Open thread: 2026 Q1 (January - March)

Hi there everyone! 🪷

My name is Shivani, new to the Forum! I'm based in Stockholm, Sweden. I got involved with EA thorugh the career guidence service, which I'm very grateful for. EA wasn't a complete stranger before that, however, it wasn't until I got approached about it that I did get involved. 

Being someone passionate about impact and the betterment of our planet and society, I feel like I should've explored the EA community before. At the same time, I'm quite shy when it comes to getting into new spaces, so not that surprising. 

I relate to what many people say about the EA community being a bit overwhelming at the beginning, and I join to what @Karen Maria Alston said about being a reader and a lurker. However, I'm excited about being part of this forum and having the chance to grow in it. 

I'm currently living the akward limbo between the end of my studies and landing THE job. I have a Master's in Sustainable Societies and, after more than a year applying to a wide variety of positions, I realized that I should focus on Operations. Thanks to a presentation durig the Summit I attended last November, I realized that ops in EA is the role I want to play. Currently I'm also participating in the CEA Operations Career Bootcamp. 

Speaking in EA terms, the problem I want to focus on is social and climate justice, and more recently, the intersection between AI governance and climate change. I know that those are not considered neglected topics, but I'm very passionate about them and, until I find a more neglected niche intersection, I'll stick with those. I'd say I'm still working on my plan to improve the world and my theory of change. 

I don't know what else I should say, so I'll say thank you for reading my rambling, and I welcome anyone who wants to connect and/or chat. 

I'd like to finish with a quote from Freedom is a constant struggle by Angela Y. Davis: " We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies." 

And, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Thank you to everyone involved here, to everyone who wants to contribute to make our world and reality a little bit better everyday. 

Kindly, 

Shivani 💫🌺🩷

Hey all!

I am Wiede, an ambitious yet confused young guy excited about starting an impactful career in international cooperation. I am about to complete my first year working as a junior WASH expert in the beautiful country of Burundi, where my colleagues and I work on creating safe school environments with access to clean water and sanitation facilities.

I have another year ahead before I return to my home country of Belgium, but I'm already pondering about what's next. Which skills should I develop ? Will I have more impact in a small or large organisation ? What is my position as a highly privileged person in this unjust world ?

So I turn to the EA community in the hope to find some answers and guidance on these and the 1000 other questions I ask myself on a daily basis. But most of all, I am excited about getting to know some like-minded people !

Cheers !

Hello everyone!

My name is Madeleine, and I'm here to say hello and fulfill my goal of making any kind of post on an online forum before the month of February ends.

I'm currently an undergraduate student based in Texas, and when I learned about EA (through GiveWell's website), I was thrilled to find a community that is tackling the questions and issues I'd often wondered about in disjointed ways but never assembled into a coherent theory that I could ask someone about or investigate.

I'm studying Electrical and Computer Engineering and searching for a way to have an impactful career. I find doing things publicly and engaging with other people hard and scary but so necessary for multiplying our collective impact, so I'm grateful to have this welcoming community and open thread as an easy way to become more comfortable with this. 

Excited to be here and looking forward to meeting other community members!

Hello everyone

I’m Karen Maria and I am based in Washington, DC in the USA. I was introduced to effective altruism through my 80,000 Hours coach, and I’m still orienting myself within the community.

I’ll be honest, the EA Forum can feel overwhelming and intimidating at times. There’s a level of rigor here that I deeply respect, and I’m currently more of a reader and lurker but I do plan to post and be a contributor.  I’m learning how to sit with ideas, follow arguments carefully, and build understanding before I form strong views. 

I’m making a late career pivot into AI safety and governance. I come from a background in marketing, communications, stakeholder engagement and brand strategy. Over the past year my curiosity about AI tools turned into deeper concern about societal impact, power concentration, persuasion, and who is most vulnerable as these systems advance. I am currently working on my theory of change. 

Most of my downtime now is spent studying. I’m reading research papers, policy analysis, and watching lots of podcasts, often slowly and repeatedly, to build real comprehension rather than surface familiarity. This transition is intentional and, at times, uncomfortable, but it’s necessary.

I’d love recommendations from this community:

• Articles or papers that will help me build foundational understanding
• Writers or researchers worth following closely
• Posts on the Forum that you think are especially clarifying for someone earlier in the journey

I’m here because I value the norms this community upholds: intellectual honesty, seriousness about impact, and humility in the face of uncertainty. I’m grateful to learn from those further along the path and to be part of the conversation as I continue to grow into this work.

Karen Maria

Hi,

Thank for posting this Toby. I have visited the EA forum for the past years but never really felt like posting or engaging.

After reading your post, I fell encouraged to share my thoughts and participate in the discussions brought along by the community.

Thanks.

Hello fellow forum members,

My name is Eileen, I am new to the forum as well, based near Toronto, Canada. I came across the EA forum through the Animal Advocacy Group where I am soliciting help to pivot my research and policy analysis skills from institutional care models to animal welfare, advocacy, and sustainable agriculture. I have a PhD in public policy and administration along with a Masters in Business Admin (BSc. in biology as well).  I am having a bit of an existential crisis of late; trying to find a reason to commit.  All the jobs in Ontario-based healthcare research are one off contracts, they need you for a short time and then throw you away and move on to the next project and you have to start all over again.  It's a little demoralizing and I am trying to find greater meaning and long term connection.  I devour knowledge and love to learn, I will shift and adapt as required to find a fit with a cause where I can feel like I am needed and valued as a core team member. Great to meet you all. 

Hello everyone,

I'm Oli Beatson, south coast of England.

I came to EA sideways via LessWrong in the mid-2010s — attended a couple of conferences and a CFAR workshop. I'm a vegetarian since 2000, but I also think I might be a sociopath because if someone came to my door and said "wanna try fried NIMBY" I'd probably have a bite. Into political daydreaming (mostly housing/abundance these days).

I got deep into libertarian econ — I still think the EA community sleeps on Caplanian bullet-biting on housing and borders — but years of weed and life have left my "powerful economic intuition" mostly as instinctive recoil from anything coercive, without a fully coherent moral framework anymore. These days I'm basically a Western-civ-maximalist neoliberal who cares way more about personal survival and cultures-I-like than distant bednets.

I was pretty convinced of AI doom (or at least plan-obviating-world-changes from AI) around 2028-32; some stuff seems roughly on track, but I'm trying to quarantine the doom as latent irrationality/psychosis because I have not seen or generated a single plausible rigorous roadmap that goes from human-level to anything scary. After enough podcasts, it's clear most people are just throwing electrons at matrices. Still interested in x-risk but also kind of Buddhist about the idea of massive population decrease. I think it's unviable to try to control everything and unhealthy to even think about, so I will stay out of discussions my brain can't afford.

Tried breaking into EA orgs as a web dev because the culture/personality fit. "Earning to give" was mostly a polite cover for earning to live independently. A decade later I'm significantly closer to homelessness, which has flipped my personality: used to be oversensitive about "working outside the system," now a little more gung-ho. Still, I'm a little lonely, bad at collaborating, and wasting cycles on one-shot schemes to fix housing or grab arbitrary power/status as a pretext. I'd kind of like to be part of a utilitarian improv troupe or something but I'm terrified of putting stuff like this out there.

Think I'm dark-triad, so these days I'm mostly here to lurk drama, feel smug about dodging it, and track community evolution. Might eventually write about how taking applied utilitarianism too literally as a core "believed belief" sent me down surprisingly easy (and bad) psychological rabbit holes. For now, channeling remaining energy into music — the secret dream I've avoided forever. Expect a terrible hip-hop album or zoning-laws musical theater.

Hoping the Forum acts as an antidote to my inner edgelord. Looking forward to reading, lurking, and maybe dropping thoughts later. Nice to (re)meet you all.

Hello everyone, 

My name is McKim and I am new to the forum. I am based in Vancouver, Canada. I learned about EA through my research on the ways companies developing LLMs impact society back in 2022 and have more or less been a lurker ever since.

I am commenting on this open thread because we just launched TechnoEthos, the company that I founded. TechnoEthos is developing TEED, a compliance and ethics evaluation system that translates laws, regulations, industry best practices, and ethical frameworks into actionable guidance for software teams. 

We just launched on LinkedIn and on our website. 

It would be wonderful to connect with folks on here who might want to collaborate with what we are building. 

Thank you. 

Hi everyone 👋

I’m G, currently living in Guatemala. I became interested in effective altruism through long-standing questions about how societies stay resilient as technology—especially AI—scales faster than our institutions, incentives, and cultures.

I’m here to explore and stress-test an idea I’ve been working on around intent-first networking.

The core premise is simple: instead of networks forming around status, feeds, or algorithms optimized for engagement, they form around explicit human intent—what someone is trying to do, solve, learn, or contribute right now. Coordination happens by matching intent to people, resources, and context, rather than attention or influence.

The motivation comes from concerns around AI and societal scaling—not so much alignment in a technical sense, but human agency and coordination: how people continue to make meaningful, values-driven decisions as systems become faster, more automated, and more opaque.

I’m especially interested in how intent-first systems might support:

• Better coordination without central control
• Healthier community formation and governance
• Human-in-the-loop design as AI agents become more capable

I’m here mainly to learn, share ideas, and welcome questions or critiques from an EA perspective.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have.

Thanks!

Apparently an emulated Drosophila melanogaster brain made a fly-like body move in a simulation.

Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move. The ghost is no longer in the machine. The machine is becoming the ghost.

The quote is from this article where you can also see the video. 

I cannot evaluate the claims being made myself. Maybe somebody here can? The company that supposedly did this is called EON Systems and lists Anders Sandberg and Robin Hanson as advisors.

Have applications for EAG San Francisco already closed? The website states that the application deadline is February 1, but the application form only includes checkboxes for London and NYC.

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone.

I'm Dan.

I found this community through the 80000hrs career guide, which I in turn found from a sponsored video on the ParkNotes YouTube channel.

I am very much new to effective altruism and I am very much focused on getting to speed with the community and the current research on the highest priority causes.

Looking forward to chatting and meeting you all.

Dan.

Hi everyone!

I'm Maxi and I'm from and based in Uruguay. I'm an economist pursuing a Masters in Economics and certified in AI Ethics, and for a while now I became increasingly interested on how to act and create lasting impact on the world's most pressing problems. Recently I did some volunteering as well, in the development of an economic impact analysis model for education in India.

I've known EA for a while, been getting involved with its conetent, and I recently got enrolled to the EA introductory program.

I have worked as an independent contractor in operations and strategy for the last 7 years. Now, I'm seeking to change my career path to organizations where I can directly address global issues and make a meaningful impact. 

Also, I'm particularly interested AI Governance and Policy and have some plans to raise awareness about AI Safety in Uruguay.

I would love to engage in rich discussions and learn from this community! So I'm really looking forward to being active over here. 
 

I'm always open for dms over here so if we share interests please feel free to reach out.
So that's all for now, and I wish to speak soon!

Hi everyone! I'm new here, but have been aware of/followed EA for 2 years now. Would love to interview someone for a high school project I'm working on (its actually about Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX). This would be an effective use of your time because if I don't do well on this project, I may be rescinded from college (carnegie mellon) and not be able to make as many effective donations in the future.

Hello everyone, I am new on the forum. I'm a journalists, web developer, and philosopher working a new theory of mind that aims to describe animal, human, and machine cognition by fusing the concepts of dual process theory, basal cognition, and enactivism. I would love to post a link to it on the forum, but it looks like the mods on the new posts have been asleep and they have not approved my first post which contained it. 

Thanks!