This account is used by the EA Forum Team to publish summaries of posts.
Executive summary: This detailed update from the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) outlines major expansions in wastewater and pooled individual sequencing, air sampling analysis, and data processing capabilities, emphasizing progress toward scalable biosurveillance systems while acknowledging ongoing technical challenges and exploratory efforts.
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Executive summary: This post introduces Making God, a planned feature-length documentary aimed at a non-technical audience to raise awareness of the risks associated with the race toward AGI; the filmmakers seek funding to complete high-quality production and hope to catalyze public engagement and political action through wide distribution on streaming platforms.
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Executive summary: This personal reflection offers candid advice to the author's past self as a newcomer to Effective Altruism (EA), emphasizing the importance of epistemic humility, clear communication, professionalism, and community engagement, while warning against overconfidence, edgy behavior, and risky schemes.
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Executive summary: This exploratory analysis reviews causal evidence on the relationship between immigration and crime in several European countries, finding little to no effect in the UK and Italy, mixed results in Germany, and limited data for France and Belgium, while suggesting that secure legal status and access to employment significantly reduce immigrant crime rates.
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Executive summary: In this personal reflection, the author shares how they transitioned from software engineering to an impactful AI policy operations role within just three months, arguing that entry into the field is more accessible than commonly believed—especially for proactive individuals willing to leverage community connections, volunteer experience, and financial flexibility.
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Executive summary: This exploratory post argues that while standard expected utility theory recommends fully concentrating charitable donations on the highest-expected-impact opportunity, a pragmatic Bayesian approach—averaging across uncertain models of the world—can justify some degree of diversification, particularly when model uncertainty or moral uncertainty is significant.
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Executive summary: This evidence-based analysis from the 2024 EA Survey explores which factors most help people have a positive impact and form valuable personal connections in the EA community, finding that personal contact, 80,000 Hours resources, and EA events are consistently influential—though engagement level, gender, and racial/ethnic identity shape which sources matter most.
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Executive summary: This exploratory post presents a speculative but grounded dystopian scenario in which mediocre, misused AI—rather than superintelligent systems—gradually degrades society through hype-driven deployment, expert displacement, and systemic enshittification, ultimately leading to collapse; while the author does not believe this outcome is likely, they argue it is more plausible than many conventional AI doom scenarios and worth taking seriously.
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Executive summary: This exploratory proposal advocates for a pilot programme using metagenomic sequencing of wastewater at Auckland Airport to detect novel pathogens entering New Zealand, arguing that early detection could avert the enormous health and economic costs of future pandemics at a relatively low annual investment of NZD 3.6 million.
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Executive summary: This exploratory reanalysis uses causal inference principles to reinterpret findings from a longitudinal study on meat reduction, concluding that certain interventions like vegan challenges and plant-based analog consumption appear to reduce animal product consumption, while prior findings suggesting that motivation or outdoor media increase consumption may have stemmed from flawed modeling choices rather than true effects.
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