EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

EA Forum Team

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30+ karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

  1. 1d ago

    “Should EA fund Earth systems stabilization? New RP report + request for critique” by Liam St Louis

    TL;DR: EA has traditionally deprioritized climate change as a cause area. But a new report from Rethink Priorities, an EA research institute, suggests that specific Earth systems risks driven by climate change could have mortality impacts comparable to major global health burdens, on top of the known damages of climate change. The report finds that research and governance work on ‘Earth Systems Stabilization’ to establish whether safe options to address these risks exist clears EA cost-effectiveness bars and justifies significant funding. Disclosure: I run the Climate Change program at The Navigation Fund, a philanthropic foundation that also works on Farm Animal Welfare and Transforming Criminal Justice. Building on these research findings, we will be jointly launching an Earth Systems Stabilization Fund with Outlier Projects, who commissioned the research. The report interviews me and leaders of organizations we already support and recommends funding work in areas where they operate. When we launched The Navigation Fund's Climate Change program last year, we looked for an area within climate change where our dollars could be especially effective. One area we’ve chosen to focus on is “Earth Systems Stabilization” - a new umbrella term to describe the work of understanding, predicting, and [...] --- Outline: (04:58) Earth Systems Risks and the Case for Funding Stabilization Research (05:04) Why new evidence suggests the effective altruism community should reconsider its approach to climate research --- First published: October 22nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RGxASteXu5iyeNQZZ/should-ea-fund-earth-systems-stabilization-new-rp-report --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 1d ago

    “CEA is now independent of Effective Ventures” by Ayla Smith

    Hi everyone! I’m CEA's new Chief of Staff. I also serve as our Board Liaison, and I’m posting to introduce you to CEA's new independent board. I’m happy to be a point of contact for any questions you have about them, or the recruiting process we ran to find and select them! TL;DR: As of October 1, 2026, CEA is an independent organization, with our first independent board. Why we spun out When we announced our spinout in 2024, we said that bringing our operations in-house and setting up our own legal entities would help us pursue our mission better. EV is winding down, and we wanted governance and operations built for what CEA is today. That's now in place: our own operations team, our own entities, and a board accountable to CEA specifically. Meet our new board Stien van der Ploeg (Board Chair) is the executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators. Before joining ACE, Stien worked 20 years supporting various causes in multiple countries. They now use their leadership, strategy, and philanthropy skills to help more people help more animals. Jacob Eliosoff is a computer programmer from Montreal who lives in NYC. He started out in tech [...] --- Outline: (00:40) Why we spun out (01:08) Meet our new board (03:32) What changes (04:31) Thank you --- First published: October 23rd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CQfu8Raj6FdL8KzPe/cea-is-now-independent-of-effective-ventures --- 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.

  3. 1d ago

    “Drugs to shift food preferences” by Ronen Bar

    TL;DR The animal movement works hard on two fronts: changing minds (e.g., outreach, investigations, campaigns) and changing supply (e.g., alternative proteins, vegan labeling). There is a third front that seems much less explored: changing the craving itself. The desire for meat is not only a belief. It is partly or mainly, I assume mainly, biological, and biology and humans already change what we feel like eating: weight loss shots that reduce food cravings, appetite drugs that can shift food preferences, pregnancy aversions for specific foods, or a taste aversion due to some bad eating experience. I argue that voluntary, consent-based aids for people who already want to eat fewer animals are a neglected intervention space, and I suggest cheap first steps. I have not found a dedicated program developing such aids specifically to reduce animal product consumption, though relevant appetite and food-preference research already exists. I call this space voluntary desire modification. It could contain interventions to temporarily or permanently change craving for animal products or create an aversion to animal products, or create craving for vegan products at the expense of animal products, or any other intervention that very generally and grossly changes our body's response to animal [...] --- Outline: (00:10) TL;DR (02:02) Epistemic Status (02:30) Beyond Rationality & Emotions, into Desires (05:17) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Mind map diagram titled "The Causes of the Slaughter Industry" with eight branches. (05:29) Biology Already Changes What We Want to Eat (10:18) Consent is the Whole Foundation (10:56) Nobody Working on This? (11:49) First Steps for Assessing this Intervention Space (13:03) Reasons This Could Backfire or not work (15:45) Open Questions (16:29) Epilogue --- First published: October 22nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fi5iWXJeNQ4K7mnZM/drugs-to-shift-food-preferences --- 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.

  4. 2d ago

    “EA has not given up on diet change or animal liberation” by Seth Ariel Green 🔸

    Context: WelfareTech There has been some concern lately about effective altruism's supposed turn away from the big-picture parts of animal welfare: diet change, systemic shift, animal liberation, etc. As far as I can tell, this is due to 1) a widely reshared Substack article which got some praise from EA-aligned folks, including folks at @Coefficient Giving; 2) the fact that Innovate Animal Ag is setting up an "accelerator farm," which, per Robert Yaman, will be "a commercial broiler facility that sells chickens into the market, but it will also be a place where startups can test technologies and where we can combine interventions;" and 3) Spring Innovation Fund, which launched this summer as "a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifically for Welfare Tech: technology that improves animal welfare in ways that make commercial sense for producers to adopt." I don't buy it I just got back from two EA events (the Communicators Retreat and EAG NYC) where I talked to a few dozen people at length. Almost everyone wanted to talk about diet change and animal liberation. I think this supposed turn away from these topics has been greatly exaggerated. The EA rank and file want to [...] --- Outline: (00:11) Context: WelfareTech (01:07) I don't buy it (01:48) Maybe the elites are doing an about-face and the rest of us will follow their marching orders once the money comes in? (02:40) Why did this consensus emerge? (03:00) Solution: more of you should write more about what you think (03:59) Some tactical remarks The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 19th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bJ7BKGfAgMttdSKaE/ea-has-not-given-up-on-diet-change-or-animal-liberation --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. 2d ago

    “Instrumental convergence is incoherent (so pls slightly lower your p(extinction))” by Arepo

    ‘Like most of life's dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’ J Dmitri Gallow Epistemic status I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall nature of its contents based on my strong impression from the subset of work that I’ve read. I’ve recently spent maybe 2 to 300 hours learning about modern AI safety technical work, and some amount of spare time over the years before that thinking about here-relevant notions such as preferences from an analytic-philosophical perspective. I intend this post as a work in progress. TL;DR: The concept of instrumental convergence comes from a reference class of pre-empirical categorical predictions with a very low success rate. In historical usage, its definition is very murky. Perhaps too murky to really say that it made any meaningful real-world predictions. I suspect its definition is fundamentally unfixable. On my best interpretation of what it could be said to have predicted, it seems to be much worse than we would want a good high-level model of AI behaviour to be. Despite these shortcomings, it still seems to be widely internalised by the EA and [...] --- Outline: (00:22) Epistemic status (00:54) TL;DR: (02:14) Intro (04:41) How is instrumental convergence defined? (06:05) Predictions of instrumental convergence theory (09:04) A simple gap in seminal IC arguments (09:42) Bostrom (09:58) Omohundro (10:54) Carlsmith (11:49) LessWrong wiki (12:30) Why we can't easily fill the gap (12:34) Intuitive goal notions aren't adequate (aka, coffee-fetching is hopelessly overloaded) (15:24) Formal goal notions aren't adequate (18:21) A stronger counterthesis: goals are incoherent (21:14) Related work to the stronger counterthesis (24:04) Counterpoints (26:02) What's the alternative, then? (29:37) Why does it matter? (32:13) 'Misalignment' (34:39) The Hugging Face attack (38:44) Takeaways (40:01) Acknowledgements (40:24) Disclaimers (41:31) Appendix: more on the extreme ambiguity of coffee-making The original text contained 27 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 22nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i6TbMr5yc4Jq5eqyE/instrumental-convergence-is-incoherent-so-pls-slightly-lower --- 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.

  6. 3d ago

    “CCF: As more money arrives, the best place to give keeps moving” by Rethink Priorities

    This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas. TL;DR: A lot of new money is about to enter effective giving. When that happens, the question "Where does a dollar do the most good?" gets harder to answer, not easier. It depends on how much money each area already has, and that amount keeps changing as the money arrives. This is why the model behind the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund doesn't just rank funds once and stop. It tracks how each fund's cost-effectiveness changes as it receives more funding, and re-ranks as it goes. Below, we explain why anyone giving at scale should use similar reasoning. If you’re a small or mid-sized donor who makes giving decisions independently, it's relatively easy to figure out what your money is doing. For example, when you give your first $1000 to a charity that runs corporate cage-free egg campaigns, your donation will go on to fund corporate cage-free egg campaigns. When you give your second $1000 to the same charity, it will fund…corporate cage-free egg campaigns. And you will never guess what your tenth $1000 goes [...] --- Outline: (02:37) Modeling diminishing marginal returns (07:05) Acting as part of a group (08:48) How the Cross-Cause Fund works (10:42) Why you can't just follow the highest marginal number (13:03) Acknowledgements --- First published: October 21st, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FZkwut9d5fD2vzC5i/ccf-as-more-money-arrives-the-best-place-to-give-keeps --- 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. 3d ago

    “The Altruists and effective altruism: what the Netflix trailer portrays” by Tess Newton-Palmer

    Hi everyone. I lead marketing and communications at CEA, and this is a follow-up to my earlier post on The Altruists. The Netflix drama about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried comes out on 19 November. Here's what the trailer shows about how the series portrays effective altruism, our position on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, and how we’re preparing for the release. A note for newcomers: If you’re new to effective altruism (EA) or the EA Forum, welcome! The Effective Altruism Forum is a platform run by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) to facilitate discussions relevant to effective altruism and coordinate related projects. As before, I’m happy to be a point of contact for questions – feel free to reach out at comms@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. If you're a journalist, please get in touch with us at media@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. If you want to learn more about effective altruism, I recommend you start here: What is effective altruism? What the trailer shows Netflix released the trailer for The Altruists on 8 October. The trailer includes clear visual and narrative references to effective altruism. In one scene, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison wear EA t-shirts at a gathering where the EA logo appears on screen. In [...] --- First published: October 16th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TvkN9n3Fw2bPMaiJB/the-altruists-and-effective-altruism-what-the-netflix --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  8. 3d ago

    “Sanku: from 7 million to ~70 million people in three years — what we’ve learned and what it would take to scale much further” by Rickard Vikstrom, Felix Brooks-church

    TL;DR Food fortification is a well-established, highly cost-effective way to address micronutrient deficiencies, but in many countries the main constraint is implementation. Standards may already exist, while weak enforcement, fragmented milling sectors, unreliable premix supply, limited technology and quality systems, and difficult commercial incentives prevent fortification from working consistently at scale. Sanku works across these implementation barriers to make fortification more reliable and scalable. Sanku has grown from helping millers fortify flour consumed by around 7 million people in 2023 to around 70 million today. Over the same period, net donor cost per person has fallen from $0.55 to around 0.10 dollars per year, driven by economies of scale and a growing commercial revenue base. We recently commissioned Rethink Priorities (RP) to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of our work. The results vary substantially across countries and highlight important uncertainties, but they also identify practical opportunities to improve impact. We are already acting on the findings by improving baseline data, strengthening our evidence and M&E, and sharpening how cost-effectiveness informs expansion decisions. Our goal is for the ongoing cost of fortification to become fully market-funded. Commercial revenue covered around one-third of operating costs in FY26, and our current financial model projects [...] --- Outline: (00:17) TL;DR (03:29) Introduction (05:52) Why fortification can be highly cost-effective (07:22) Where fortification falls short in practice (08:28) From a small-mill technology to a broader fortification system (11:37) Three lessons from scaling across Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia (11:55) 1. Build with millers, and adapt to the market (13:00) 2. Establish stronger baselines before entering new markets (13:45) 3. Recruitment and People Ops can become a constraint on scale (14:45) What we learned from the Rethink Priorities analysis -- and how we're acting on it (19:43) How we're acting on the findings (21:31) Why scale further, and what it will take (21:59) What it will take (23:40) How you can help Sanku scale The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 15th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bxgkBZui6o8XZ3xCs/sanku-from-7-million-to-70-million-people-in-three-years --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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About

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30+ karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

Information

  • Creator
    EA Forum Team
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    250
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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