Just under a month until the Cluelessness Critiques Competition deadline. How's it going? Any hints on what people are writing about?
I have made a semi-functional rich person impact ranker. It requires votes (and optionally, longform analyses from humans or AIs). If you want to help flesh it out, dm me on here or on twitter or if you have my details, anywhere I am contactable and I'll send it to you.
Apply to be a Teacher for TARA Round 2, 2026 🧑🏫
• Part-time role ($80 AUD/hr, ~13 hours/week).
• Lead Saturday sessions and provide remote support.
• Must have strong ML skills and completed most or all of the ARENA curriculum.
• Applications close 8 August 2026, reviewing candidates on rolling basis.
• Check out the role description and apply.
The Fallacy of Similar Magnitudes
A name I came up with for a pattern that comes up often enough to deserve one. Here’s a particular instance:
Suppose you're a longtermist who thinks the vast majority of the (net positive) moral weight is in the far future, that AI existential risk is above 1%, and that it's reasonably tractable to reduce. Some people who hold all three premises still say things like: "AI safety has maybe two orders of magnitude more resources than animal welfare, so the marginal dollar is better spent on animal welfare."
This is the fallacy of similar magnitudes: in this case, the application is that neglectedness comparisons only matter when the causes are within a couple orders of magnitude of each other in stakes. Under the stated premises, they aren’t: the a priori difference in expected value is way larger. Two orders of magnitude in resources doesn't move the needle even a bit.
Note: this AW response could be ok if you have certain views about risk aversion or worldview diversification, but that’s besides the point.
Just under a month until the Cluelessness Critiques Competition deadline. How's it going? Any hints on what people are writing about?
I suppose this is familiar: you have some defined tasks for the week, they are inherently interesting (and reasonably impactful!), you have the right level of competence to achieve them (although these tasks are kind of learning-by-doing, since it's a start-up kind of task), you have a good working environment (silence and food, for me).
And yet you feel that slump, you have opened the document and you have booked your Focusmate, and it should go into this deep flaw state. But it...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...
➡️ Effective altruism is a joint effort. Our goal is to make the EA Forum a great space for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good we can.
This page might evolve, and at this point parts weren't written by Lizka (who no longer works on the Forum). If any information seems inaccurate or you think we should change something, please ... |
Looking for a way to skill-build as a student or young graduate? Consider charity trusteeship!
EAs are often good at maths/technology and less good at leadership and governance skills. This is an excellent match for (non-EA) trustee governance boards, that often have committed older people with good leadership and governance but who struggle with use of tech and maths. There are a lot of trustee vacancies around - highly absorbable - and it's an easy way to get started on tackling real issues with charities big and small!
You can help your charity act more effectively in the world using EA principles and frameworks about effective use of charitable resources, and learn experientially about practical issues than arise with those frameworks when they are implemented. Organisations like the Young Trustees Movement (UK) can mentor and support you, and the other trustees will probably have a lot of sage advice. And while trusteeship is unpaid, it also doesn't *cost* money either, so it's a fairly cheap way to do "EA as a hobby".
The EA community needs more people aged 30+ with genuine commitment and leadership skills, and should encourage people looking for principles-first EA to consider this as a life path in their 20s.
> Website: https://ai-safety-tracker-website.vercel.app/
> Data, code and plots: https://github.com/SomaxSoma/AI-Safety-Research-Tracker
TL;DR: We classified every paper accepted at ICLR, ICML and Neu...
“Human fallback” is one of the more frequently invoked and under‑specified phrases in AI safety discussions. Policy and governance documents often promise effective human oversight, kill switches, and humans in the loop, but they rarely address a blunt, operational question in any given sector: could this institution run for 72 hours without AI, under stress, this week?¹
Two concepts matter for that question. First, whether humans can still hand‑fly the system: run core operations safel...
19:00 Arrivals
19:15 Short intro for people new to EA
19:30 Open discussion and networking
Vegan snacks will be provided!
We're always happy to welcome new people, and we think this event is a great start to learn more about EA! If you’re new, I'm thrilled to introduce you to the community, just approach me at the event.
If you'd like to learn more about EA before attending the event, take a look at these resources to get a...
I wonder how much attending different universities matters if we focus solely on the quality of research mentorship available to an EA-oriented student who hopes to reduce AI risks.
I plan to study dentistry at a medical university because I believe having earn-to-give as a backup option is important. However, my ultimate goal is to become an AI safety researcher. I therefore plan to collaborate with computer science professors at a nearby university an...
Not attending CS degree isn't a sacrifice. Self-learning is very sufficient, the only thing I need from school is research mentorship.
It's a bit complicated to explain, but doing these two in parallel does NOT reduce productivity at all. If you're interested at why I could explain in the future
I'm not involved in animal welfare, so I won't comment on whether broadening the tent and bringing in meat-eaters is a good thing. That said, if we take that as a given, I still find this solution of tabooing "vegan" rather strange. One direct comparison we could make here would be the 10% pledge. It seems like the community orients to the 10% pledge in much the same way you'd like people to orient towards veganism? It's a large commitment to your values. It's to be celebrated. People talk about it openly. But you aren't expected to have to sign the pledge in order to identify as EA, attend a meeting, post on the Forum, etc.
I would say it would be a very large mistake to taboo the 10% pledge entirely, and avoid mentioning it in polite company. There's a lot of gap between "Everyone must sign the 10% pledge, or you're not a real EA and should feel unwelcome here" and "Nobody should ever mention the 10% pledge in public, for fear of driving away newcomers". EA already seems to handle this well with how the 10% pledge is used. Why shouldn't that be the model for how to handle other large commitments that should be celebrated but not demanded?
Just as some feedback, I don’t think the usual objection to working on longtermism or GCRs is ‘it’s not valuable enough’, even from a general audience. I think it would be more persuasive to explain somewhere why working on these causes would achieve anything at all. It’s not clear from your post that there would be a relationship between effort and rewards, and I suspect a lot of people share the intuition that any counterfactually valuable work on the very long term future would be washed out or easily reversible.
This is one of my favorite talks ever. Clear, gripping, heartbreaking, and uplifting all in ten minutes; not a word wasted.
Thank you to everyone at Pure Earth for the work you do on this incredibly important issue, I'm excited to send this talk to friends and family.
Looking for a way to skill-build as a student or young graduate? Consider charity trusteeship!
EAs are often good at maths/technology and less good at leadership and governance skills. This is an excellent match for (non-EA) trustee governance boards, that often have committed older people with good leadership and governance but who struggle with use of tech and maths. There are a lot of trustee vacancies around - highly absorbable - and it's an easy way to get started on tackling real issues with charities big and small!
You can help your charity act more effectively in the world using EA principles and frameworks about effective use of charitable resources, and learn experientially about practical issues than arise with those frameworks when they are implemented. Organisations like the Young Trustees Movement (UK) can mentor and support you, and the other trustees will probably have a lot of sage advice. And while trusteeship is unpaid, it also doesn't *cost* money either, so it's a fairly cheap way to do "EA as a hobby".
The EA community needs more people aged 30+ with genuine commitment and leadership skills, and should encourage people looking for principles-first EA to consider this as a life path in their 20s.