Effective Altruism Forum

Published on June 22, 2026 1:42 AM GMT What the average human understands continues to drastically increase. Humans today know more than the average human fifty years ago. This is because of inventions like the web, which give us access to most of the knowledge available to humans instantaneously. A new age of epistemology has begun with AI, in that AI-generated summaries continue this trend of g…

Published on June 21, 2026 10:32 AM GMT Introduction: I have been reflecting on recent discussions on this platform concerning the future of global development philanthropy, particularly on the argument that the next wave of philanthropy should place greater emphasis on emerging regions and locally led approaches. These discussions led me to consider a related question in animal welfare: if Afric…

Published on June 20, 2026 8:33 AM GMT This is a linkpost for the position paper AI Welfare Is Bullshit by Yunze Xiao, Gordon Dai, Shahan Ali Memon, Jen-tse Huang, Maarten Sap, and Mona Diab, whose preprint was published on 14 April 2026. The abstract is below. Here is summary of the paper from Yunze. "Comments, pushback, and counter-cases are welcome — especially from researchers actively buildi…

Published on June 20, 2026 7:32 AM GMT I've just launched the Animal Futures Tournament on Metaculus, in partnership with The Unjournal and @Sentient Futures . The tournament is built on a simple idea: the animal movement is regularly makes strategic decisions on which organisations to fund, which campaigns to push, and which emerging issues to prioritise. These decisions are more informed when t…

Published on June 20, 2026 12:21 AM GMT I had a draft of this post sitting in my files. The situation is changing at the World Bank, where I no longer work, so my knowledge is rapidly becoming obsolete. However, there may be a specific opportunity for people with US work authorization willing to move to Washington DC; see (2)(a) below. There are two common routes into a career at the World Bank. …

Published on June 19, 2026 8:02 PM GMT I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. This is a summary of my full document, “ Infrastructure for secret mass multi-agent collusion exists and is rapidly advancing ”. Section references below point to it, and citations here can be found in the document's b…

Published on June 19, 2026 6:12 PM GMT By Deena Mousa , Program Officer, Global Health & Wellbeing Cause Prioritization AI is progressing rapidly and could have profound implications for the health and wellbeing of people around the world. While global health philanthropy has historically assumed relative continuity with the past, we would like to engage seriously with the potential implications …

Published on June 19, 2026 5:37 PM GMT After about seven years, QURI is moving into maintenance mode. This means we’ll ensure that key software (Guesstimate and SquiggleHub) is maintained, but we won’t be developing new software or doing new research. Background I started QURI in 2019. At that point I was excited about projects at the intersection of epistemics and software, primarily to be used …

Published on June 19, 2026 4:17 PM GMT Here’s Holden Karnofsky : I tend to think it’s worse than 51/49. I tend to think we’re always going to be prone to overestimate how robustly good our actions are. And the more we learn about all the galaxy-brained considerations that one should have had in one’s head, the more it’s going to be like 50+ε%. I think AI safety is a great cause to work in. I’m ex…

Published on June 19, 2026 12:44 PM GMT I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness” , which I’ll call the unawareness argument . To that end, this post will: break down the unawareness argument at a high level; explain why the EA community should care about this argument; and summarize the angles for critiquing the argument th…

Published on June 19, 2026 12:44 PM GMT TL;DR We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence, ‘ The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance ’—submit your entries by August 14th . There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: $7k in total . Additionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to $50k for a truly…

Published on June 19, 2026 10:18 AM GMT If you're interested in working on existential risk, mirror life should be near the top of your list ... and almost no one is working on it yet. Mirror bacteria, built from molecules with reversed chirality, could in principle evade the immune defences of essentially every plant, animal, and human on Earth, with no natural predators or established treatment…

Published on June 18, 2026 9:33 PM GMT Naively assume that your money is entirely being used either to implement an intervention, or to research that intervention. Donating towards e.g. SWP might help us understand whether that intervention is helpful, by giving us more effectiveness data from the field. You might find it helpful to indicate if you've read the post that inspired this! Animal Welf…

Published on June 18, 2026 2:52 PM GMT A map of who is doing what on AI safety in Latin America, scoped to catastrophic risk, and an argument for digesting the Northern frameworks rather than copying them. I used Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic) for brainstorming, understanding and discussing concepts, finding initiatives, and grammar and spelling corrections on text I had already written. It likely c…

Published on June 18, 2026 6:08 PM GMT By Robert Wiblin | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today. In this video, Rob Wiblin walks through a fascinating analysis from researcher Beren Millidge that uses …

Published on June 18, 2026 2:54 PM GMT Hi everyone, My name is Gian, the founder of HELGEN (biosecurity / biodefense), focusing on detecting biological threats in the environment. We have established partnerships with professorships in TUM and LMU (Munich, Germany), and looking for someone who could potentially join as member to apply for EXIST / other German and EU grants. I am looking for a co-…

Published on June 18, 2026 12:22 PM GMT TLDR: The field of AI safety is bottlenecked on talent. Running recruitment processes is expensive and time-consuming. Freelancers are overlooked. Hiring freelancers can provide a way to quickly and cheaply test a person's fit within an org, and vice versa. Plus, real work gets completed, and freelancers get both compensation and a portfolio piece. Last wee…

Published on June 18, 2026 9:54 AM GMT At every EA conference I go to I end up having long conversations with attendees about my inside-view on what it is like to have kids. Since I know that a lot of impact-oriented people have questions/interest here, I decided to write up my thoughts in a series of posts that address different angles of how to think about this from my perspective. The link her…

Published on June 18, 2026 4:45 AM GMT Far-off funders and effective global philanthropy Originally posted on my Substack There’s a new wave of philanthropy about to come out of Silicon Valley. Nan Ransohoff, in “ The third wave of American philanthropy ”, notes that we might soon have an additional $37B of philanthropy per year from Anthropic and the OpenAI Foundation. Some of the soon-to-be-ric…

Published on June 18, 2026 2:39 AM GMT Crossposting this from LessWrong , with the permission of the author, Tom Smith. In the past few years, many people around me have tried to convince me that US electoral politics is important. But like many other people in the community, I’ve been suspicious of many of the high-level arguments that I’ve heard. It felt like people were pulling numbers out of …