EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

Audio is here if you prefer. Hope you like it. I got something to offer, all I ask is your time. And forgiveness for the form: a cheesy rhyme. You’re skeptical? Makes sense. But I know your type's vice. You strike me as a purveyor, of do-gooder advice. And it's pretty damn good, I don't mean to boast, This advice always fits. Well…sort of. Almost! Listen good, take your time, to ensure I'm understood, As I tell you how to do the utmost good. But first let's all travel, to that fateful day. When you first got involved, with that thing called EA. Maybe a colleague, a classmate, or old childhood friend, Solemnly broke the news, of how this world will end. Or perhaps it was fanfic, of a boy with a wand, career tips, free pizza, or a child in a pond. Well, you found the [...] --- First published: July 1st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rd8JBxJHC68ErsRLW/do-what-you-can-a-poem --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The podcast explores the challenges faced by the Center for Effective Aid Policy in advocating for aid reform and improving development assistance cost-effectiveness. It reflects on the reasons for its shutdown, including limited political support and funding constraints. Despite the closure, there is optimism for future aid projects and appreciation for the support from the effective altruism community, volunteers, advisers, and donors.

Exploring the lack of public discourse on factory farming, analyzing why it is often overlooked. Strategies discussed to boost awareness include motivating the media, innovating tactics, and shaping a compelling narrative around the issue.

Join Animal Welfare Fund member KarolinaSarek, grantmaking expert Zoë Sigle, and fund manager Neil_Dullaghan as they discuss the latest grant recommendations for the period of May 2022 to March 2024. The podcast dives into the total funding recommended, grants paid out, acceptance rates, and key grants highlighted during this time. Learn about the impactful initiatives across different countries working towards improving animal welfare.

This is a link post. This represents work from several people at the NAO. Thanks especially to Dan Rice for implementing the duplicate junction detection, and to @Will Bradshaw and @mike_mclaren for editorial feedback. Summary If someone were to intentionally cause a stealth pandemic today, one of the ways they might do it is by modifying an existing virus. Over the past few months we’ve been working on building a computational pipeline that could flag evidence of this kind of genetic engineering, and we now have an initial pipeline working end to end. When given 35B read pairs of wastewater sequencing data it raises 14 alerts for manual review, 13 of which are quickly dismissible false positives and one is a known genetically engineered sequence derived from HIV. While it's hard to get a good estimate before actually going and doing it, our best guess is that if this system [...] ---Outline:(00:22) Summary(01:15) System Design(02:36) Evaluation(02:50) Simulation(05:28) Real World Evaluation(08:29) System Sensitivity(11:34) Future Work--- First published: June 27th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/da6iKGxco8hjwH4nv/detecting-genetically-engineered-viruses-with-metagenomic --- 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.

Philosopher Jeff Sebo discusses his new book 'The Moral Circle' which challenges human exceptionalism and calls for expanding moral consideration to all significant beings. The podcast explores ethical dilemmas and case studies to prompt a reevaluation of our responsibilities towards diverse beings.

Recently, I've noticed a growing tendency within EA to dissociate from Rationality. Good Ventures have stopped funding efforts connected with the rationality community and rationality, and there are increasing calls for EAs to distance themselves. This trend concerns me, and I believe it's good to make a distinction when considering this split. We need to differentiate between 'capital R' Rationality and 'small r' rationality. By 'capital R' Rationality, I mean the actual Rationalist community, centered around Berkeley: A package deal that includes ideas about self-correcting lenses and systematized winning, but also extensive jargon, cultural norms like polyamory, a high-decoupling culture, and familiarity with specific memes (ranging from 'Death with Dignity' to 'came in fluffer'). On the other hand, 'small r' rationality is a more general concept. It encompasses the idea of using reason and evidence to form conclusions, scout mindset, and empiricism. It also includes a quest [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 25th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2pYGbvYsKfDC2WnxL/distancing-ea-from-rationality-is-foolish --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(You can read this post as a Google Doc. You might find this easier to share with animal-sympathetic non-EAs. Also: I work at Rethink Priorities, but I'm writing in a personal capacity.) A few weeks ago, I shared some suggested responses for a Defra consultation on welfare labelling. I was really pleased to hear that many EAs and animal rights advocates wrote in to support the proposal. I’m now sharing a similar opportunity: ~ten minutes of your time to speak up for ~4.5 million caged chickens. If you want to help, you have less than 48 hours to get this done! What's the public consultation? The Scottish government is running a public consultation on their proposal to ban cages for layer hens. Agriculture is a devolved power so Holyrood have responsibility for Scottish animal welfare.Let's be clear: cage-free chickens have dramatically better lives than caged chickens. Liberating caged [...] ---Outline:(00:46) What's the public consultation?(03:42) How you can help(04:39) Will your response influence decision-makers?The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 24th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mooBq4A3Hd8ttTyAY/ten-minutes-to-speak-up-for-4-5-million-caged-chickens --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary. Who We Are: Kaya Guides runs a self-help course on WhatsApp to reduce depression at scale in low and middle-income countries. We help young adults with moderate to severe depression. Kaya currently operates in India. We are the world's first nonprofit implementer of Step-by-Step, the World Health Organization's digital guided self-help program, which was proven effective in two RCTs. Pilot: We ran a pilot with 103 participants in India to assess the feasibility of implementing our program on WhatsApp with our target demographic and to generate early indicators of its effectiveness. Results: 72% of program completers experienced depression reduction of 50% or greater. 36% were depression-free. 92% moved down at least a classification in severity (i.e. they shifted from severe to moderately severe, moderately severe to moderate, etc). The average reduction in score was 10 points on the 27-point PHQ-9 depression questionnaire. Context: To offer a few [...] ---Outline:(04:44) Part 1. About the Kaya Guides Program(04:49) What is Kaya Guides and what do we do?(05:13) How the program works(05:35) Evidence base(06:11) Why guided self-help is effective(06:50) Why this work matters(07:52) Program design(08:46) Target participant profile(09:14) Impact measurement(10:00) Part 2. Pilot Impact and Cost-Effectiveness(10:18) Impacts on depression(11:01) Comparison(12:10) Effect Size Estimate(14:35) Takeaway(15:02) Cost-Effectiveness(15:29) Pilot Cost-Effectiveness(17:15) 2025 Projected Cost-Effectiveness(19:15) Program Impacts According to Participants(22:50) Part 3. Recruitment(22:55) Quick Stats(24:20) Participant Profile(25:38) Part 4. Retention(27:45) Part 5. Participant Feedback(31:19) What's Next(32:05) Support Us--- First published: June 16th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6NaRJpSn2zfRSnGYN/kaya-guides-pilot-results --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post. Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate In a nutshell We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These programs provide health interventions to the same children under 5 years old annually or every 3 years. Our cost-effectiveness models currently assume that different lives are saved each year from these interventions. We think it's possible the programs are actually saving the same, high-risk children over and over. In a worst-case scenario, this could mean the programs are saving 80% fewer cumulative lives than we thought. Based on a shallow review of empirical evidence and talking to experts, our best guess is that we're only overstating the total lives saved by these programs by around 10%, because: Under-5 deaths [...] ---Outline:(00:12) In a nutshell(02:46) What's the issue?(06:44) What did we find?(11:53) How could we be wrong?(14:31) What's the issue?(17:35) Why we don’t think this is a big concern(18:22) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk(20:42) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population(25:12) Modeling these drivers(34:08) Sensitivity checks(35:35) Outside the model checks(37:34) How could we be wrong?(40:28) Are we returning children to normal life expectancy?(42:34) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk across the life cycle(43:43) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population(48:13) Moral difficulties raised by the life expectancy question--- First published: June 18th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jNAFTJWpKK89pisaQ/are-our-top-charities-saving-the-same-lives-each-year --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.