EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Introduction In this post, I present what I believe to be an important yet underexplored argument that fundamentally challenges the promise of cultivated meat. In essence, there are compelling reasons to conclude that cultivated meat will not replace conventional meat, but will instead primarily compete with other alternative proteins that offer superior environmental and ethical benefits. Moreover, research into and promotion of cultivated meat may potentially result in a net negative impact. Beyond critique, I try to offer constructive recommendations for the EA movement. While I've kept this post concise, I'm more than willing to elaborate on any specific point upon request.From industry to academia: my cultivated meat journey I'm currently in my fourth year (and hopefully final one!) of my PhD. My thesis examines the environmental and economic challenges associated with alternative proteins. I have three working papers on cultivated meat at various stages of development, though [...] ---Outline:(00:13) Introduction(00:55) From industry to academia: my cultivated meat journey(01:53) Motivations and epistemic status(03:39) Baseline assumptions for this discussion(03:44) Cultivated meat is environmentally better than conventional meat, but probably not as good as plant-based meat(06:29) Cultivated meat will remain quite expensive for several years, and hybrid plant-cell products will likely appear on the market first(08:58) Cultivated meat is ethically better than conventional meat(10:26) The main argument: cannibalization rather than conversion(16:46) Strategic drawbacks of the current focus(19:11) The evidence that would make me eat my words (and maybe cultivated meat)(20:37) What Id like to see change in the Effective Altruism approach to cultivated meat(22:14) Answer from GFI Europe--- First published: April 30th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TYhs8zehyybvMt5E4/cultivating-doubt-why-i-no-longer-believe-cultivated-meat-is --- 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.

My upvotes/downvotes are worth 2 points each and my supervotes are worth 6. A person with between 10 and 100 karma on the forum has an upvote worth 1 and a supervote worth 2 (the scaling system is described in this code here I think) My concern is that this system lends itself to groupthink, whereby the dominant views or topics are liable to get more karma, giving holders of those views more voting power, giving users that makes posts they agree with or that they see as relevant more karma, etc. Dissenting opinions or posts not of interest to the in-group are liable to be downvoted (although karma is meant to reflect quality or relevance of a post or comment, this is of course misused), which both hides those comments but also puts off dissenting voices from commenting/posting in the future. The justification for the current system [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FZ4GkH7eiibKrb6rN/should-people-with-more-forum-karma-have-more-powerful-votes --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post is for university group student organizers. We start with the big reason you should run a social, three tips we’re highly certain of, and some additional thoughts. We think ~40% of the value of this post is in a tentative answer to the question of how university groups can best provide value to members post intro fellowship; this is a question almost all university group organizers should think more deeply about. Another ~50% is in the “Big intro fellowship” section (tip 1), which is sufficient to run a fairly successful weekly meeting, and we are highly confident that almost all university groups should adopt the “Big intro fellowship” even if you do not choose to run a social. We both co-lead the University of Chicago group and all data comes from the UChicago group unless otherwise noted. If this post makes you consider a change at [...] ---Outline:(01:48) Why a Social(04:27) Doing a Social Well(08:29) Some additional thoughts--- First published: April 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cCquf3RaTYuadFneL/university-groups-should-run-socials --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Guardian reported yesterday on 'The Lunar Hatch' project, which is aiming to send fertilised sea bass eggs into space, so they can farm fish for astronauts. Lunar Hatch's ultimate aim is to create a “closed-loop food chain” on the moon, using a series of compartments. The first tanks will be filled with water from ice found at the bottom of craters at the moon's poles. The wastewater produced by fish in these tanks will be used to produce micro-algae that can then be used to feed filtering organisms, including bivalves, or zooplankton would collect some of the waste. The faeces from the sea bass in the first tank would, meanwhile, be treated by shrimps and worms that would in turn be food for the fish. “The aim of Lunar Hatch is to have no waste,” Przybyla [the researcher leading the project] says. “Everything is recycled through an aquaculture [...] --- First published: April 29th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wzCGbdCQsNQHjL8MY/aquaculture-in-space --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: RP's best interventions barely qualify as Health Systems Strengthening - they focus directly on the Health worker and their implementation. Not only these, but almost all HSS interventions are also measureable and should be measured! Plus some light disagreements with RP. First a huge thanks to @Open Philanthropy and @Rethink Priorities for this report - I’m not sure any serious attempt at a cost-effectiveness analysis of Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) interventions has been done before - and they’ve done a great job. I won’t spend much time affirming all the good stuff in the report (please read at least the summary before reading this) rather I’ll double down on things I think are important or that I disagree with. HSS is not neglected “Health Systems Strengthening” has been a loud clarion call in the public health world for over 30 years now. There can [...] ---Outline:(00:56) HSS is not neglected(01:48) RP's best Interventions are barely HSS and focus on Health Workers(03:50) Cost-Effectiveness of HSS interventions can and should be measured(06:00) Context matters - Country Intervention(07:46) IMCI and other guidelines have enormous potential(08:50) Light Disagreements(08:53) Community Health workers are often not cost-effective(11:05) LMH is far more well known and better funded than Living Goods(11:43) Transitioning to government ownership is a risky bet - that might sometimes be worth it(12:56) Supply Chains interventions have largely failed.The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w44oxwXpRkzyEEEHr/the-best-health-systems-strengthening-interventions-aren-t --- 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'm writing this on behalf of the mod team. They've reviewed and commented on this post, but mistakes are mine. We want and value criticism on the EA Forum. EA organisations often make their decisions transparent to the Forum audience in a way which makes good criticism possible. But transparency has its challenges, one of which is that not all criticism is good. By ‘good’ criticism, I mean criticism which is valuable to spend time engaging with. Criticism which can improve your project, or improve the case you make for your project. I also mean criticism which is good for the world but not for the criticised person or organisation. For example, perhaps an approach to solving a problem, or a the work of a particular organisation, is getting too much funding or attention relevant to its merits. Then, the recipient of the criticism may protest — but [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9XXL6DrfdvL6wuJaA/criticism-on-the-ea-forum --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

At the request of @Vasco Grilo🔸 in a post that I can't get out of drafts, here's the full linkpost. Original post is below: So this post is an argument that multi-decade timelines are reasonable, and the key cruxes that Ege Erdil has with most AI safety people who believe in short timelines are due to the following set of beliefs: Ege Erdil don't believe that trends exist that require AI to automate everything in only 2-3 years. Ege Erdil doesn't believe that the software-only singularity is likely to happen, and this is perhaps the most important crux he has with AI people like @Daniel Kokotajlo who believe that a software-only singularity is likely. Ege Erdil expects Moravec's paradox to bite hard once AI agents are made in a big way. This is a pretty important crux, because if this is true, a lot more serial research agendas [...] ---Outline:(04:06) Trend extrapolations don't point towards short timelines(09:21) A software singularity is unlikely(12:44) AI agents will need a lot of compute to automate all remote work(18:21) Conclusion--- First published: April 27th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tTzztd2vuDj8Nt7jC/the-case-for-multi-decade-timelines-linkpost --- 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 wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community. Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5. While this might seem like a minor limit for many, for someone like me — a student without a steady income or job, $5 is a significant amount. To provide some context: According to Numbeo, the average monthly income of a Nigerian worker is around $130–$150, and students often rely on even less — sometimes just $20–$50 per month for all expenses. For many students here, having $5 "lying around" isn't common at all; it could represent a week's worth of meals [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YoN3sKfkr5ruW47Cg/reflections-on-the-usd5-minimum-donation-barrier-on-the --- 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.

The idea that we can substitute carbon-based neurons with functionally equivalent artificial neurons (made of, say, silicon) is at the heart of many discussions about consciousness. For me, this used to be a load-bearing argument for caring about digital consciousness, and I think it still is for many people, including at Anthropic. However, it doesn’t withstand closer scrutiny, so I think it's time to let go of this dearly beloved intuition. This post was inspired by the video “Consciousness Isn't Substrate-Neutral: From Dancing Qualia & Epiphenomena to Topology & Accelerators” by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, but it's written in my personal capacity.Cartoon neurons Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff likes to speak of “cartoon neurons”—the overly simplified abstraction of neurons as switches that take in some inputs and fire (or not) depending on some activation function.Cartoon neuron He calls this abstraction “an insult to neurons”: Why are they an insult? Well, if you [...] ---Outline:(00:51) Cartoon neurons(03:21) Abstracting away complexity(06:35) Simulating the brain(08:19) Sufficiently detailed replicas/simulations(10:36) TakeawaysThe original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 26th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KHEjSPeJBLpoZ3qS5/it-s-time-to-say-goodbye-to-functionally-equivalent --- 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 the first post in a sequence about how I think about and break down my research process. Post 2 is coming soon. Thanks to Oli Clive-Griffin, Paul Bogdan, Shivam Raval and especially to Jemima Jones for feedback, and to my co-author Gemini 2.5 Pro - putting 200K tokens of past blog posts and a long voice memo in the context window is OP.Introduction Research, especially in a young and rapidly evolving field like mechanistic interpretability (mech interp), can often feel messy, confusing, and intimidating. Where do you even start? How do you know if you're making progress? When do you double down, and when do you pivot? These are far from settled questions, but I’ve supervised 20+ papers by now, and have developed my own mental model of the research process that I find helpful. This isn't the definitive way to do research (and I’d love [...] ---Outline:(00:36) Introduction(03:28) The key stages(03:35) Ideation (Stage 0): Choose a problem(04:14) Exploration (Stage 1): Gain surface area(06:55) Understanding (Stage 2): Test Hypotheses(09:17) Distillation (Stage 3): Compress, Refine, Communicate--- First published: April 26th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hmBPqApDXvhLzbiFt/how-i-think-about-my-research-process-explore-understand --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.