Quick takes

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)

Hey y'all,

My TikTok algorithm recently presented me with this video about effective altruism, with over 100k likes and (TikTok claims) almost 1 million views. This isn't a ridiculous amount, but it's a pretty broad audience to reach with one video, and it's not a particularly kind framing to EA. As far as criticisms go, it's not the worst, it starts with Peter Singer's thought experiment and it takes the moral imperative seriously as a concept, but it also frames several EA and EA-adjacent activities negatively, saying EA quote "has an enormously well fund... (read more)

Heads up for job-board users: you can now find more roles (1,200+) and set custom email alerts on our job board.

For added context: As promised earlier, we’re continuing to scale and improve our job board, to help talented people find impactful roles (including in causes, regions, and orgs that might have been underrepresented in EA so far). Mainly, you can now find more roles than before and set alerts for your chosen filters, in addition to smaller improvements, like being able to filter for highlighted roles. We’ll continue doing significant wo... (read more)

U.S. Politics should be a main focus of US EAs right now. In the past year alone, every major EA cause area has been greatly hurt or bottlenecked by Trump. $40 billion in global health and international development funds was lost when USAID shut down, which some researchers project could lead to 14 million more deaths by 2030. Trump has signed an Executive Order that aims to block states from creating their own AI regulations, and has allowed our most powerful chips to be exported to China. Trump has withdrawn funding from, and U.S. support for, internatio... (read more)