A bit sad to find out that Open Philanthropy’s (now Coefficient Giving) GCR Cause Prioritization team is no more. 

I heard it was removed/restructured mid-2025. Seems like most of the people were distributed to other parts of the org. I don't think there were public announcements of this, though it is quite possible I missed something. 

I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard. 

There don't seem to be many active online artifa... (read more)

Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?

The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?

A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities... (read more)

It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding. 

Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.

As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.

It is popular to hate on Swapcard, and yet Swapcard seems like the best available solution despite its flaws. Claude Code or other AI coding assistants are very good nowadays, and conceivably, someone could just Claude Code a better Swapcard that maintained feature parity while not having flaws.

Overall I'm guessing this would be too hard right now, but we do live in an age of mysteries and wonders. It gets easier every month. One reason for optimism is it seems like the Swapcard team is probably not focused on the somewhat odd use case of EAGs in general (... (read more)

What are people's favorite arguments/articles/essays trying to lay out the simplest possible case for AI risk/danger?

Every single argument for AI danger/risk/safety I’ve seen seems to overcomplicate things. Either they have too many extraneous details, or they appeal to overly complex analogies, or they seem to spend much of their time responding to insider debates.

I might want to try my hand at writing the simplest possible argument that is still rigorous and clear, without being trapped by common pitfalls. To do that, I want to quickly survey the field so I can learn from the best existing work as well as avoid the mistakes they make.

Consider adopting the term o-risk.

William MacAskill has recently been writing a bunch about how if you’re a Long-Termist, it’s not enough merely to avoid the catastrophic outcomes. Even if we get a decent long-term future, it may still fall far short of the best future we could have achieved. This outcome — of a merely okay future, when we could have had a great future — would still be quite tragic.

Which got me thinking: EAs already have terms like x-risk (for existential risks, or things which could cause human extinction) and s-risk (for suffering risks,... (read more)

Thanks to everyone who voted for our next debate week topic! Final votes were locked in at 9am this morning. 

We can’t announce a winner immediately, because the highest karma topic (and perhaps some of the others) touches on issues related to our politics on the EA Forum policy. Once we’ve clarified which topics we would be able to run, we’ll be able to announce a winner. 

Once we have, I’ll work on honing the exact wording. I’ll write a post with a few options, so that you can have input into the exact version we end up discussing. 

PS: ... (read more)

EA Animal Welfare Fund almost as big as Coefficient Giving FAW now?

This job ad says they raised >$10M in 2025 and are targeting $20M in 2026. CG's public Farmed Animal Welfare 2025 grants are ~$35M.  

Is this right?

Cool to see the fund grow so much either way.

Lots of “entry-level” jobs require applicants to have significant prior experience. This seems like a catch-22: if entry-level positions require experience, how are you supposed to get the experience in the first place? Needless to say, this can be frustrating. But we don’t think this is (quite) as paradoxical as it sounds, for two main reasons. 

1: Listed requirements usually aren't as rigid as they seem.

Employers usually expect that candidates won’t meet all of the “essential” criteria. These are often more of a wish list than an exhaustive list... (read more)

@Ryan Greenblatt and I are going to record another podcast together (see the previous one here). We'd love to hear topics that you'd like us to discuss. (The questions people proposed last time are here, for reference.) We're most likely to discuss issues related to AI, but a broad set of topics other than "preventing AI takeover" are on topic. E.g. last time we talked about the cost to the far future of humans making bad decisions about what to do with AI, and the risk of galactic scale wild animal suffering.

Not sure who needs to hear this, but Hank Green has published two very good videos about AI safety this week: an interview with Nate Soares and a SciShow explainer on AI safety and superintelligence.

Incidentally, he appears to have also come up with the ITN framework from first principles (h/t @Mjreard).

Hopefully this is auspicious for things to come?

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will be repping the EA Forum Team at EAG SF in mid-Feb — stop by our office hours to ask questions, give us your hottest Forum takes, or just say hi and come get a surprise sweet! :)

Reminder: applications for EAG SF close soon (this Sunday!)

I’ve seen a few people in the LessWrong community congratulate the community on predicting or preparing for covid-19 earlier than others, but I haven’t actually seen the evidence that the LessWrong community was particularly early on covid or gave particularly wise advice on what to do about it. I looked into this, and as far as I can tell, this self-congratulatory narrative is a complete myth.

Many people were worried about and preparing for covid in early 2020 before everything finally snowballed in the second week of March 2020. I remember it personally.... (read more)