Quick takes
Are there any organizations out there that would describe their niche as advising for small/medium-sized donors? I can't think of any, and I'm wondering why not. I'm not exactly sure what organizations that claim to advise large donors actually do, but it seems plausible that some things are also effective for smaller donors just because there are larger numbers of those. I'm thinking of, for instance:
- tax law advice for effective giving
- will writing advice
- compiling resources on charity evaluations
- conducting charity evaluations
Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking ...
If possible the names should also be displayed for both upvoters and downvoters. This brings transparency and responsibility.
In my view, this would be very harmful. For example, it's not uncommon for a post to criticize a person or organization with significant power or influence in EA. Giving the criticized organization a list of people who upvoted criticisms and/or downvoted defenses would seriously chill and distort voting. We want people to vote their honest viewpoints without calculating whether their vote could come back to cost them in career ...
I really like Bob Fischer's point #4 from deep within the comment threads of his recent post and thought to share it more widely, seemed like wise advice to me:
...FWIW, my general orientation to most of the debates about these kinds of theoretical issues is that they should nudge your thinking but not drive it. What should drive your thinking is just: "Suffering is bad. Do something about it." So, yes, the numbers count. Yes, update your strategy based on the odds of making a difference. Yes, care about the counterfactual and, all else equal, put your efforts
Thanks for sharing, Mo. I liked that point to understand @Bob Fischer's general orientation better. At the same time, I did not find it that insightful. I think it makes a point while providing very little argument for it, and I do not seem to agree with the sentiment about the impact of moral views on cause prioritisation. It makes sense to have 4 years with an impact of 0 throughout a career of 44 years to increase the impact of the remaining 40 years (= 44 - 4) by more than 10 % (= 4/40). In this case, the impact would not be 0 "in most circumstances" (...
I just want to say thanks for all the orgs posting for marginal funding week for not having really donor-grabby messaging in their posts. No guilt trips, no exploitative photos of people in distress, etc. Just genuine explanations of what could be done with extra money.
I really dislike being the target of pushy giving tactics, because I'll be honest they just make me feel bad. And the fact that the EA community on the whole doesn't tolerate them is an amazing plus for being the kind of place I want to hang out in.
I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.2, which takes us to the end of the year.
Posting a bit late since I just got back from a long holiday — here's a bonus photo from my trip! :)
At the beginning of November, I learned about a startup called Red Queen Bio, that automates the development of viruses and related lab equipment. They work together with OpenAI, and OpenAI is their lead investor.
On November 13, they publicly announced their launch. On November 15, I saw that and made a tweet about it: Automated virus-producing equipment is insane. Especially if OpenAI, of all companies, has access to it. (The tweet got 1.8k likes and 497k views.)
In the tweet, I said that there is, potentially, literally a startup, funded by and collaborat...
My instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction (so take it with a grain of salt) is that the Red Queen Bio co-founder’s responses are satisfactory and reassuring. Your concerns are based on an unsourced rumour and speculation, which are always in unlimited supply and don’t warrant a response from a company in every case.
You also don’t seem to be updating rationally on the responses you are receiving, but just doubling-down on your original hunch, which by now seems like it’s probably false.
Not all tweets merit a response, so it doesn’t matter whether they continue to answer your questions or not.
Self-driving cars are not close to getting solved. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Andrej Karpathy, the lead AI researcher responsible for the development of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software from 2017 to 2022. (Karpathy also did two stints as a researcher at OpenAI, taught a deep learning course at Stanford, and coined the term "vibe coding".)
From Karpathy’s October 17, 2025 interview with Dwarkesh Patel:
Dwarkesh Patel 01:42:55
...You’ve talked about how you were at Tesla leading self-driving from 2017 to 2022. And you firsthand saw this progress from c
Python & Fellowship Tests
Repost from blog (I'd appreciate any feedback)
This Autumn has been a bit of a mix of continuing with Arena, being sick, and applying for half a dozen fellowships and courses.
Claude and Astra's fellowships both required code signal's industry coding assessments. I did a week of preparation for both of them before taking the test but did a lot worse than I thought I would. Being relatively new to Python and not being able to code at high speed without making mistakes was my downfall with these. I'm generally not great at thinking...
Could EA benefit from having a "bulldog"?
That is, a pugnacious (but scrupulous) public advocate of EA and EA-adjacent ideas. In the EA community currently, who might come closest to being something like EA's bulldog?
More precisely, I'm thinking of a hybrid between, say, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer (or perhaps Derek Parfit, for added dryness). A fiery, polemical wit married to a calm, analytical rigor.
A good, non-EA -affiliated example of this style is Alex J. O'Connor, better known as Cosmic Skeptic on YouTube, a student o...
I know you wrote this five years ago, but I think this is the opposite of what effective altruism needs now. The worrying tendency I see in effective altruism nowadays is for people to circle the wagons around criticism.
The current EA community, or at least large parts of it, is somewhat radicalized around certain views, particularly around near-term AGI forecasts, AGI safety/alignment, social justice, scientific racism, sexual harassment, and a quirky, home-grown variety of Bayesianism-utilitarianism.
One of the root causes of this radicalization seems to ...
During the Donation Election (i.e. right now) is a great time to work through our cruxes around cause prioritisation, and tactics within causes. If you want to help cause more discussion on the Forum, consider writing a poll post, highlighting some key crux (like policy change vs research work in AI Safety, or funding farmed vs wild animal welfare). You don't need to include much background info besides the poll, but linking out to a few readings on each side of the debate is always a bonus.
Posting this here for a wider reach: I'm looking for roommates in SF! Interested in leases that begin at the very end-of-December or start of January.
Right now, I know three others who are interested and we have a low-key signal group chat. If you are in a similar spot, direct message me here or on one my linked socials and we will hop on a 15-minute call to determine if we would be a good match!
I wasn't as clear as I'd like to have been about deadlines for admission to the donation election, so I'll make things clearer here:
- If an org posted during marginal funding week (which ended on November 23rd), and had not signalled that they'd like to be included in the donation election - I'll message them before including them as candidates. You'll see a couple of these orgs added over the next couple of days.
- If an org communicated with me and planned to post for marginal funding week, but was unable to post in time, I'll allow a couple days of grace (mo
(vibesy post)
People often want to be part of something bigger than themselves. At least for a lot of people this is pre-theoretic. Personally, I've felt this since I was little: to spend my whole life satisfying the particular desires of the particular person I happened to be born into the body of, seemed pointless and uninteresting.
I knew I wanted "something bigger" even when I was young (e.g. 13 years old). Around this age my dream was to be a novelist. This isn't a kind of desire people would generally call "altruistic," nor would my younger self have c...
An informal research agenda on robust animal welfare interventions and adjacent cause prioritization questions
Context: As I started filling out this expression of interest form to be a mentor for Sentient Futures' project incubator program, I came up with the following list of topics I might be interested in mentoring. And I thought it was worth sharing here. :) (Feedback welcome!)
Animal-welfare-related research/work:
...Yup, something a variety of views can get behind. E.g., not "buying beef".
For "consensual EAA interventions" above, I think I was thinking more "not something EAs see as ineffective like welfare reforms for circus animals". If this turned out to be the safest animal intervention, I suspect this wouldn't convince many EAs to consider it. But if, say, developing alternatives to rodents as snake food turned out to be very safe, this could weigh a lot in its favor for them.
It's mind-blowing to me that AMF's immediate funding gap is $462M for 2027-29. That's 56-154,000 lives (mostly under-5 children) at $3-8k per life saved, maybe fewer going forward due to evolving resistance to insecticides, but it wouldn't change the bottomline that this seems to be a gargantuan ball dropped. Last time AMF's immediate funding gap was over $300M for 2024-26, so it's grown 50%(!) this time round. Both times the main culprit was the same, the Global Fund's funding replenishment shortfall vs target, which affects programmatic planning in count...
I think the solution in this case is make clear plans with government then slowly defund the activity. Poor governments that weren't going to find something of their own accord anyway, usually won't front up until the external funding actually reduces.
"working with government" has been the vogue thing for charities, and especially national government aid orgs (like USAID) for decades. There have been endless attempts in the vein you suggest both to support governments to spend more on health, and to allocate money better within the health budget - with no ...