Cross-posted from Good Structures. For impact-minded donors, it's natural to focus on doing the most cost-effective thing. Suppose you’re genuinely neutral on what you do, as long as it maximizes the good. If you’re donating money, you want to look for the most cost-effective opportunity (on the margin) and donate to it. But many organizations and individuals who care about cost-effectiveness try to influence the giving of others. This includes: Research organizations that try to influence the allocation or use of charitable funds. Donor advisors who work with donors to find promising opportunities. People arguing to community members on venues like the EA Forum. Charity recommenders like GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators. These are endeavors where you’re specifically trying to influence the giving of others. And when you influence the giving of others, you don’t get full credit for their decisions! You should only get credit for how much better the thing you convinced them to do is compared to what they would otherwise do. This is something that many people in EA and related communities take for granted and find obvious in the abstract. But I think the implications of this aren’t always fully digested by the [...] ---Outline:(03:34) Impact is largely a function of what the donor would have done otherwise.(04:36) Is improving the use of effective or ineffective charitable dollars easier?(06:14) How do people respond to these lower impact interventions?(08:14) What are the implications of paying a lot more attention to funding counterfactuals?(10:21) Objections to this argument. --- First published: November 12th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YrMFHJm7mbswJd7Me/the-overall-cost-effectiveness-of-an-intervention-often --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Today we’re announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help.Our mission ClusterFree's mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research. Cluster headache (also known as ‘suicide headache’) is considered the most painful condition known to mankind. We believe it is one of the largest sources of preventable extreme suffering in humans today. Every year, about 3 million adults (and an unknown number of minors) suffer from this debilitating condition. And yet, even in the EU, only 47% of the cluster headache population had unrestricted access to standard treatments (primarily oxygen and triptans) in 2019. Despite affecting a similar number of people as multiple sclerosis, global investment into cluster headache is minuscule. At the same time, countless patients have reported previously unattainable relief using certain psychedelics, even at low doses. For example, psilocybin, LSD and 5-MeO-DALT can effectively prevent attacks, and N,N-DMT can abort attacks within seconds and also have some preventative effects. However, these life-saving treatments are inaccessible to the vast majority of patients. We want to tackle these problems by: Publishing [...] ---Outline:(00:37) Our mission(02:32) About us(03:22) How you (and anyone) can help(04:59) Room for funding(06:41) Work with us(06:54) Further information --- First published: November 21st, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vzG8wu9b6vuoRxD3z/announcing-clusterfree-a-cluster-headache-advocacy-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Big news from Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving today: Today, Open Philanthropy is becoming Coefficient Giving. Our mission remains the same, but our new name marks our next chapter as we double down on our longstanding goal of helping more funders increase their impact. We believe philanthropy can be a far more vital force for progress than it is today; too often, great opportunities to help others go unfunded. As Coefficient Giving, our aim is to make it as easy as possible for donors to find and fund them. (For more on how we chose our new name, what's changing, and what's staying the same in this next chapter, see here.) The linked essay, from Coefficient CEO Alexander Berger, shares more about the change, our approach to giving, and why we’re focused on growing our work with funders outside of Good Ventures. I also wanted to highlight some details that might be of particular interest to a Forum audience. If you have other questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to respond! Any changes to your relationship with EA? Nope. While we do lots of work outside traditional EA cause areas, we still see EA as a community [...] --- First published: November 18th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vkvtu6xbvfkHPhJkC/open-philanthropy-is-now-coefficient-giving --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. People can’t get enough protein. Fully 61% of Americans say they ate more protein last year — and 85% intended to eat more this year. Last week, dairy giant Danone said it can’t keep up with US demand for its high-protein yogurt. Other food makers are rushing to pack protein into everything from Doritos to Pop-Tarts. The craze is global. The net percentage of Europeans wanting more protein has more than doubled since 2023, driven by protein-hungry Brits, Poles, and Spaniards. (The epicurean French and Italians remain holdouts.) Chinese per capita protein supply recently overtook already-high American levels. Young people are leading the charge. Across Asia, Europe, and the US, most Gen Z’ers want more protein, suggesting this trend may persist. In one recent British university survey, “protein” was the top reason students gave for not giving up meat. Doctors are also telling the 6 - 10% of Americans now taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs to eat more protein to prevent muscle loss. This is [...] --- First published: November 5th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P7NuYbwbMMNTM45Cz/the-protein-problem --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
The Center for Wild Animal Welfare (CWAW) is a new policy advocacy organization, working to improve the lives of wild animals today and build support for wild animal welfare policy. We’re now fundraising for our first year, and the next $60,000 will be matched 1:1 by a generous supporter. We’ve already started engaging policymakers on wild animal-friendly urban infrastructure (e.g. bird-safe glass). In 2026, we plan to keep engaging on urban infrastructure; start working on additional policy areas like fertility control and pesticide policy; and pursue agenda setting (e.g. publishing a State of Wild Animal Welfare Policy report). Wild animal welfare is one of the world's most important and neglected issues. Governments routinely make decisions that affect trillions of wild animals without considering their individual wellbeing. We want to change this: CWAW is one of the first organizations in the world dedicated to ensuring policymakers consider the individual welfare of wild animals. Our focus on near term policy will help wild animals now, and also build future support by proving that wild animal welfare is a legitimate and tractable policy concern. CWAW is co-founded by Richard Parr MBE, a former policy adviser to the UK Prime Minister, and Ben [...] ---Outline:(02:27) Why support wild animal welfare policy?(07:37) What we've achieved already(09:38) What we'll do in 2026(14:51) How will CWAW use marginal funding?(15:45) Who we are(16:17) Endorsements(18:30) How to help --- First published: November 18th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uko8rxrcmYB54ZnBH/new-donation-opportunity-the-center-for-wild-animal-welfare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
To a first approximation, all farmed animals are bugs. (Recalling, of course, that shrimps is bugs.) We don’t know much about their needs in current production systems. The Arthropoda Foundation is trying to fix that. If we want to help the most numerous farmed animals, we have to answer some basic empirical questions. Arthropoda funds the scientists who provide those answers. Good science isn’t cheap, fast, or flashy. But if we don’t fund it, we’re left guessing about the welfare of the most numerous animals on farms (and in the wild). The stakes are too high for guesswork. This year, Arthropoda granted out ~$160K to fund seven studies. That's seven studies for at least a trillion farmed animals. (And untold numbers of wild animals.) We could easily grant out much more. And with a staff person, we could actively develop projects to support. But as it is, we’re at capacity. In its current form, Arthropoda costs about $175K per year, at least 80% of which covers grants. The rest covers costs associated with learning more about the state of the industry, running a small coordination event, and legal compliance with charitable regulations. We’re about $55K short for 2026. Anything [...] --- First published: November 17th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mdcSeMwkBEYhdTAWF/to-a-first-approximation-all-farmed-animals-are-bugs --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
It's hard to divide anything 50/50. In many families, even if both parents have paid jobs, one parent will lean into parenting more, and the other will lean harder into paid work. In male/female couples it's usually the woman who owns more of the parenting work, and that can feel unfair if the arrangement comes from assumptions rather than a willing choice. I want to highlight some counter-examples from the effective altruism space, to show it's really possible to make an intentional choice about who does what. @Jeff Kaufman and I both travel for work, but he's more fearless than I am about having the kids solo. Once while I was at an EA conference during the annual vacation with his side of the family, he took our four-year-old and two-year-old to the beach, and also took his sister's two-year-old because she was working. Then, during this trip where he was responsible for three preschoolers, he potty-trained our toddler. My friend has pursued jobs focused on impact, while her husband has a normal job he's not pursuing for altruistic impact. He does more of the childcare while she commutes part of the week to another city [...] --- First published: November 13th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m8B5kYHdiz5BiW9qH/some-hardworking-dads-in-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Long time lurker, first time poster - be nice please! :) I was searching for summary data of EA funding trends, but couldn't find anything more recent than Tyler's post from 2022. So I decided to update it. If this analysis is done properly anywhere, please let me know. The spreadsheet is here (some things might look weird due to importing from Excel to sheets) Observations EA grantmaking appears on a steady downward trend since 2022 / FTX. The squeeze on GH funding to support AI / other longtermist priorities appears to be really taking effect this year (though 2025 is a rough estimate and has significant uncertainty.) I am really interested in particular about the apparent drop in GW grants this year. I suspect that it is wrong or at least misleading - the metrics report suggests they are raising ~$300m p.a. from non OP donors. Not sure if I have made an error (missing direct to charity donations?) or if they are just sitting on funding with the ongoing USAID disruption. Methodology I compiled the latest grants databases from EA Funds, GiveWell, OpenPhilanthropy, and SFF. I added summary level data from ACE. To remove [...] ---Outline:(00:41) Observations(01:26) Methodology(02:12) Notes --- First published: November 14th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NWHb4nsnXRxDDFGLy/historical-ea-funding-data-2025-update --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
Author's note: This is an adapted version of my recent talk at EA Global NYC (I’ll add a link when it's available). The content has been adjusted to reflect things I learned from talking to people after my talk. If you saw the talk, you might still be interested in the “some objections” section at the end. Summary Wild animal welfare faces frequent tractability concerns, amounting to the idea that ecosystems are too complex to intervene in without causing harm. However, I suspect these concerns reflect inconsistent justification standards rather than unique intractability. To explore this idea: I provide some context about why people sometimes have tractability concerns about wild animal welfare, providing a concrete example using bird-window collisions. I then describe four approaches to handling uncertainty about indirect effects: spotlighting (focusing on target beneficiaries while ignoring broader impacts), ignoring cluelessness (acting on knowable effects only), assigning precise probabilities to all outcomes, and seeking ecologically inert interventions. I argue that, when applied consistently across cause areas, none of these approaches suggest wild animal welfare is distinctively intractable compared to global health or AI safety. Rather, the apparent difference most commonly stems from arbitrarily wide "spotlights" applied to [...] ---Outline:(00:31) Summary(02:15) Consequentialism + impartial altruism → hard to do good(03:43) The challenge: Deep uncertainty and backfire risk(04:41) Example: Bird-window collisions(05:22) We don't actually understand the welfare consequences of bird-window collisions on birds(06:08) We don't know how birds would die otherwise(07:06) The effects on other animals are even more uncertain(09:16) Four approaches to handling uncertainty(10:08) Spotlighting(15:31) Set aside that which you are clueless about(18:31) Assign precise probabilities(20:06) Seek ecologically inert interventions(22:04) Some objections & questions(22:17) The global health comparison: Spotlighting hasnt backfired (for humans)(23:22) Action-inaction distinctions(25:01) Why should justification standards be the same?(26:53) Conclusion --- First published: November 14th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2YjqfYktNGcx6YNRy/if-wild-animal-welfare-is-intractable-everything-is --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a crosspost from my Substack, where people have been liking and commenting a bunch. I'm too busy during my self-imposed version of Inkhaven to engage much – yes, pity me, I have to blog – but I don't want to leave Forum folks out of the loop! I’ve been following Effective Altruism discourse since 2014 and involved with the Effective Altruist community since 2015. My credentials are having run Harvard Law School and Harvard University (pan-grad schools) EA, donating $45,000 to EA causes (eep, not 10%), working at 80,000 Hours for three years, and working at a safety-oriented AI org for 10 months after that. I’m also proud of the public comms I’ve done for EA on this blog (here, here, and here), through my 80k podcast series, current podcast series, and through EA career advice talks I’ve given at EAGs and smaller events. With that background, you can at least be confident that I am familiar with my subject matter in the takes that follow. As before, let me know which of these seems interesting or wrong and there's a good chance I’ll write them up with you the commenter very much in mind as [...] --- First published: November 6th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/s8aNPnrGH2fF3Hkpi/12-theses-on-ea --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Cross-post from Good Structures. Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes: Candidates generally have a terrible time Work tests are often unpleasant (and the best candidates have to complete many of them), there are hundreds or thousands of candidates for each role, and generally, people can't get the jobs they’ve been told are the best path to impact. Organizations are often somewhat to moderately unhappy with their candidate pools Organizations really struggle to find the talent they want, despite the number of candidates who apply. Organizations can't find or retain the recruiting talent they want It's extremely hard to find people to do recruitment in this space. Talented recruiters rarely want to stay in their roles. I think the first two points need more discussion, but I haven't seen much discussion about the last. I think this is a major issue: recruitment is probably the most important function for a growing organization, and a skilled recruiter has a fairly large counterfactual impact for the organization they support. So why is it [...] ---Outline:(01:33) Recruitment is high leverage and high impact(03:33) Organizations struggle to hire recruiters(07:52) Many of the people applying to recruitment roles emphasize their experience in recruitment. This isnt the background organizations need(08:44) Almost no one is appropriately obsessed with hiring(10:29) The state of evidence on hiring practices is bad(13:22) Retaining strong recruiters is really hard(14:51) Why might this be less important than I think?(16:40) Im trying to find people interested in this kind of approach to hiring. If this is you, please reach out. --- First published: November 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HLktkw5LXeqSLCchH/recruitment-is-extremely-important-and-impactful-some-people --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
16 minute read We update our list of Recommended Charities annually. This year, we announced recommendations on November 4. Each year, hundreds of billions of animals are trapped in the food industry and killed for food —that is more than all the humans who have ever walked on the face of the Earth.1 When faced with such a magnitude of suffering, it can feel overwhelming and hard to know how to help. One of the most impactful things you can do to help animals is to donate to effective animal charities—even a small donation can have a big impact. Our goal is to help you do the most good for animals by providing you with effective giving opportunities that greatly reduce their suffering. Following our comprehensive charity evaluations, we are pleased to announce our Recommended Charities!Charities awarded the status in 2025Charities retaining the status from 2024Animal Welfare ObservatoryAquatic Life InstituteShrimp Welfare ProjectÇiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma DerneğiSociedade Vegetariana BrasileiraDansk Vegetarisk ForeningThe Humane LeagueGood Food FundWild Animal InitiativeSinergia Animal The Humane League (working globally), Shrimp Welfare Project (in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and India), and Wild Animal Initiative (global) have continued to work on the most important issues for animals [...] ---Outline:(03:54) Charities Recommended in 2025(03:59) Animal Welfare Observatory(05:44) Shrimp Welfare Project(07:38) Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira(09:41) The Humane League(11:22) Wild Animal Initiative(13:15) Charities Recommended in 2024(13:20) Aquatic Life Institute(15:25) Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği(17:34) Dansk Vegetarisk Forening(19:18) The Good Food Fund(21:19) Sinergia Animal(23:20) Support our Recommended Charities The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: November 4th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/waL3iwczrjNt8PreZ/announcing-ace-s-2025-charity-recommendations --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
(Audio version, read by the author, here, or search for "Joe Carlsmith Audio" on your podcast app.) Last Friday was my last day at Open Philanthropy. I’ll be starting a new role at Anthropic in mid-November, helping with the design of Claude's character/constitution/spec. This post reflects on my time at Open Philanthropy, and it goes into more detail about my perspective and intentions with respect to Anthropic – including some of my takes on AI-safety-focused people working at frontier AI companies. (I shared this post with Open Phil and Anthropic comms before publishing, but I’m speaking only for myself and not for Open Phil or Anthropic.)On my time at Open PhilanthropyI joined Open Philanthropy full-time at the beginning of 2019.[1] At the time, the organization was starting to spin up a new “Worldview Investigations” team, aimed at investigating and documenting key beliefs driving the organization's cause prioritization – and with a special focus on how the organization should think about the potential impact at stake in work on transformatively powerful AI systems.[2] I joined (and eventually: led) the team devoted to this effort, and it's been an amazing project to be a part of. I remember [...] ---Outline:(00:51) On my time at Open Philanthropy(08:11) On going to Anthropic --- First published: November 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EFF6wSRm9h7Xc6RMt/leaving-open-philanthropy-going-to-anthropic --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is the latest in a series of essays on AI Scaling. You can find the others on my site. Summary: RL-training for LLMs scales surprisingly poorly. Most of its gains are from allowing LLMs to productively use longer chains of thought, allowing them to think longer about a problem. There is some improvement for a fixed length of answer, but not enough to drive AI progress. Given the scaling up of pre-training compute also stalled, we'll see less AI progress via compute scaling than you might have thought, and more of it will come from inference scaling (which has different effects on the world). That lengthens timelines and affects strategies for AI governance and safety. The current era of improving AI capabilities using reinforcement learning (from verifiable rewards) involves two key types of scaling: Scaling the amount of compute used for RL during training Scaling [...] ---Outline:(09:12) How do these compare to pre-training scaling?(13:42) Conclusion --- First published: October 22nd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TysuCdgwDnQjH3LyY/how-well-does-rl-scale --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
TL;DR: I took the 🔸10% Pledge in 2016 and haven’t kept to it consistently. I’ve decided not to pay the backlog donations, and instead to recommit fresh from today, with simple systems to keep me on track. Sharing this for transparency and in the hope it may be helpful to others - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Why I’m posting In 2016, as a university student, I took the Giving What We Can 10% Pledge. I made my pledge publicly, and my social media profiles show the 🔸10% Pledge badge. For integrity's sake, I want to be equally public that I fell short—and [...] ---Outline:(00:29) Why I'm posting(00:52) What happened(01:53) Going forward --- First published: October 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3vcpERphsumgEzqeB/recommitting-to-giving-a-personal-update --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Many thanks to @Felix_Werdermann 🔸 @Engin Arıkan and @Ana Barreiro for your feedback and comments on this, and for the encouragement from many people to finally write this up into an EA forum post. For years, much of the career advice in the Effective Altruism community has implicitly (or explicitly) suggested that impact = working at an EA nonprofit. That narrative made sense when the community and its talent pool were smaller. But as EA grows, it's worth reassessing whether we’re overconcentrating on nonprofit careers, a trend that may be limiting our community's impact and leaving higher-leverage opportunities on the table. Why Now? As the EA movement has grown, it has attracted far more talent than the nonprofit sector can realistically absorb. This creates an urgent need to develop alternative pathways for talented, mission-aligned people. Under the current status quo, many end up feeling frustrated after going through multiple [...] ---Outline:(00:51) Why Now?(02:06) Important Caveats(03:20) The argument for roles outside of non-profits(03:25) Institutions Dwarf Nonprofit Capacity(05:19) Salaries Are Covered Outside the Movement(06:12) Counterfactual Impact Is Often Greater(06:57) A Healthier Distribution of Talent(07:54) Why This Might Be Wrong Advice(08:24) The Challenges of External Roles(10:13) Why These Risks Still Seem Worth Taking(10:57) Why Steering Everyone Toward Nonprofits Might Hurt the EA Community(11:03) Nonprofit Roles Are Saturated(11:27) Nonprofits Have Low Absorbency(12:24) Too Many Advising Channels, One Bottlenecked Funnel(12:49) Nonprofits are not a good fit for everyone, and they may be a much better fit for roles in other sectors.(13:31) Important Final Caveats --- First published: October 16th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FAmCmCavZ5vTzbRcM/why-many-eas-may-have-more-impact-outside-of-nonprofits-in --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
Summary As part of our ongoing work to study how to best frame EA, we experimentally tested different phrases and sentences that CEA were considering using on effectivealtruism.org. Doing Good Better taglines We observed a consistent pattern where taglines that included the phrase ‘do[ing] good better’ received less support from respondents and inspired less interest in learning about EA. We replicated these results in a second experiment, where we confirmed that taglines referring to “do[ing] good better” performed less well than those referring to “do[ing] the most good”. Nouns and sentences Nouns: The effect of using different nouns to refer to EA was small, but referring to EA as a ‘philosophy’ or ‘movement’ inspired the most curiosity compared to options including ‘project’ and ‘research field’. Sentences: “Find the most effective ways to do good with your time, money, and career” and “Effective altruism asks the question of how we [...] ---Outline:(00:12) Summary(01:23) Method(02:18) Taglines (Study 1)(03:40) Doing Good Better replication (Study 2)(05:23) Sentences (Study 1)(06:45) Nouns (Study 1)(07:41) Effectiveness focus(07:55) Conclusion(08:56) Acknowledgments --- First published: October 27th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y6zMpdwkkAQ8rF56w/framing-ea-doing-good-better-did-worse --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
This is a link post. In Ugandan villages where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) hired away the existing government health worker, infant mortality went up. This happened in 39%[1] of villages that already had a government worker. The NGO arrived with funding and good intentions, but the likelihood that villagers received care from any health worker declined by ~23%. Brain Misallocation “Brain drain”, - the movement of people from poorer countries to wealthier ones, has been extensively discussed for decades[2]. But there's a different dynamic that gets far less attention: “brain misallocation”. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the brightest talents are being incentivised towards organisations that don’t utilise their potential for national development. They’re learning how to get grants from multilateral alphabet organisations rather than build businesses or make good policy. This isn’t about talent leaving the country. It's about talent being misdirected and mistrained within it. Examples Nick Laing [...] ---Outline:(00:36) Brain Misallocation(01:16) Examples(05:37) The Incentive Trap(07:48) When Help Becomes Harm(08:48) Conclusion --- First published: October 23rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6rmdyddEateJFWb4L/the-charity-trap-brain-misallocation Linkpost URL:https://gdea.substack.com/p/the-charity-trap-brain-misallocation --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
This is a link post. Biological risks are more severe than has been widely appreciated. Recent discussions of mirror bacteria highlight an extreme scenario: a single organism that could infect and kill humans, plants, and animals, exhibits environmental persistence in soil or dust, and might be capable of spreading worldwide within several months. In the worst-case scenario, this could pose an existential risk to humanity, especially if the responses/countermeasures were inadequate. Less severe pandemic pathogens could still cause hundreds of millions (or billions) of casualties if they were engineered to cause harm. Preventing such catastrophes should be a top priority for humanity. However, if prevention fails, it would also be prudent to have a backup plan. One way of doing this would be to enumerate the types of pathogens that might be threatening (e.g. viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc), enumerate the subtypes (e.g. adenoviruses, coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, etc), analyze the [...] ---Outline:(04:20) PPE(09:56) Biohardening(14:36) Detection(17:00) Expression of interest and acknowledgements The original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 2nd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/33t5jPzxEcFXLCPjq/the-four-pillars-a-hypothesis-for-countering-catastrophic Linkpost URL:https://defensesindepth.bio/the-four-pillars-a-hypothesis-for-countering-catastrophic-biological-risk/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
I’ve used the phrase “entertainment for EAs” a bunch to describe a failure mode that I’m trying to avoid with my career. Maybe it’d be useful for other people working in meta-EA, so I’m sharing it here as a quick draft amnesty post. There's a motivational issue in meta-work where it's easy to start treating the existing EA community as stakeholders. The real stakeholders in my work (and meta-work in general) are the ultimate beneficiaries — the minds (animal, human, digital?) that could benefit from work I help to initiate. But those beneficiaries aren’t present to me — they aren’t my friends, they don’t work in the same building as me. To keep your eyes on the real prize takes constant work. When that work slips, you could end up working on ‘entertainment for EAs’, i.e. something which gets great feedback from EAs, but only hazily, if [...] --- First published: October 17th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AkSDhiPuvnRNbjXAf/entertainment-for-eas --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.