EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

EA Forum Team
  • 0.0 (0)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you'd like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

  1. 12H AGO

    “CEA’s response to sexual harassment” by Fran

    In this piece, I discuss the sexual harassment I experienced at the Centre for Effective Altruism, the organisation's response, the outcomes of two independent legal reviews, and the final settlement. In the second part of this piece, I make cultural critiques of CEA and EA more broadly. Everything shared here reflects my own experience and perspective. I have anonymised the perpetrator, but I reference specific leadership roles where I believe this to be appropriate and necessary. Trigger warnings: non-specific reference of rape and specific discussion of sexual harassment TL;DR (One-page summary) After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. After I filed a harassment report, the incident was independently investigated and determined to be harassment. Despite this, I was denied access to the document [...] --- Outline: (00:47) TL;DR (One-page summary) (03:38) A more detailed account (03:42) The sexual harassment incident (06:42) The investigation (10:38) The appeal and final report (14:02) Public accountability versus internal processes (16:59) The final settlement agreement (18:54) I still think there is a lot of good in effective altruism (20:33) Various cultural reflections (20:50) 1) Sexual harassment is not the natural result of an open and high-trust culture, it is the natural result of misogyny. (22:46) 2) The danger of EAs fixation on intent and why he didnt mean it is not good enough. (24:11) 3) Cowardice and deference at CEA. (26:30) 4) Women in EA are often encouraged to try and settle things informally or to trust their organisations -- another abuse of high-trust culture. (28:45) 5) A harmful misunderstanding of trauma and mitigating vs. aggravating factors. (30:27) 6) I have encountered so many EAs who believe it is easy for victims to speak publicly, or to share their experiences with other community members. And thus, if they arent regularly hearing from victims, harassment must be rare. (33:02) To any women who have faced something similar (34:40) Acknowledgements --- First published: February 27th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XxXnPoGQ2eKsQx3FE/cea-s-response-to-sexual-harassment --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    36 min

  2. 5D AGO

    “500k mid-career professionals want to do more good with their careers. Can we help them?” by Dom Jackman

    I'm Dom Jackman. I founded Escape the City in 2010 to help people leave corporate jobs and find work that matters. 16 years later, 500k+ professionals have used the platform - mostly people 5-15 years into careers at places like McKinsey, Deloitte, Google, the big banks - who feel a growing gap between what they do all day and what they actually care about. I'm not from the EA community. I'm writing this because I think there's a real overlap between the people I work with and what the EA talent ecosystem actually needs. I want to test that before investing serious time in it. What I've noticed Reading through talent discussions on this forum, there's a consistent theme: the pipeline is strongest for early-career people. 80,000 Hours does great work for students and recent grads. Probably Good provides broad guidance. BlueDot, MATS, Talos build skills for specific cause areas. But mid-career professionals with real commercial experience keep coming up as underserved. The "Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape" post nails it: these people "don't have 'EA capital,' may be poorly networked and might feel alienated by current messaging." The post calls for "custom entry [...] --- Outline: (00:51) What Ive noticed (01:40) What I see every day (02:28) What Im thinking about building (03:24) Honest questions (04:39) Not looking for funding (04:58) Artifacts --- First published: February 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H9pb6DEasgzjCff9a/500k-mid-career-professionals-want-to-do-more-good-with --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    6 min

  3. FEB 19

    “Our Levels of Ambition Should Match The Problems We’re Solving” by Matt Beard

    [I am a career advisor at 80,000 Hours. I've been thinking about something Will MacAskill said recently in an interview with my shrimp-friend Matt: "should people be more ambitious? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren't ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we're facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed." This post is my reflection on these ideas.] ************ My last post argued that if you want to have a great career, your goal should not be to get a job. Instead, you should choose an important problem to work on, then “get good and be known.” Building skills will allow you to solve problems and reap the benefits. In the ~500 career advising calls I’ve hosted in the past year, the most common response I’ve heard has been: “Okay, how good? How well known? How many hours of practice will get me there?” Most people want to calibrate their ambitions so that the time and energy they invest feels worth it to them. I empathize with this, but when I’m honest– with myself for my own [...] --- Outline: (06:28) Jensen Huang is more ambitious than you (12:58) Most extreme ambition is misplaced (17:45) Okay, how can altruistic people aim higher and work harder? (21:17) Ambition at the End of the Human Era (24:03) Closing Caveats - Efficiency, Burnout, and Choosing What Matters --- First published: February 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7qsisgX3cwETJuPNz/our-levels-of-ambition-should-match-the-problems-we-re --- 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.

    26 min

  4. FEB 19

    [Linkpost] “The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse” by titotal

    This is a link post. I would like to thank David Thorstadt for looking over this. If you spot a factual error in this article please message me. The code used to generate the graphs in the article is available to view here. Introduction Say you are an organiser, tasked with achieving the best result on some metric, such as “trash picked up”, “GDP per capita”, or “lives saved by an effective charity”. There are several possible options of interventions you can take to try and achieve this. How do you choose between them? The obvious thing to do is look at each intervention in turn and make your best, unbiased estimate of how each intervention will perform on your metric, and pick the one that performs the best: Image taken from here Having done this ranking, you declare the top ranking program to be the best intervention and invest in it, expecting that that your top estimate will be the result that you get. This whole procedure is totally normal, and people all around the world, including people in the effective altruist community, do it all the time. In actuality, this procedure is not correct. The optimisers curse is [...] --- Outline: (00:26) Introduction (02:17) The optimisers curse explained simply (04:42) Introducing a toy model (08:45) Introducing speculative interventions (12:15) A simple bayesian correction (18:47) Obstacles to simple optimizer curse solutions. (22:08) How Givewell has reacted to the optimiser curse (25:18) Conclusion --- First published: February 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/q2TfTirvspCTH2vbZ/the-best-cause-will-disappoint-you-an-intro-to-the Linkpost URL:https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/the-best-cause-will-disappoint-you?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true --- 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.

    28 min

  5. FEB 18

    “What is Love ft. Claude & VascoBot” by AgentMa🔸

    What is the highest form of love? According to the VascoBot Claude programmed for me: “Thanks for the great question, AgentMa🔸. I strongly upvoted it. I think the highest form of love is expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) applied to all sentient beings, weighted by their welfare ranges as a fraction of that of humans. However, I believe most discussions of love neglect the welfare implications for soil animals and microorganisms, which I think dominate the expected value calculations in most cases. I estimate that when someone experiences profound love, their increased wellbeing leads to approximately 2.3 % (= 50 additional kcal consumed per day * 0.046 % per kcal) additional food consumption. Multiplying this by the roughly 4.71*10^13 soil nematodes affected per kcal of food production (from my back-of-the-envelope calculations based on van den Hoogen et al. (2019)), I get approximately 1.08*10^12 affected nematode-years per year of experiencing love. Conditional on my preferred exponent of the number of neurons of 0.7, and assuming the welfare range of a nematode is 10^-6 as a fraction of that of humans, the welfare effects on soil animals could be 1.08*10^6 nematode-equivalent quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) per year of love experience. In [...] --- First published: February 14th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/exwmGp3swfbbNqSsN/what-is-love-ft-claude-and-vascobot --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    6 min

  6. FEB 17

    “The reality of long-term EA community building: Lessons from 3 years of EA Barcelona” by Melanie Brennan 🔹, Anthony L

    We are Melanie and Anthony, the two community builders at EA Barcelona. In this post, we share where the group stands today and reflect on key learnings from nearly three years of grant-funded community building. We hope these reflections are useful to other community builders, funders, and CEA, particularly around what it realistically takes to build and sustain EA communities over multiple years, from funding stability and feedback loops to the personal sustainability of professional community builders. TL;DR EA Barcelona was funded by the EA Infrastructure Fund between May 2023 and December 2025 (1.2 FTE). Over this period, it has grown into a thriving local community and informal coordination hub for EA activity in Spain. Unexpectedly, EAIF decided not to continue funding our project in 2026. We subsequently explored the current funding landscape for EA community building, but found no viable path to stable funding for 2026 that didn’t involve a high level of personal and professional risk. As a result, we’ve decided not to continue with a funded community-builder model for EA Barcelona for now, and will instead focus on transitioning to a volunteer-led structure. Background: EA Barcelona (2023-2025) Present-day EA Barcelona began as a casual meetup group [...] --- Outline: (00:45) TL;DR (01:38) Background: EA Barcelona (2023-2025) (02:20) 2023: Establishing EA Barcelona as a city hub (03:52) 2024: Deepening engagement and seeding national growth (07:51) 2025: Transitioning from local hub to national coordination (13:37) Late 2025: Navigating the Transition (13:43) Initial Funding Cuts (14:44) What we did next (17:00) Clarity starts to emerge (18:19) Where we are now (18:57) Our plan for 2026: transition toward a volunteer-led community model (20:19) Quick disclaimer: Are either of us Spanish? (21:36) Thank you! --- First published: January 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/daHMkoQsHSbcK6Kjo/the-reality-of-long-term-ea-community-building-lessons-from --- 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.

    23 min

  7. FEB 17

    “Preparing for a flush future: work, giving, and conduct” by Sam Anschell

    Note: opinions are all my own. Following Jeff Kaufman's Front-Load Giving Because of Anthropic Donors and Jenn's Funding Conversation We Left Unfinished, I think there is a real likelihood that impactful causes will receive significantly more funding in the near future. As background on where this new funding could come from: Coefficient Giving announced:  A recent NYT piece covered rumors of an Anthropic valuation at $350 billion. Many of Anthropic's cofounders and early employees have pledged to donate significant amounts of their equity, and it seems likely that an outsized share of these donations would go to effective causes. A handful of other sources have the potential to grow their giving: Founders Pledge has secured $12.8 billion in pledged funding, and significantly scaled the amount it directs.[1] The Gates Foundation has increased its giving following Bill Gates’ announcement to spend down $200 billion by 2045. Other aligned funders such as Longview, Macroscopic, the Flourishing Fund, the Navigation Fund, GiveWell, Project Resource Optimization, Schmidt Futures/Renaissance Philanthropy, and the Livelihood Impacts Fund have increased their staffing and dollars directed in recent years. The OpenAI Foundation controls a 26% equity stake in the for-profit OpenAI Group PB. This stake is currently valued at $130 billion [...] --- Outline: (02:39) Work (03:50) Giving (04:53) Conduct --- First published: February 2nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H8SqwbLxKkiJur3c4/preparing-for-a-flush-future-work-giving-and-conduct --- 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.

    7 min

  8. FEB 17

    “EA Grants Database - a new website” by Brian Foerster

    The EA Grants Database is a new site that neatly aggregates grant data from major EA funders who publish individual or total grant information. It is intended to be easy to maintain long term, entirely piggybacking off of existing data that is likely to be maintained. The website data is updated by a script that can be run in seconds, and I anticipate doing this for the foreseeable future. In creating the website, I tried to make things as clear and straightforward as possible. If your user experience is in any way impaired, I would appreciate hearing from you. I would also appreciate feedback on what features would actually be useful to people, although I am committed to avoiding bloat. In a funding landscape that seems poised to grow, I hope this site can serve as a resource to help grantmakers, grantees, and other interested parties make decisions while also providing perspective on what has come before. My post on matching credits and this website are both outgrowths of my thinking on how we might best financially coordinate as EA grows and becomes more difficult to understand.[1] Relatedly, I am also interested in the sort of mechanisms that [...] --- First published: February 8th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rohYFGfiFjepLDnWC/ea-grants-database-a-new-website --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    2 min
See All (250)

About

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you'd like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

Information

You Might Also Like