timely critical feedback without replacing mentor supervision.
2. Deep technical expertise is often less important than curiosity, prioritisation support, and challenging scholars’ theories of change early to avoid unproductive research paths.
3. The RM role spans project management, life coaching, pseudo-mentorship, research output review, career coaching, networking, and logistical navigation, with intensity varying by scholar.
4. An internal “RPG skill tree” is used to reflect how different RMs allocate strengths across people management, project management, life coaching, and research supervision.
5. As a senior RM, the author spent under half their time on direct scholar support, with the remainder split across managing other RMs, internal projects, infrastructure, events, and strategy work.
6. Although internal projects felt less directly rewarding than scholar work, the author judged some to be higher impact given comparative advantage, and remains committed to research management in AI alignment after leaving MATS.

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Executive summary: This report maps the current landscape of AI innovation in aquaculture, finding that commercially available AI tools are already widespread, concentrated in stock and growth management for high-value species like salmon and shrimp, and likely to become increasingly embedded in farm operations despite unclear implications for animal welfare.

Key points:

1. The authors identified 91 companies with AI-enabled aquaculture products that are already on the market and could affect farmed animal welfare.
2. Stock and growth management is the most common application of AI (59% of products), while feed and feed optimization is the least common (38%) despite feed comprising 50–70% of operating costs.
3. AI technologies target over 35 species, with shrimp and salmon as the most frequently targeted groups, and 76% of products applying exclusively to fishes.
4. Company headquarters are most commonly located in the US (16.8%), Norway (15.8%), and Singapore (9.5%), with China underrepresented in the sample despite its dominance in global aquaculture.
5. The focus on narrow AI reflects near-term relevance, with the authors setting aside AGI and emphasizing tools that farms can deploy today.
6. The report frames innovation as the first stage of technological change, with subsequent reports planned to analyze deployment patterns and welfare effects.

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Executive summary: The post argues, confidently and polemically, that earning to give is an underrated and often superior way for most people to do good, because large, sustained donations typically outweigh the impact of personal lifestyle changes or pursuing “sexy” direct-impact jobs.

Key points:

1. The author claims common moral intuitions about “being a good person” focus on visible kindness and lifestyle choices, but perform poorly when judged by actual impact.
2. They argue that high earners who donate large sums, such as ~$200K+ per year to effective charities, may be among the most ethical people by a consequentialist standard.
3. The post asserts that for most people, money is the strongest lever for change, unless one is unusually talented or positioned to have outsized direct impact.
4. The author criticizes the tendency within EA spaces to prioritize direct EA jobs over earning to give, suggesting this ignores basic economic specialization.
5. Using illustrative income scenarios, they argue that improving earnings can multiply donation capacity far more than most personal ethical sacrifices.
6. The post acknowledges second-order effects of certain careers but contends that objections often rely on motivated reasoning and lack evidence that alternatives outperform large-scale effective donations.

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Yes, this checks out.   

Executive summary: The post argues, through metaphor and personal reflection, that individuals and institutions should invest in early-stage potential rather than select solely for proven performance, because nurturing undeveloped talent creates long-term value that harvesting only finished “gems” cannot.

Key points:

1. The author uses the Pien Ho parable to illustrate how valuable potential can be mistaken for an “ordinary stone” when judged only by immediate surface qualities.
2. The author argues that optimizing exclusively for proven talent leads to widespread underinvestment in developing people who could become highly valuable with support.
3. The author claims early-career programs should prioritize promise, drive, and character traits like kindness and responsibility over fully demonstrated performance.
4. The author notes that mentors and institutions often wish to support emerging talent but face resource constraints.
5. The author encourages prospective mentees to seek mentors who are caring, responsive, and growth-oriented rather than simply prestigious.
6. The author concludes that investing in latent potential benefits both individuals and the broader world, illustrated by the story of a friend whose promise was eventually recognized.

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Executive summary: The post outlines Giving Green’s updated research approach, its 2025–2026 philanthropic priorities and Top Climate Nonprofits, recent regranting decisions totaling $26 million, and plans to expand climate and biodiversity work as an independent organization.

Key points:

1. Giving Green states that systems change through policy, technology, and market-shaping is the most leveraged route for climate philanthropy, and cost-effectiveness analyses serve as supporting inputs rather than decisive metrics.
2. The organization argues that several high-impact climate areas remain neglected, citing aviation’s projected rise to over 20% of global CO₂ emissions by 2050 and noting that less than $15 million per year goes to mitigating aviation’s non-CO₂ effects.
3. Its 2025–2026 high-leverage giving strategies include clean energy in the U.S., aviation, maritime shipping, heavy industry, food systems, LMIC energy transitions, carbon dioxide removal demand, and solar radiation management governance.
4. For Q4 2025, the Giving Green Fund recommended $26 million to 29 nonprofits aligned with these strategies.
5. Planned 2026 work includes about $30 million in new grants and research on livelihood-improving climate interventions, catastrophic risks, overshoot, heavy industry, LMIC energy transitions, and food systems.
6. Giving Green is developing Top Biodiversity Nonprofits for 2026, focusing on preventing land use change and reducing ecosystem damage from fishing.
7. The organization became an independent nonprofit in late 2025, now hosts its own fund, and reports influencing over $56 million in climate donations since 2019 at an estimated 20x impact multiplier.

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Executive summary: The author argues that early-career people should prioritize building rare, valuable skills and becoming legible to others, rather than trying to immediately secure an “EA job,” and presents strategies for skill identification, testing fit, deliberate practice, and sustainable long-term growth.

Key points:

1. The post claims people should prioritize identifying an important problem, improving relevant skills, and becoming legible to others instead of treating “getting a job” as the milestone.
2. It argues many young applicants implicitly frame success as landing an EA role fast, which creates pressure and leads to distorted decisions.
3. It states that talent and impact are extremely right-tailed but malleable, and that deliberate practice and tight feedback loops accelerate growth.
4. It recommends studying top performers, reading job postings, having informational chats, and running small side projects to discover which skills matter most.
5. It describes “testing fit” through empirical exploration such as short projects, fellowships, internships, and conversations to gather signals about aptitude and motivation.
6. It emphasizes working in public, seeking criticism, and producing concrete artifacts (writing, GitHub projects, events) to improve faster and increase visibility.
7. It discusses burnout and imposter syndrome, noting the value of sustainable habits, calibrated comparisons, and roles that offer real skill-building.
8. It advises leaving roles with weak growth prospects or harmful work and expanding one’s “luck surface area” by building relationships and showing work publicly.
9. It concludes that long-term impact comes from getting good and being known, not from early job titles.

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Executive summary: The author argues that, given the moral weight of conscious experience and the role of luck in determining life circumstances, a voluntary simplicity pledge tied to the world’s average income lets them meet their ethical duties while still maintaining a balanced and meaningful life.

Key points:

1. The author claims conscious moments have intrinsic importance and that ignoring others’ suffering amounts to endorsing harmful systems.
2. The author argues most advantages and disadvantages in life stem from luck, so they do not view their own wealth as morally deserved.
3. The author states that effective donations can do large amounts of good, citing estimates of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved and 126,000 cage-free years for chickens per equivalent spending.
4. The author describes voluntary simplicity research, citing Hook et al. (2021) as finding a consistent positive relationship between voluntary simplicity and well-being.
5. The author explains they set their salary to roughly the world’s average income adjusted for London (£26,400 in 2025) and donate earnings above that.
6. The author reports that living this way feels non-sacrificial, supports long-term financial security, and aligns their actions with their values while recognizing others’ differing circumstances.

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Executive summary: The author argues in an exploratory and uncertain way that alternative proteins may create large but fragile near-term gains for animals because they bypass moral circle expansion, and suggests longtermists should invest more in durable forms of moral advocacy alongside technical progress.

Key points:

1. The author claims alternative proteins can reduce animal suffering in the short term and may even end animal farming in the best case.
2. The author argues that consumers choose food mainly based on taste and price, so shifts toward alternative proteins need not reflect any change in values toward animals.
3. The author suggests that progress driven by incentives is vulnerable to economic or social reversals over decades or centuries.
4. The author argues that longtermist reasoning implies concern for trillions of future animals and that fragile gains from alternative proteins may not endure.
5. The author claims moral circle expansion is slow and difficult but more durable because it changes how people think about animals.
6. The author concludes that work on alternative proteins should continue but that moral advocacy may be underinvested in and deserves renewed attention.

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