Executive summary: The author shares how they introduced Effective Altruism (EA) to friends unfamiliar with the movement by explaining its core ideas, personal impact, and diverse community, encouraging more open conversations and engagement with EA.

Key points:

1. After attending EA Global conferences and wearing EA-branded clothing, the author received unexpected interest, prompting them to write a public explainer for friends unfamiliar with EA.
2. The post introduces EA through two central questions: “How do we know we’re doing good?” and “How do we do good better?”, emphasizing evidence-based charity evaluation and moral impartiality.
3. The author outlines EA’s roots in cost-effectiveness (e.g., global health interventions like anti-malaria nets) and moral philosophy (e.g., valuing all lives equally, longtermism).
4. Examples are given of EA-aligned actions—such as kidney donation, pandemic prevention, AI safety, and global health careers—some of which the author or their friends pursue.
5. The author highlights the diversity and global reach of the EA community, describing it as ambitious, nerdy, kind, and open to critique.
6. They encourage others to explore EA via recommended resources (like 80,000 Hours and local groups) and offer to have personal conversations to make the ideas more accessible.

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Executive summary: This post offers a practical framework for critically evaluating advice by assessing the advice giver’s awareness, experience, and intention, especially when navigating uncertainty or crises where poor advice can have outsized negative consequences.

Key points:

1. Not all advice should be followed—its usefulness depends on how well it matches your situation, which requires assessing the advice giver’s awareness of your context, relevant experience, and underlying intentions.
2. Emotional states—both yours and the advice giver’s—can bias how advice is given, received, and interpreted; recognizing this can improve judgment.
3. Advice may be less applicable if your background or goals differ significantly from common expectations, especially if you are on a non-standard or trailblazing path.
4. Crisis situations make good advice both more essential and harder to evaluate, due to limited resources, higher risk, and greater emotional influence.
5. When overwhelmed, prioritizing which advice to evaluate deeply, especially unsolicited advice, helps preserve mental bandwidth while still benefiting from support.
6. Ultimately, even meta-advice (like this post) should be critically assessed using the same framework; reasoning behind advice may be more valuable than the advice itself.

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Executive summary: WorkStream Nonprofit has launched new service offerings—including executive assistant support, bookkeeping, tech implementation, and hiring help—to strengthen nonprofit operational capacity and impact, alongside free resources and an upcoming accelerator program.

Key points:

1. WorkStream Nonprofit aims to eliminate operational bottlenecks for nonprofits by offering tailored support in operations, staffing, and systems to maximize impact.
2. Four new paid services have been introduced: executive assistant support ($800+/month), bookkeeping services ($500+/month), tech systems implementation, and hiring process design.
3. Free resources include consulting sessions, educational content, and matchmaking to service providers (with pro bono matchmaking coming soon).
4. Client testimonials highlight significant operational improvements and time savings—e.g., 1,000+ hours saved annually at one organization.
5. Applications are open for a revamped 6-month nonprofit accelerator, which includes infrastructure and staff training for $2,500 per organization.
6. The organization invites partners for pro bono services, service ideas, and donor support to sustain its accessible offerings.

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Executive summary: EA UPY’s coordinated and active participation in EAGx CDMX 2025 fostered individual growth, community building, and meaningful connections, with strong pre-event preparation enabling a highly impactful experience for members.

Key points:

1. EA UPY comprised 17.6% of EAGx CDMX attendees, with 34 participants—mostly students and professionals—engaging as speakers, volunteers, and meetup facilitators.
2. Pre-event preparation, including workshops on career planning and 1-on-1s, helped maximize the impact of participation and was led by Jorge Luis Castillo Ruz and Janeth Valdivia.
3. EA UPY members led or contributed to key initiatives such as INFOSEC and AI Safety meetups, a panel on community building in Latin America, and the EA Mexico meetup.
4. Participants reported gaining insights on AI governance, biosecurity, and career development, with many citing motivation and valuable networking as key takeaways.
5. Connections made at the event are expected to lead to professional opportunities, collaborations, and increased national and global engagement for EA UPY.
6. Feedback highlighted the value of structured preparation, with suggestions for more institutional support and online prep activities to increase accessibility.

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Executive summary: The author argues that insect suffering is plausibly the worst problem in the world due to the vast number of insects and the likelihood that many suffer intensely, and recommends supporting efforts to reduce insect suffering through donations, policy advocacy, and support for habitat loss and human civilization.

Key points:

1. Scale and plausibility of insect suffering: Insects likely can suffer, and given their enormous population (~10¹⁸ alive at a time), the collective scale of their suffering—especially through short, painful lives and deaths—could far exceed all human suffering in history.
2. Ethical reasoning: Even with conservative assumptions about insect sentience, their suffering remains orders of magnitude greater than human suffering; denying its moral importance would require rejecting common-sense ethical principles about the badness of pain.
3. Cognitive biases: The neglect of insect suffering stems from psychological biases like scope neglect, empathy gaps, and a preference for the natural, which distort our moral intuitions.
4. Intervention recommendations: Donating to insect-focused charities (e.g. Insect Institute), submitting policy feedback (e.g. against insect farming), and supporting organizations like Wild Animal Initiative are practical ways to reduce suffering.
5. Support for human civilization and habitat loss: Civilization and habitat destruction may reduce wild insect populations and thus overall suffering; rewilding is discouraged for increasing animal suffering.
6. Moral call to action: Insect suffering is described as the most important issue in the world today, and the author urges readers to prioritize it in their altruistic efforts.

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Executive summary: Regular, all-invited general meetings are an easy, underutilized way for university EA groups to build stronger communities, retain members, and deepen engagement post-fellowship, with multiple successful formats already in use across campuses.

Key points:

1. General meetings help solve a key weakness of intro fellowships: lack of continued engagement and community-building among EA members across cohorts.
2. They provide a low-barrier entry point for newcomers and a way for fellowship graduates to stay involved, fostering a vibrant, mixed-experience community.
3. EA Purdue’s model emphasizes short, interactive presentations with rotating 1-1 discussions to build connections and maintain engagement; weekly consistency and snacks significantly improve attendance.
4. Other models include WashU’s activity-driven “Impact Lab,” Berkeley’s mix of deep dives and guest speakers, UCLA’s casual dinner + reading discussions, and UT Austin’s structured meetings with thought experiments, presentations, and social games.
5. General meetings are relatively easy to prepare—especially if organizers collaborate, rotate roles, or reuse content—and can also serve as a training ground for onboarding new organizers.
6. While some models trade off between casual atmosphere and goal-oriented impact, many organizers believe these meetings meaningfully contribute to group cohesion and member development, even if not all impact is directly measurable.

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Executive summary: The author argues that cosmopolitanism—viewing oneself as a global citizen with moral concern for all people—is a powerful antidote to the rise of hypernationalism in the U.S., and suggests concrete actions individuals can take to promote global well-being in the face of rising isolationism.

Key points:

1. Hypernationalism prioritizes national self-interest and identity to the exclusion of global cooperation, leading to zero-sum thinking and resistance to collective action on issues like climate change or humanitarian aid.
2. Cosmopolitanism promotes a shared global identity and moral concern for all people, encouraging cooperation across borders and emphasizing positive-sum outcomes for humanity.
3. The author contrasts these worldviews using real-world examples, such as U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the freezing of aid to Ukraine, illustrating how hypernationalism justifies harmful inaction.
4. Cosmopolitanism is positioned not as a cure-all but as a resistance strategy, capable of slowing the cultural drift toward hypernationalism by influencing public narratives and individual choices.
5. Concrete recommendations include donating to high-impact global charities, such as those vetted by GiveWell or The Life You Can Save, as a way for individuals to express cosmopolitan values and tangibly improve global well-being.
6. The post endorses Giving What We Can’s 10% or trial pledge as a practical step toward embracing cosmopolitanism and countering nationalist ideologies with global compassion and action.

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Executive summary: The author reflects on leaving Washington, DC—and the pursuit of a traditional biosecurity policy career—due to personal, political, and existential factors, while affirming continued commitment to biosecurity and Effective Altruism from a more authentic and unconventional path.

Key points:

1. The author moved to DC aiming for a formal biosecurity policy career but found the pathway elusive despite engaging in various adjacent roles; they are now relocating to rural California for personal and practical reasons.
2. Three main factors shaped this decision: a relationship opportunity, political shifts that diminish public health prospects, and growing concern about transformative AI risks.
3. The author expresses solidarity with Effective Altruism and biosecurity goals but questions the tractability and timing of entering the field now, especially under the current U.S. administration.
4. Barriers to career progression may have included awkwardness, gender nonconformity, and neurodivergence, raising broader concerns about inclusivity and professional norms in policy spaces.
5. While hesitant to give advice, the author suggests aspiring policy professionals consider developing niche technical expertise and soliciting honest feedback on presentation and fit.
6. The post closes with a personal affirmation of identity (queer, polyamorous, neurodivergent), and a commitment to continue contributing meaningfully—even if unconventionally—to global health and existential risk issues.

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Executive summary: As EA and AI safety move into a third wave of large-scale societal influence, they must adopt virtue ethics, sociopolitical thinking, and structural governance approaches to avoid catastrophic missteps and effectively navigate complex, polarized global dynamics.

Key points:

1. Three-wave model of EA/AI safety: The speaker describes a historical progression from Wave 1 (orientation and foundational ideas), to Wave 2 (mobilization and early impact), to Wave 3 (real-world scale influence), each requiring different mindsets—consequentialism, deontology, and now, virtue ethics.
2. Dangers of scale: Operating at scale introduces risks of causing harm through overreach or poor judgment; environmentalism is used as a cautionary example of well-intentioned movements gone wrong due to inadequate thinking and flawed incentives.
3. Need for sociopolitical thinking: Third-wave success demands big-picture, historically grounded, first-principles thinking to understand global trends and power dynamics—not just technical expertise or quantitative reasoning.
4. Two-factor world model: The speaker proposes that modern society is shaped by (1) technology increasing returns to talent, and (2) the expansion of bureaucracy. These create opposing but compounding tensions across governance, innovation, and culture.
5. AI risk framings are diverging: One faction views AI risk as anarchic threat requiring central control (aligned with left/establishment), while another sees it as concentrated power risk demanding decentralization (aligned with right/populists); AI safety may mirror broader political polarization unless deliberately bridged.
6. Call to action: The speaker advocates for governance “with AI,” rigorous sociopolitical analysis, moral framework synthesis, and truth-seeking leadership—seeing EA/AI safety as “first responders” helping humanity navigate an unprecedented future.

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Executive summary: The post argues that understanding the distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence is key to analyzing the development and future trajectory of AI systems, including the potential dynamics of an intelligence explosion and how superintelligent systems might evolve and be governed.

Key points:

1. Intelligence has at least two distinct dimensions—crystallized (stored knowledge) and fluid (real-time reasoning)—which apply to both humans and AI systems.
2. AI systems like AlphaGo and current LLMs use a knowledge production loop, where improved knowledge boosts performance and generates further knowledge, enabling recursive improvement.
3. Crystallized intelligence is necessary for performance, and likely to remain crucial even in superintelligent systems, as deriving everything from scratch is inefficient.
4. Future systems may differ significantly in their levels of crystallized vs fluid intelligence, raising scenarios like a "naive genius" or a highly knowledgeable but shallow reasoner.
5. A second loop—focused on improving fluid intelligence algorithms themselves—may drive the explosive dynamics of an intelligence explosion, but might be slower or require many steps of knowledge accumulation first.
6. Open questions include how to govern AI knowledge creation and access, whether agentic systems are required for automated research, and how this framework can inform differential progress and safety paradigms.

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