EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

(aka "surely we have enough Jews here that at least one person finds this funny") MISHNA: Rabbi Ord says that the three permissible cause areas are global health and development, animal welfare, and long-termism. Why are these the three permissible cause areas? Because any charity outside of these cause areas is a violation of bal tashchit, the prohibition against wasting resources. GEMARA: And why not four categories, because global health and development are two separate categories? Rabbi bar bar Hana answers: Is not global health valuable only because it later leads to development? Therefore, consider them the same category. Rav Yehuda objects. He tells the story of a student who asked Rabbi Yohanan why there should not be a fourth category, meta-effective-altruism. Rabbi Yohanan answered: this is covered under long-termism, because it pays off in the long-term when the meta-charity causes effective altruists to have more resources. But if [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/363kggkFJHz5ys5T7/excerpts-from-the-ea-talmud --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Guest Guy Raveh discusses the scarcity of scandals in Effective Altruism, suggesting that EA is now scandal-constrained. Topics include past controversies, sentencing of SBF, investigation findings on Owen Cotton-Barratt, Whytham Abbey sale, and OpenPhil's involvement. Raveh raises ideas for generating new scandals to keep EA in the headlines.

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), an effective altruism (EA) project which recently spun out of Effective Ventures (EV) is spinning out of the newly established Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). The current CEO of CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism), Zach Robinson, CEO of CEA and Effective Ventures (CEOCEV), will be taking the position of Chief Executive Administrator (CEA) for CEA (CEA), as the venture spins out of CEA (CEA). The cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) for this new effective venture suggested that this venture will be high-EV (see: EA). CEA's CEA's CEA ventures that the new spun-out CEA venture's effectiveness is cost-effective in every available scenario (CEAS). CEA's new strategy, See EA will take effect: See: Gain a better understanding of where the community is, who is part of it and where it could go EA: Effective altruism. No need to complicate things. To provide some clarity on [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WgneAKfjRJkYsTs3p/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-spinning-out-of-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Hillary Clinton, who is still alive I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible. Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees: Name: Open Asteroid Impact Launch Date: April 1 2024 Website: openasteroidimpact.org Mission: To have as high an impact as possible Pitch: We are an asteroid mining company. When most people think about asteroid mining, they think of getting all the mining equipment to space and carefully mining and refining ore in space, before bringing the ore back down in a controlled landing. But humanity has zero experience in Zero-G mining in the vacuum of space. This is obviously very inefficient. Instead, it's much [...] --- First published: April 1st, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RHGfmJfj3jvLw2mq4/introducing-open-asteroid-impact Linkpost URL:https://openasteroidimpact.org/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Like many organizations, Open Philanthropy has had multiple founding moments. Depending on how you count, we will be either seven, ten, or thirteen years old this year. Regardless of when you start the clock, it's possible that we’ve changed more in the last two years than over our full prior history. We’ve more than doubled the size of our team (to ~110), nearly doubled our annual giving (to >$750M), and added five new program areas. As our track record and volume of giving have grown, we are seeing more of our impact in the world. Across our focus areas, our funding played a (sometimes modest) role in some of 2023's most important developments: We were among the supporters of the clinical trials that led to the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recommending the R21 malaria vaccine. This is the second malaria vaccine recommended by WHO, which expects it [...] --- First published: March 27th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/couP8n3BTrpFA5YDJ/open-philanthropy-our-progress-in-2023-and-plans-for-2024-1 Linkpost URL:https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-progress-in-2023-and-plans-for-2024/ --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Wytham Abbey Project is closing. After input from the Abbey's major donors, the EV board took a decision to sell the property. This project's runway will run out at the end of April. After this time, the project will cease operations, and EV UK will oversee the sale of the property. The Wytham Abbey team have been good custodians of the venue during the time they ran this project, and EV UK will continue to look after this property as we prepare to sell. The proceeds of the sale, after the cost of sale is covered, will be allocated to high-impact charities. A statement from the Wytham Project can be found here. --- First published: March 25th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yggjKEeehsnmMYnZd/announcement-on-the-future-of-wytham-abbey --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was partly inspired by, and shares some themes with, this Joe Carlsmith post. My post (unsurprisingly) expresses fewer concepts with less clarity and resonance, but is hopefully of some value regardless. Content warning: description of animal death. I live in a small, one-bedroom flat in central London. Sometime in the summer of 2023, I started noticing moths around my flat. I didn’t pay much attention to it, since they seemed pretty harmless: they obviously weren’t food moths, since they were localised in my bedroom, and they didn’t seem to be chewing holes in any of my clothes — months went by and no holes appeared. [1] The larvae only seemed to be in my carpet. Eventually, their numbers started increasing, so I decided to do something about it. I Googled humane and nonlethal ways to deal with moth infestations, but found nothing. There were lots of sources [...] The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 25th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ax5PwjqtrunQJgjsA/killing-the-moths --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I've been writing a few posts critical of EA over at my blog. They might be of interest to people here: Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism Alternative Visions of Effective Altruism Auftragstaktik Hurdles of using forecasting as a tool for making sense of AI progress Brief thoughts on CEA's stewardship of the EA Forum Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger? ...and there are a few smaller pieces on my blog as well. I appreciate comments and perspectives anywhere, but prefer them over at the individual posts at my blog, since I have a large number of disagreements with the EA Forum's approach to moderation, curation, aesthetics or cost-effectiveness. --- First published: March 15th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/coWvsGuJPyiqBdrhC/unflattering-aspects-of-effective-altruism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Satisfaction with the EA community Reported satisfaction, from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 10 (Very satisfied), in December 2023/January 2024 was lower than when we last measured it shortly after the FTX crisis at the end of 2022 (6.77 vs. 6.99, respectively).  However, December 2023/January 2024 satisfaction ratings were higher than what people recalled their satisfaction being “shortly after the FTX collapse” (and their recalled level of satisfaction was lower than what we measured their satisfaction as being at the end of 2022). We think it's plausible that satisfaction reached a nadir at some point later than December 2022, but may have improved since that point, while still being lower than pre-FTX. Reasons for dissatisfaction with EA: A number of factors were cited a similar number of times by respondents as Very important reasons for dissatisfaction, among those who provided a reason: Cause prioritization (22%), Leadership (20%), Justice, Equity, Inclusion and [...] ---Outline:(04:15) Community satisfaction over time(08:12) Reasons for dissatisfaction with the EA community(13:07) Changes in EA engagement(14:00) Changes in EA-related behaviors(15:57) Perception of issues in the EA community(16:14) Leadership vacuum(16:46) Desire for more community change following FTX(17:13) Trust in EA-related organizations(18:53) Appendix(18:56) Effect sizes for satisfaction over time(20:12) Email vs non-email referrers(21:30) AcknowledgmentsThe original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 20th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aF6nh4LW6sSbgMLzL/updates-on-community-health-survey-results --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: we think the limiting factor for new charities has shifted from founder talent to early stage funding being the top limiting factor. We have historically written about limiting factors and how they affect our thinking about the highest impact areas. For new charities, over the past 4-5 years, fairly consistently, the limiting factor has been people; specifically, the fairly rare founder profile that we look for and think has the best chance at founding a field-leading charity. However, we think over the last 12 months this picture has changed in some important ways: Firstly, we have started founding more charities: After founding ~5 charities a year in 2021 and 2022 we founded 8 charities in 2023 and we think there are good odds we will be able to found ~10-12 charities in 2024. This is a pretty large change. We have not changed our standards for [...] --- First published: March 19th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AXhC4JhWFfsjBB4CA/the-current-limiting-factor-for-new-charities --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.