EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

We’re excited to announce SparkWell! What is SparkWell? SparkWell is an Anti Entropy program designed to help high-impact nonprofit projects test ideas, develop operational capabilities, and launch as independent entities. We provide a temporary home for a diverse range of promising initiatives. Why have we built this? We believe that we’re living through a transformational period in history. Catastrophic risks loom large, whether from climate change, factory farming, pandemics, nuclear or cyber warfare, or the misalignment or misuse of intelligent systems. A transformational period in history warrants a transformation in philanthropy — and we want to give innovative projects the support they need to test their ideas and scale. We leverage our skills and experience with nonprofit operations to guide enrolled projects through a bespoke acceleration roadmap. Within 6–24 months, your project will graduate into an independent entity with operational best practices. This will put you in a [...] ---Outline:(00:19) What is SparkWell?(00:38) Why have we built this?(01:28) What does SparkWell offer?(02:38) Who are we?(03:34) Who's enrolled in the program already?(04:38) Who funded this?(04:57) How do I apply?--- First published: June 5th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tGAm2fTAb7BLCAThJ/announcing-sparkwell --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack. between status, power, and identity, is there any room for the real thing? Dan Williams’ 2024 posts on altruism and cynicism struck a chord with me. In the posts, Dan reflects on the basic and, as far as I can tell, well-accepted story of the origins of altruistic sentiment in humans. Glossing over considerable detail: cooperation and trust create gains from trade and social interdependence that improves the genetic fitness of all the individuals concerned, so traits that tend to signal cooperativeness and trustworthiness get favored and altruism is one of those traits. The trouble is that you only get as much altruism as improves your own reproductive success and well… if you only have a thing to the extent there's something in it for you, you run into some definitional problems with calling that thing altruism. I interpret [...] ---Outline:(02:23) What is Goodness?(06:37) Spreading Joy(10:25) Animals(13:38) Why it's so hard to get thereThe original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HfFzuydGQBQPqx635/the-tiny-flicker-of-altruism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Crossposted on Substack.Preamble I have been asked to share a few tips on how to get the most out of the conference as part of the opening talk of this year's EAGxPrague. I decided to focus on the tacit knowledge I have. This is because there is a lot of useful advice on how to get the most out of conferences, but I feel they usually offer general tips, as opposed to really getting into the weeds. Here is a slightly more polished version of the transcript I prepared. I also added some pictures: Hi, my name is Gergő, and I would like to welcome you to this conference too. Props to Hana for organising! Yesterday, I decided to check Swapcard to see how many EA conferences I attended since my first one in 2020. It's around 20, so I thought I would exactly describe what I do [...] ---Outline:(00:16) Preamble(01:11) Conference week(01:15) Monday/Tuesday(02:05) Wednesday/Thursday(02:34) Figuring out who to talk to(04:07) On reaching out to people(05:20) During the conference(06:37) After the conference(07:59) ConclusionThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 4th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BFiH9qbEzBBitq5XW/tacit-knowledge-how-i-exactly-approach-eag-x-conferences --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Recognizing the small animal replacement problem (SARP) led many animal advocates to, broadly, warn against strategies to help animals that build upon environmental and/or health arguments (see, e.g., Carpendale 2022; Sokk 2021; Bryant 2024; Hazo 2022; Ozden & Dullaghan 2022). More specifically, this includes strategies such as advocating against red meat consumption (see Mathur 2022; CE Team 2018; Rouk 2022) or against subsidies for meat and other animal products (Ryba 2022), and pushing for a food carbon tax (Zeijlmans 2025; Springlea 2022).EA-inspired animal advocates therefore strongly favor strategies such as promoting plant-based alternatives to animal products and reforming the chicken farming industry (see, e.g., OPP's farm animal welfare page; Sarek et al. 2024; ACE 2024), assuming these do not contribute to SARP.[1] This post very briefly questions this assumption. (Don’t expect a detailed argumentation. I’m just throwing some thoughts.)Why veg advocacy might also contribute to SARPHumane [...] ---Outline:(01:29) Why veg advocacy might also contribute to SARP(02:11) Why chicken reforms might also contribute to SARP(02:52) ConclusionThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zdFFnm8fWqPY8zsa4/chicken-reforms-and-veg-advocacy-may-contribute-to-the-small --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is very rough — it's functionally a collection of links/notes/excerpts that feel related. I don’t think what I’m sharing is in a great format; if I had more mental energy, I would have chosen a more-linear structure to look at this tangle of ideas. But publishing in the current form[1] seemed better than not sharing at all.I sometimes feel like two fuzzy perspective-clusters[2] are pulling me in opposite directions: Cluster 1: “Getting stuff done, building capacity, being willing to make tradeoffs & high-stakes decisions, etc.” There are very real, urgent problems in the world. Some decision-makers are incredibly irresponsible — perhaps ~evil — and I wish other people had more influence. Pretending like we’re helpless (I do not think we are, at least in expectation), ignoring decisions/tradeoffs we are in fact making, or trying to abdicate the power we have — perhaps to keep our hands [...] ---Outline:(06:16) List (excerpts)(07:18) Dynamism, carving up the future, gardens(07:23) Dynamism vs stasis(10:00) Carving up the future(11:50) Gardening as an alternative to carving things up?(12:32) An approach that focuses on legitimacy, boundaries, liberalism...(18:46) Virtues & cooperation(18:49) Virtue as ~parenting yourself(20:32) Making oneself a beacon/fixed point (not enough to approach everything strategically when playing a part of a whole)(22:41) Paretotopia & cooperation(24:12) Appendix: lightly adapted from one of my messy internal docsThe original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYX7Rk7mHWxgwc762/notes-on-dynamism-power-and-virtue --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can's impact evaluation for the 2023–2024 period. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and working sheet for this evaluation. We look forward to your questions and comments! This report estimates Giving What We Can's (GWWC's) impact over the 2023–2024 period, expressed in terms of our giving multiplier — the donations GWWC caused to go to highly effective charities per dollar we spent. We also estimate various inputs and related metrics, including the lifetime donations of an average 🔸10% pledger, and the current value attributable to GWWC and its partners for an average 🔸10% Pledge and 🔹Trial Pledge. Our best-guess estimate of GWWC's giving multiplier for 2023–2024 was 6x, implying that for the average $1 we spent on our operations, we caused $6 of value to go to highly [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AywMrGRvtA7Rq5b6r/gwwc-s-2023-2024-impact-evaluation-executive-summary --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Audio note: this article contains 55 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. We’ve seen so far that unawareness leaves us with gaps in the impartial altruistic justification for our decisions. It's fundamentally unclear how the possible outcomes of our actions trade off against each other. But perhaps this ambiguity doesn’t matter much in practice, since the consequences that predominantly shape the impartial value of the future (“large-scale consequences”, for short) seem at least somewhat foreseeable. Here are two ways we might think we can fill these gaps: Implicit: “Even if we can’t assign EVs to interventions, we have reason to trust that our pre-theoretic intuitions at least track an intervention's sign. These intuitions can distinguish whether the large-scale consequences are net-better than inaction.”[1] Explicit: “True, we don’t directly conceive [...] ---Outline:(03:01) Degrees of imprecision from unawareness(07:32) When is unawareness not a big deal?(10:22) Why we're especially unaware of large-scale consequences(11:30) Extremely limited understanding of mechanisms(15:32) Unawareness and superforecasting(19:14) Pessimistic induction(25:11) The better than chance argument, and other objections to imprecision(32:21) Appendix A: The meta-epistemic wager?(35:43) ReferencesThe original text contained 15 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 2nd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qZS8cgvY5YrjQ3JiR/2-why-intuitive-comparisons-of-large-scale-impact-are --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Crossposted from my blog. When I started this blog in high school, I did not imagine that I would cause The Daily Show to do an episode about shrimp, containing the following dialogue: Andres: I was working in investment banking. My wife was helping refugees, and I saw how meaningful her work was. And I decided to do the same. Ronny: Oh, so you're helping refugees? Andres: Well, not quite. I'm helping shrimp. (Would be a crazy rug pull if, in fact, this did not happen and the dialogue was just pulled out of thin air). But just a few years after my blog was born, some Daily Show producer came across it. They read my essay on shrimp and thought it would make a good daily show episode. Thus, the Daily Show shrimp episode was born. I especially love that they bring on an EA [...] --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/viSRgubpKDjQcatQi/the-importance-of-blasting-good-ideas-into-the-ether --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

I am looking for work, and welcome suggestions for posts.Summary I think the impact of the vast majority of interventions is driven by effects on wild animals. In particular, by effects from land use change on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, which are the most abundant terrestrial animals. There are 4.4*10^20 top soil nematodes, and 10^19 soil arthropods, “≈95% of which are soil mites and springtails”. I estimate random soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have (expected) welfare ranges (as fractions of that of humans) of 6.47*10^-6, 3.57*10^-5, and 6.17*10^-5, which are 0.324 %, 1.79 %, and 3.09 % of Rethink Priorities’ (RP's) median welfare range of silkworms. I calculate soil nematodes, mites, and springtails have (in expectation) a welfare of -4.36*10^-6, -1.57*10^-5, and -2.35*10^-5 QALY/animal-year, and an annual welfare of -296 k, -13.9 k, and -10.4 k times that of humans. The annual welfare of soil nematodes being 12.6 times that of soil [...] ---Outline:(00:16) Summary(06:47) Introduction(10:57) Welfare ranges(16:50) Welfare per animal-year, and annual welfare(22:24) Welfare per area(25:08) Cost-effectiveness(40:02) Effects on soil animals cannot be neglected just because they are uncertain(43:03) Acknowledgements--- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Rjutj7Jd2v2KHvDyA/cost-effectiveness-accounting-for-soil-nematodes-mites-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Epistemic status: An email thread with a representative for Moral Ambition, consumption of Rutger Bregman's and Moral Ambition's book and social media. A year of leading my local EA group, deep understanding of EA ideas. Introduction In early 2025, historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman published his book Moral Ambition, urging readers to "stop wasting talent and start making a difference." The book serves as a compliment and guide to the movement he's founded [1] called The School for Moral Ambition (SMA). In less than a year, they've grown to more than 9000 members and over 1000 people have completed their Circles Program, which corresponds to an intro fellowship. Is this just EA with the serial numbers filed off? Or the successor to our stumbling community? To make sense of this new movement and its relationship to EA, I've corresponded with Marijn Scheltens who works as Community Manager [...] ---Outline:(00:25) Introduction(01:24) Comparison of Principles(02:48) Similarities(03:02) The world sucks, we should fix it(03:45) Cause Prioritization(04:10) Cause Areas(04:33) Differences(04:41) Criticism Culture(05:38) Impact(07:40) Motivations(08:40) Ethics(09:19) Personal thoughts(09:29) Novelty(09:57) Baggage(10:26) Should you join SMA?(11:19) Collaboration(11:58) AcknowledgementsThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 3rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/piNDCbpmGiy8P85hL/the-ea-s-guide-to-moral-ambition --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.