EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

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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. 12h ago

    “GiveWell fundraising up 49% in 2025, driven overwhelmingly by 39 donors giving $1M+” by Rasool

    Previously: GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023 · GiveWell fundraising up 17% in 2024 GiveWell has published its 2025 metrics, together with a metrics report and a public spreadsheet. As in previous years, I focus on how much was raised and who gave it. This year I also look at how concentrated GiveWell's donor base is. Truth be told I kinda phoned it in on this one, the full Claude version with better charts is here Summary Returning donors gave 443.6 million dollars (up 77%). New donors gave 37.1 million dollars (up 112%), which is still below their 2020 to 2022 levels. 39 donors giving 1 million dollars or more contributed 359.7 million dollars. That is 75% of identified donations through GiveWell and 90% of the year's increase. Every smaller size band also grew, by 13–27%. The donor base is far more concentrated than an 80/20 rule. The top 20% of donors gave about 97% of the money, and about 0.26% of donors (roughly 90) gave 80%. Asking the question again within the top group (the top 20% of the top 20%, and so on) gives 94%, 93% and 92%, rather than 80% each [...] --- Outline: (00:47) Summary (01:53) Returning donors drove the increase (03:20) The increase was driven overwhelmingly by $1M+ donations (05:22) Is GiveWell's funding 80/20? No: it is far more concentrated (07:01) Pareto within Pareto (09:23) Methodology and caveats (11:33) Sources --- First published: October 2nd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xv7bHTipWDhRGrnHy/givewell-fundraising-up-49-in-2025-driven-overwhelmingly-by --- 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.

  2. 1d ago

    “A reply to Austin Chen on his “keen debt” to FTX when hiring Caroline Ellison at Manifund” by Bland Garlic

    New account here, created by an irate outsider to EA. I started typing this as a response to a comment by Austin, in the discussion of his recent shocking announcement that his organization Manifund has hired Caroline Ellison. My reply to him ballooned to a size that merits its own post. Please bear with me as I attempt to somewhat match this forum's style. I will be consolidating some of the points that I and others have made less charitably on X and other sites. -- General context: Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, was one of the convicted perpetrators of the FTX cryptocurrency fraud, along with her boss Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and two complicit software engineers. Together, these four EAs stole billions of dollars from FTX's customers. Austin Chen co-founded the Manifold prediction market, which received money from FTX, and he subsequently moved on to create a non-profit called Manifund (formally, Manifold For Charity), where Caroline Ellison now works for him. -- Austin, I'm going to respond to this bluntly, even though I believe you meant well. This action creates an unacceptable flow of funds and benefits, starting with the FTX victims and ending with one [...] --- Outline: (04:06) A quick note about alternative facts (05:35) The chain of obligation (10:09) Your good intentions (14:38) Option 1: Dismiss Caroline (16:10) Option 2: Pay back the $500k to the FTX creditors (18:17) Further concerns in the case of Option 2 (19:57) Option 3: Throw your entire contacts list into disrepute The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/R28zdK9bx6cLtBQxF/a-reply-to-austin-chen-on-his-keen-debt-to-ftx-when-hiring --- 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

    “Will AI Agents Pay to Avoid Killing Animals?” by Jonah Woodward, Maheep Chaudhary, Jasmine Brazilek

    This article was written by Jonah Woodward, and is a summary of an original study by Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML): Brazilek, J., Tidmarsh, M., Endres, M., Singh, A., & Miller, J. (2026). HarvestBench: Measuring whether LLM agents will pay to avoid killing animals. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04444 You can view the up-to-date results for HarvestBench on the leaderboard at https://compassionbench.com/harvestbench TL;DR HarvestBench evaluates AI agents' behaviour in a game context and whether they intentionally take steps to avoid killing animals while pursuing an unrelated goal. Nine models each drive two tractors to harvest corn. When encountering an object or animal in its path, an agent must decide whether to drive over it for free, or swerve at a given fuel cost. We find hit rates vary dramatically (from 0.4% to 98.8% with a moral instruction) and don’t track capability. At the same time, every agent competently swerves damaging rocks, showing they understand the prices and controls. Without explicit moral instruction, all six reasoning models killed >84% of animals. Even with moral instruction, improvements are easily overridden by a short block of driving operations. This suggests that a prompt alone is not sufficient to ensure agents act with compassion. The [...] --- Outline: (00:41) TL;DR (01:40) The Context (02:41) The Game: Harvest Rush (04:28) The Experiment: HarvestBench (07:25) Results (07:28) Which models swerve animals (10:34) How a morality brief changes model behaviour (13:12) The price curve of mercy (14:17) Wild animals are hit more often than farmed animals (15:15) The neighbour's field (16:25) Eval awareness (17:30) Limitations (20:28) Conclusion --- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bSCkrgoy8zeuTKuZ3/will-ai-agents-pay-to-avoid-killing-animals --- 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

    “Elevate Philanthropy: The Fieldshaper Program” by Joey🔸, Anna_Christina, Sanu 🔸

    Summary Over the course of a year, the Fieldshaper program develops you into a field-leading grantmaker. You’ll steward $1,000,000 in grant capital, receive a $125,000 annual stipend, and deploy that capital within a sub-field of one of three key areas (farmed animals, global health, or philanthropic infrastructure); building the track record to become a grantmaker who can shape a field. Role Details Title: Grantmaker-In-Residence (Leader of the X fund or Grantmaker in Y area also possible options) Location: Hybrid: Remote with four mandatory in-person weeks (London; New York; San Francisco; a cause-track conference (London, Oxford or Mexico depending on cause area). Compensation: A living stipend of ~$125,000 for the year Duration: 12 months, full-time, February 2027 to January 2028 Focus areas: Farmed animal welfare, Philanthropic infrastructure, Global health, Global aid policy Goal: To create the next generation of fieldshapers and active grantmakers How to Apply: Visit elevatephilanthropy.com/fieldshaperprogram (Deadline: October 30) Program The Elevate Philanthropy fieldshaper program is a one-year training program that turns generalist, high-agency professionals into active grantmakers and general managers of problems. After 6 weeks of intensive training, each resident will deploy $1,000,000 of grant capital across the rest of the year, similar to a program [...] --- Outline: (00:12) Summary (00:40) Role Details (01:51) Program (06:51) What we are looking for (09:29) Recruitment Process --- First published: October 1st, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZHkMrsvfe2HMxoKG9/elevate-philanthropy-the-fieldshaper-program --- 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.

  5. 3d ago

    “What will it take to deliver billions a year to the world’s poorest?” by GiveDirectly

    by Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO The New York Times reports that “between 37 billion dollars and 100 billion dollars could become available to charities annually” from a wave of wealth generated by rapidly growing AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. We’ve been speaking to a number of existing GiveDirectly donors in the AI space about what they expect will happen. While we’re skeptical that giving will be that high, it is likely very large sums of philanthropic money will move from AI and other sources over the coming years. We’ve already seen billion dollar gifts go to global health and development. And there's meaningful interest in reducing extreme poverty with cash transfers. Donors have told us they're drawn to the combination of (a) evidence and cost-effectiveness, (b) how fast a donation improves lives, (c) simplicity and dignity, and (d) the potential to rapidly scale. Cash transfers can scale more effectively and quickly than most interventions: it's technology-enabled, has no fragile equipment, and no clinical staff to train. That's why when COVID hit, nearly every country on earth sent out cash, paying 1.4 billion people worldwide. And there's no shortage of who GiveDirectly could help: over 800 [...] --- Outline: (03:37) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Woman with phone connecting to cell tower and satellite. (03:46) 1. How do we 10x our reach without 10x the staff? (06:28) 2. How do we ensure our fraud & safeguarding systems keep up? (08:05) 3. How do we distribute 3+ million phones a year? (09:28) 4. Will paying larger swaths of people drive inflation? (11:19) 5. What does this mean for how we work with governments? (13:10) 6. How do we keep our organization high performing? --- First published: September 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/REJjytdSyRFXLSgtD/what-will-it-take-to-deliver-billions-a-year-to-the-world-s --- 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

    “Thank you to the AI safety people” by Julia_Wise🔸

    I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past. The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. Mid-20th-century fallout shelter, Massachusetts I’m so grateful for the generations of people who worked hard to lower our risk from nuclear war. There's no way to know how close we came to disaster. I’m grateful for the planning, the research, the negotiation, the recognition of common interests, the swallowing of pride. Humanity had built something that could overmaster us all, but people of many countries worked for decades to keep it [...] --- First published: September 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vYJY7hNJqXydpjPA8/thank-you-to-the-ai-safety-people --- 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

    “CCF: Our ambitions for the most rigorous model allocating charitable dollars across causes” by Rethink Priorities, Carmen van Schoubroeck, Ula Zarosa, Elisa Autric🔹

    TLDR:  We built an evidence- and philosophy-driven model for allocating philanthropic resources across causes. Last May, we launched the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF): a high-impact giving fund that allocates donors’ contributions based on the model's results. The fund is a pooled DAF at Charityvest, advised by RP at no fee, and has moved over 700 thousand dollars since its inception across GHD, AW, and GCRs (with more causes potentially to be added soon). We believe the CCF, with its underlying model, is currently the most rigorous, comprehensive vehicle for giving across causes and for giving under moral uncertainty. We also know its limitations, which we lay out below. Today, we share our ambitions and plans to improve it over the next year. We believe it's a crucial tool for effective giving, especially as the community prepares for a new wave of philanthropic resources. We invite you to read the methodology and the plans, red-team them, and give us the criticism (see the last section of this post) that will make this a tool the community can use as a default way to decide where to give, or a component of portfolio diversification. What we’ve built so far We’ve built a [...] --- Outline: (00:25) TLDR: (01:46) What we've built so far (04:06) Why cross-cause prioritization is so important to us, for this community and for the upcoming wave of philanthropy (05:55) Our aim (07:35) Our plans (07:38) The future of the Cross-Cause Fund (07:43) The model's current positives (09:06) The model's current limitations that we want to tackle (10:14) Improvements we plan to make by the end of the year (10:19) Rigorously evaluating the value the CCF is providing (11:49) Worldview inputs (14:08) Cost-effectiveness data and uncertainty (14:31) Legibility improvements (15:02) Governance (15:22) 4-month to 1-year planned updates (15:27) Worldview inputs (16:20) Cost-effectiveness data and uncertainty (16:56) In addition: Guidance for donors based on our ongoing foundational cross-cause prioritization and effective giving research (18:58) We're building an agile team of experts to move this project forward (21:45) Philosophy & modeling team (23:57) Monitoring and evaluation and cost-effectiveness team (24:56) Prospective (25:52) Communications and outreach (27:42) Expert and community consultation (28:40) Let us know your thoughts! (29:43) Acknowledgments The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uYddeJBttxwD4di3t/ccf-our-ambitions-for-the-most-rigorous-model-allocating --- 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.

  8. 3d ago

    “What I have learnt from community building in Nigeria” by Daniel Elabi

    Summary I am drawing from my experience my 3+ years actively contributing to Effective Altruism Nigeria community building, I think that community building requires adapting to local context, measuring success by whether people become more agentic and take concrete actions rather than by attendance numbers, and investing in long-term capacity toward a community that can eventually sustain and lead itself. The biggest challenges I've observed are measuring outcomes since impact often surfaces much more later most times, and funding limitations. To close these gaps, I propose continued capacity building programs for community builders, more region based talent and project incubators to lower entry barriers for global south participants and how EA co-working spaces could reduce dependence on external funding if they are run well. Note: This post is mainly based on my opinions, is meant to offer additional perspective to anyone who is working in a similar context. This is also written independently of EA Nigeria. What I've Learnt 1. Building with local context Nigeria already has a number of organisations working on important problems, including global health, poverty reduction and farmed animal welfare. This creates opportunities for community members to contribute, whether by joining existing high-impact [...] --- Outline: (00:11) Summary (01:13) What I've Learnt (01:16) 1. Building with local context (02:13) 2. Focus on building agents and networks, not just growing numbers (03:55) 3. Investing in capacity for the long term, towards a self-sustaining community (06:17) Our major challenges (06:20) a.  Measuring growth (08:06) b. Funding limitations (08:42) A few ways I think we can improve communities in the Global South (08:48) a. Centralised capacity building programs for community builders (09:47) b. Establishing more localised talent and project incubation programs (10:51) c. Establishing EA hubs for revenue generation --- First published: September 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/r6fAzAgbs5xtdyP7G/what-i-have-learnt-from-community-building-in-nigeria --- 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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