Executive summary: Regular, all-invited general meetings are an easy, underutilized way for university EA groups to build stronger communities, retain members, and deepen engagement post-fellowship, with multiple successful formats already in use across campuses.

Key points:

1. General meetings help solve a key weakness of intro fellowships: lack of continued engagement and community-building among EA members across cohorts.
2. They provide a low-barrier entry point for newcomers and a way for fellowship graduates to stay involved, fostering a vibrant, mixed-experience community.
3. EA Purdue’s model emphasizes short, interactive presentations with rotating 1-1 discussions to build connections and maintain engagement; weekly consistency and snacks significantly improve attendance.
4. Other models include WashU’s activity-driven “Impact Lab,” Berkeley’s mix of deep dives and guest speakers, UCLA’s casual dinner + reading discussions, and UT Austin’s structured meetings with thought experiments, presentations, and social games.
5. General meetings are relatively easy to prepare—especially if organizers collaborate, rotate roles, or reuse content—and can also serve as a training ground for onboarding new organizers.
6. While some models trade off between casual atmosphere and goal-oriented impact, many organizers believe these meetings meaningfully contribute to group cohesion and member development, even if not all impact is directly measurable.

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Executive summary: The author argues that cosmopolitanism—viewing oneself as a global citizen with moral concern for all people—is a powerful antidote to the rise of hypernationalism in the U.S., and suggests concrete actions individuals can take to promote global well-being in the face of rising isolationism.

Key points:

1. Hypernationalism prioritizes national self-interest and identity to the exclusion of global cooperation, leading to zero-sum thinking and resistance to collective action on issues like climate change or humanitarian aid.
2. Cosmopolitanism promotes a shared global identity and moral concern for all people, encouraging cooperation across borders and emphasizing positive-sum outcomes for humanity.
3. The author contrasts these worldviews using real-world examples, such as U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the freezing of aid to Ukraine, illustrating how hypernationalism justifies harmful inaction.
4. Cosmopolitanism is positioned not as a cure-all but as a resistance strategy, capable of slowing the cultural drift toward hypernationalism by influencing public narratives and individual choices.
5. Concrete recommendations include donating to high-impact global charities, such as those vetted by GiveWell or The Life You Can Save, as a way for individuals to express cosmopolitan values and tangibly improve global well-being.
6. The post endorses Giving What We Can’s 10% or trial pledge as a practical step toward embracing cosmopolitanism and countering nationalist ideologies with global compassion and action.

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Executive summary: The author reflects on leaving Washington, DC—and the pursuit of a traditional biosecurity policy career—due to personal, political, and existential factors, while affirming continued commitment to biosecurity and Effective Altruism from a more authentic and unconventional path.

Key points:

1. The author moved to DC aiming for a formal biosecurity policy career but found the pathway elusive despite engaging in various adjacent roles; they are now relocating to rural California for personal and practical reasons.
2. Three main factors shaped this decision: a relationship opportunity, political shifts that diminish public health prospects, and growing concern about transformative AI risks.
3. The author expresses solidarity with Effective Altruism and biosecurity goals but questions the tractability and timing of entering the field now, especially under the current U.S. administration.
4. Barriers to career progression may have included awkwardness, gender nonconformity, and neurodivergence, raising broader concerns about inclusivity and professional norms in policy spaces.
5. While hesitant to give advice, the author suggests aspiring policy professionals consider developing niche technical expertise and soliciting honest feedback on presentation and fit.
6. The post closes with a personal affirmation of identity (queer, polyamorous, neurodivergent), and a commitment to continue contributing meaningfully—even if unconventionally—to global health and existential risk issues.

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Executive summary: As EA and AI safety move into a third wave of large-scale societal influence, they must adopt virtue ethics, sociopolitical thinking, and structural governance approaches to avoid catastrophic missteps and effectively navigate complex, polarized global dynamics.

Key points:

1. Three-wave model of EA/AI safety: The speaker describes a historical progression from Wave 1 (orientation and foundational ideas), to Wave 2 (mobilization and early impact), to Wave 3 (real-world scale influence), each requiring different mindsets—consequentialism, deontology, and now, virtue ethics.
2. Dangers of scale: Operating at scale introduces risks of causing harm through overreach or poor judgment; environmentalism is used as a cautionary example of well-intentioned movements gone wrong due to inadequate thinking and flawed incentives.
3. Need for sociopolitical thinking: Third-wave success demands big-picture, historically grounded, first-principles thinking to understand global trends and power dynamics—not just technical expertise or quantitative reasoning.
4. Two-factor world model: The speaker proposes that modern society is shaped by (1) technology increasing returns to talent, and (2) the expansion of bureaucracy. These create opposing but compounding tensions across governance, innovation, and culture.
5. AI risk framings are diverging: One faction views AI risk as anarchic threat requiring central control (aligned with left/establishment), while another sees it as concentrated power risk demanding decentralization (aligned with right/populists); AI safety may mirror broader political polarization unless deliberately bridged.
6. Call to action: The speaker advocates for governance “with AI,” rigorous sociopolitical analysis, moral framework synthesis, and truth-seeking leadership—seeing EA/AI safety as “first responders” helping humanity navigate an unprecedented future.

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Executive summary: The post argues that understanding the distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence is key to analyzing the development and future trajectory of AI systems, including the potential dynamics of an intelligence explosion and how superintelligent systems might evolve and be governed.

Key points:

1. Intelligence has at least two distinct dimensions—crystallized (stored knowledge) and fluid (real-time reasoning)—which apply to both humans and AI systems.
2. AI systems like AlphaGo and current LLMs use a knowledge production loop, where improved knowledge boosts performance and generates further knowledge, enabling recursive improvement.
3. Crystallized intelligence is necessary for performance, and likely to remain crucial even in superintelligent systems, as deriving everything from scratch is inefficient.
4. Future systems may differ significantly in their levels of crystallized vs fluid intelligence, raising scenarios like a "naive genius" or a highly knowledgeable but shallow reasoner.
5. A second loop—focused on improving fluid intelligence algorithms themselves—may drive the explosive dynamics of an intelligence explosion, but might be slower or require many steps of knowledge accumulation first.
6. Open questions include how to govern AI knowledge creation and access, whether agentic systems are required for automated research, and how this framework can inform differential progress and safety paradigms.

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Executive summary: Altruistic perfectionism and moral over-demandingness can lead to burnout, and adopting sustainable, compassionate practices—like setting boundaries, prioritizing workability, and recognizing oneself as morally valuable—can help EAs remain effective and fulfilled over the long term.

Key points:

1. Altruistic perfectionism and moral demandingness can cause burnout when people feel they must do "enough" to an unsustainable degree.
2. Workability emphasizes choosing sustainable actions over maximally demanding ones, even if that means doing less now to maintain long-term impact.
3. Viewing altruism as a choice rather than an obligation—and counting yourself as a morally relevant being—can help reduce guilt and pressure.
4. Universalizability suggests adopting standards you’d want others to follow; extreme personal sacrifice can discourage others from engaging.
5. Boundaries (like donation caps, self-care routines, and happiness budgets) help prevent compassion fatigue and moral licensing.
6. Local volunteer work and therapy are practical tools for maintaining motivation and psychological well-being, with techniques like celebrating progress and embracing internal multiplicity.
7. The post argues for a shift from self-critical thoughts to self-compassion, emphasizing that doing good should also feel good and be sustainable.

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Executive summary: Optimistic longtermism relies on decisive but potentially unreliable judgment calls, and these may be better explained by evolutionary biases—such as pressures toward pro-natalism—than by truth-tracking reasoning, which opens it up to an evolutionary debunking argument.

Key points:

1. Optimistic longtermism depends on high-stakes, subjective judgment calls about whether reducing existential risk improves the long-term future, despite pervasive epistemic uncertainty.
2. These judgment calls cannot be fully justified by argument and may differ even among rational, informed experts, making their reliability questionable.
3. The post introduces the idea that such intuitions may stem from evolutionary pressures—particularly pro-natalist ones—rather than from reliable truth-tracking processes.
4. This constitutes an evolutionary debunking argument: if our intuitions are shaped by fitness-maximizing pressures rather than truth-seeking ones, their epistemic authority is undermined.
5. The author emphasizes this critique does not support pessimistic longtermism but may justify agnosticism about the long-term value of X-risk reduction.
6. While the argument is theoretically significant, the author doubts its practical effectiveness and suggests more fruitful strategies may involve presenting new crucial considerations to longtermists.

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Executive summary: This post argues that s-risk reduction — preventing futures with astronomical amounts of suffering — can be a widely shared moral goal, and proposes using positive, common-ground proxies to address strategic, motivational, and practical challenges in pursuing it effectively.

Key points:

1. S-risk reduction is broadly valuable: While often associated with suffering-focused ethics, preventing extreme future suffering can appeal to a wide range of ethical views (consequentialist, deontological, virtue-ethical) as a way to avoid worst-case outcomes.
2. Common ground and shared risk factors: Many interventions targeting s-risks also help with extinction risks or near-term suffering, especially through shared risk factors like malevolent agency, moral neglect, or escalating conflict.
3. Robust worst-case safety strategy: In light of uncertainty, a practical strategy is to maintain safe distances from multiple interacting s-risk factors, akin to health strategies focused on general well-being rather than specific diseases.
4. Proxies improve motivation, coordination, and measurability: Abstract, high-stakes goals like s-risk reduction can be more actionable and sustainable if translated into positive proxy goals — concrete, emotionally salient, measurable subgoals aligned with the broader aim.
5. General positive proxies include: movement building, promoting cooperation and moral concern, malevolence mitigation, and worst-case AI safety — many of which have common-ground appeal.
6. Personal proxies matter too: Individual development across multiple virtues and habits (e.g. purpose, compassion, self-awareness, sustainability) can support healthy, long-term engagement with s-risk reduction and other altruistic goals.

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Executive summary: Transhumanist views on AI range from enthusiastic optimism to existential dread, with no unified stance; while some advocate accelerating progress, others emphasize the urgent need for AI safety and value alignment to prevent catastrophic outcomes.

Key points:

1. Transhumanists see AI as both a tool to transcend human limitations and a potential existential risk, with significant internal disagreement on the balance of these aspects.
2. Five major transhumanist stances on AI include: (1) optimism and risk denial, (2) risk acceptance for potential gains, (3) welcoming AI succession, (4) techno-accelerationism, and (5) caution and calls to halt development.
3. Many AI safety pioneers emerged from transhumanist circles, but AI safety has since become a broader, more diverse field with varied affiliations.
4. Efforts to cognitively enhance humans—via competition, merging with AI, or boosting intelligence to align AI—are likely infeasible or dangerous due to timing, ethical concerns, and practical limitations.
5. The most viable transhumanist-aligned strategy is designing aligned AI systems, not enhancing humans to compete with or merge with them.
6. Critics grouping transhumanism with adjacent ideologies (e.g., TESCREAL) risk oversimplifying a diverse and nuanced intellectual landscape.

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Executive summary: The author argues that dismissing longtermism and intergenerational justice due to its association with controversial figures or philosophical frameworks is misguided, and that caring about future generations is both reasonable and morally important regardless of one’s stance on utilitarianism or population ethics.

Key points:

1. Critics on the political left, such as Nathan J. Robinson and Émile P. Torres, oppose longtermism so strongly that they express indifference to human extinction, which the author finds deeply misguided and anti-human.
2. The author defends the moral significance of preserving humanity, citing the value of human relationships, knowledge, consciousness, and potential.
3. While longtermism is often tied to utilitarianism and the total view of population ethics, caring about the future doesn’t require accepting these theories; even person-affecting or present-focused views support concern for future generations.
4. Common critiques of utilitarianism rely on unrealistic thought experiments; in practice, these moral theories do not compel abhorrent actions when all else is considered.
5. Philosophical debates (e.g. about population ethics) should not obscure the intuitive and practical importance of ensuring a flourishing future for humanity.
6. The author warns against negative polarisation—rejecting longtermist ideas solely because of their association with disliked figures or ideologies—and urges readers to separate intergenerational ethics from such baggage.

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