Please list any new funding opportunities you can think of here on the Forum? I feel like we might already be in the early ramp-up to significantly more EA aligned funding. At the same time, the Forum's overview over funding opportunities feels like it is quickly getting outdated. I think as things move quickly, coordination might become looser and new promising interventions are identified, it is helpful for people to have a good overview over available funding sources and their priorities.
I have heard on the grapevine there is already funding on several fronts that might not be very public. I am a little bit uncertain if perhaps it is better these sources remain anonymous. At the same time, I think there might be several promising EA projects that are not sufficiently visible to people influencing funding decisions.
Epistemic note: I am not listing these yet as I have not had time yet to verify how much they qualify as EA funding opportunities.
Here are a few recent developments I am considering listing on the funding opportunities page, but would like someone that knows these funds better to list them:
Is there a way for me to filter posts below say 15 karma from my frontage? I couldn’t easily find it on mobile.
11 ways the World Cup can help you survive.
An adjustment to the Information-Action Ratio.
There’s a lot of stuff out there along the lines, “Can you guess the hidden meaning behind every World Cup kit?” and it’s hard to know how to feel about it.
On the one hand, it’s an eyesore and a regrettable reminder of how our brains have been turned to mush. On the other, there really is a lot to learn from a coming together of 48 rabid fanbases from the four corners and the Lord only knows how many nations, cultures and languages they represent. I know a straight shooter respected on all sides who will tell you without a hint of irony that this World Cup is the most important geopolitical event in history, and the thing it’s replacing at the top of the charts is the last one.
The 1001 plays it straight, of course, because you don’t need clickbait or SEO bros when huge-if-true claims like "The World Cup is a random number generator" and "Everything is a tradeoff" are, in fact, true. The thing about kit-based knowledge - and I say this as someone who, at the behest of Grandad, could once name the home ground of all 92 clubs in the Football League - is there’s very little you, someone in the waning days of their career with a laptop job, can do with it, other than score points at The Parrot’s Beak quiz on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in Sheffield.
The real quiz is extending as many careers and lives as possible long enough to see the next World Cup. For that, we need to adjust the Information-Action Ratio a little away from titillating trivia and toward generalizable concepts that can be deployed day in day out at the desk in mum and dad’s basement.
I wrote a list of some of the things football commentators say which sound silly out of context yet will make you better at understanding contemporary workplace dynamics and communicating about them with your colleagues (human or otherwise).
You can bet your bottom dollar "11 ways the World Cup can help you survive" is unlike any listicle you've ever read.
From The 1001, an EA sports blog.
I'm currently drafting a post on current sycophantic AI as something that threatens core human skills of reasoning, maths etc. Based on aviation skills fade and recent possible impact on CS outcomes. This could have knock on impacts to other causes as degraded skills might lead to degraded outcomes in fields like AI alignment or ethical reasoning in time.
I would appreciate some human collaboration on it. I don't have huge amount of time (so it is AI written currently, ironically, but writing ITN notes isn't my cue competency anyway).
One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If there were millions+ of general-purpose robots deployed in the world, and someone were able to hack / take control of a large fraction of them, they could easily create a repressive state.
When I tried to find mainstream assessments of this risk pathway online, however, I found very little; there is some discussion of the ethics of develo...
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Great job! Wonderful to see effective giving being so very back.
Also good to see 🔷 catching better metrics. I'd seen quite a lot of prior anecdotal evidence of it appearing significantly undervalued - many of the most engaged effective givers I know were 🔷 initially, which really didn't track with the very low value attributions given previously.
Yet another banger of a report! Awesome stuff.
I asked Claude to create an interactive dashboard version and to "make it similarly aesthetically pleasing":
Pledge values:
Sensitivities:
Build your own multiplier:
You should definitely trust the actual report over this dashboard, if you see something funny blame Claude...
Subtitle: How to Ride Without Losing Your Mind
Five years ago, Ajeya Cotra memorably described Effective Altruist reasoning as a “train to crazy town”—with longtermists in particular staying on the train for longer than their nearterm-focused colleagues. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but what I suspect resonates for a lot of people is the sense that EA-style abstract reasoning can push you in...
This basic idea has been known for some time, and I think people may find the precedents interesting. In Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method”, he notes that he will keep his current ethical views and behaviours fixed, while he takes on his project of carefully investigating what he can know for certain. In Kant’s “What is the Enlightenment?”, he points out that part of what makes the Enlightenment work as a social project, is that people are allowed to say or think what they want to, as long as they obey the King and fulfill their social role. So it seems that previous writers have considered the importance of purposely fixing one’s behaviour for a while, so as to allow one’s thinking to be more free. Still, I feel that at some point or another, one does have to resolve the tension between that which one knows and that which one acts upon.
[Subtitle without the typo. If your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.]
This is a crosspost for The mistake of conflating intelligence and power...
Recently, I made a case that “Africa needs greater strategic attention in the animal welfare space” because many systems shaping animal agriculture in Africa are still being formed. Growing populations, rising urbanization, rising incomes, and changing food consumption patterns are likely to increase demand for animal-source foods ac...
Disclaimer: I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively endorse it.
The Unjournal has been building a set of tools and resources that may be useful for researchers trying to decide what to work on, how to prioritize, or how to have more impact. Also relevant for research users and research managers.
In particular:
...
This session’s exercise is about doing some personal reflection. There are no right or wrong answers here, instead, this is an opportunity for you to take some time and think about your ethical values and beliefs.
What does it mean to be a good ancestor? (10 mins.)
In the exercise from last week, we asked you to write a letter to the past. This week, we’d like you to turn your focus forward, and think about the years, decades and centuries ahead of us. ...
A good ancestor is someone who leaves the world a little more capable of solving its own problems.
I don't think being a good ancestor means predicting the future perfectly or trying to control it. We know far less about future generations' needs than about our own.
A good ancestor thinks beyond immediate incentives and recognizes that today's decisions can shape opportunities and risks for people who will never know their names.
A good ancestor is committed to building and preserving trustworthy institutions, protecting democratic values, investing in education and scientific knowledge, reducing avoidable risks, and caring for the natural environment.
At a personal level, a good ancestor shares knowledge, mentors others, and contributes to communities rather than treating achievements as only individual. They leave behind ideas, relationships, and systems that continue to benefit others after they're gone.
I also think humility is an important virtue for a good ancestor. We cannot know exactly what future generations will value, so we should avoid imposing our own vision of the future too rigidly. Our responsibility is not to decide their lives for them, but to leave them with as many opportunities as possible and as few irreversible harms as we can.
Ultimately, being a good ancestor means acting with the awareness that our lives are part of a much longer story, and even the smallest of choices can shape the world inherited by people we'll never meet.
I used AI tools to assist with editing this post, and I personally reviewed and refined all arguments.
AGI — systems capable of functioning as a country of geniuses — could arrive before 2030, and whoever develops it first could rapidly build insurmountable geopolitical advantages. This creates catastrophic risks: power concentration in unelected hands, democratic erosion from arms-race dynamics, unprecedentedly durable authoritarian entrenchment through AI...
I was never accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship programme, but I was able to land a high-impact role at one (now leading it!), by getting in touch with other founders. For me, this is no less rewarding than being the real founder, and enough people treat me as if I went through the programme that it’s usually a surprise to people that I didn’t.
So I would urge some people to reconsider if founding is exactly what you want, you may be able to derive almost all of the benefits via a slightly different path, and CE’s charities would very much welcome talented founder-type generalists in high-level leadership & ownership roles!
For those reading this post: PauseAI UK is currently fundraising for operational expansion. If you want to donate to PauseAI UK, you can see their donor prospectus and make donations at https://pauseai.uk/donate
I have a clarification question regarding the judges' interpretation of "constructive" response. For the question to make sense, though, I need to offer a bit of context.
One way to understand the meaning of "constructive response" is to construe it as "a response that gets the 'impartial altruist' out of a perceived pickle, allowing them to continue to inhabit the 'impartial altruist' orientation in some form."
The pickle is "Yipes! If we're really clueless, then this EA stuff maybe isn't so E after all." The constructive response is "Well, maybe it's still as E as we can hope for, given our station, relative to the other options". Or something.
As shorthand, we can think of this kind of constructive response as an "internally constructive" response: inside the orientation of the 'impartial altruist,' it constructs an escape hatch from the pickle that allows one to retain at least some level of confidence that sticking with some version of the 'impartial altruist' orientation is advisable.
Another way that a response might be "constructive" is by liberating one from an orientation that is no longer advisable to retain. Such a response is constructive not because it builds an internal escape hatch from the pickle, but because it constructs an escape hatch from the orientation itself.
As shorthand, we can think of this kind of constructive response as an "externally constructive" response: given that it is generally a good (constructive) thing to escape a failing enterprise, the former 'impartial altruist' sees, from outside their past orientation, the opportunity costs of staying within it and the prospects of moving beyond it.
In my field, philosophy, one might see W.V.O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as an externally constructive response to logical positivism, or Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity as an externally constructive response to ordinary language philosophy, or Wilfird Sellars' Empiricism and the The Philosophy of Mind as an externally constructive response to naive foundationalism in epistemology.
Maybe it's more descriptively accurate to call externally constructive responses, as I'm thinking of them, as "program ending" responses, but it does seem to me that they are constructive in an important sense given that abandoning flagging and failed prospects can save a lot of time and energy that can be more wisely repurposed.
My question is whether judges would consider "externally constructive"/"program ending" contributions eligible to win prizes. I'm curious about this because I have conflicting intuitions.
On the one hand, I can't imagine that the (fictional) Effective Logical Positivism Society would have ever considered awarding W.V.O Quine a 1,325 pound prize (roughly $50,000 in 1951 BPS) had he submitted "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" to a similar essay contest. In a similar vein, one wouldn't expect a (fictional) Christian Theodicy Society to award a prize to an essay that persuasively shows theodicy to be a flawed enterprise. When an organization is promoting a particular paradigm, program, or identity, it is counterintuitive that they would fete an essay that undercuts the paradigm, program, or identity they support.
On the other hand, EA's commitment to impartiality and to following the evidence where it leads, even if it leads to counterintuitive or unwelcome conclusions, invites one to wonder whether (what I'm calling) an "externally constructive"/"program ending" essay wouldn't be very desirable for its allowing one to put aside something that is underperforming or failing so that the resources going into it can be reinvested more wisely without nostalgia for the loss of a certain favored identity or method.
Good grief! I had intended for this to be three or four sentences! Apologies for the length!
Hi! This has been in my backlog, so I wanted to quickly post about a one-on-one app that we made a couple of months ago for the West Coast EA Retreat and Midwest EA Retreat.
Pairwise is a simple scheduler for 1:1s at retreats and other events. You can sign in with a magic link, mark the slots you're free, browse other attendees and see when your availability overlaps, and request meetings.
You can try a demo retreat here and read about its use at the West Coast EA retreat here.
If you want to use pairwise for an EA or AI safety or similar retreat/event, please let me know! You can email [email protected] or DM me.
Made by Jesse Gilbert with help from Saul Munn. Open source on GitHub.