EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

EA Forum Team

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. 18h ago

    “Do AI safety talent programmes work? Nobody has run the study that would tell us.” by Laura Thomas-Walters

    Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report. Background At least 70 million dollars has gone into AI safety talent programmes so far, but we still can’t really say much about their impact. Notably, Kairos has just raised 50 million dollars on a self-described "shallow retrospective" that looked at "around 80 people". I decided to do a deep dive into how AI Safety Talent programmes self-evaluate their impact. Disclaimer, these programmes are small, fast, and generally run by people with no evaluation training and no slack. The oldest one was only established in 2018 (AI Safety Camp, as far as I can tell). Most last less than 6 months. When timelines are genuinely short and urgent, then time spent evaluating is time that could be spent building. I am not criticising any individual programme. Having said that, there are retrospective evaluation designs that could be run cheaply without slowing anything down. And a field that funds talent pipelines at this scale without knowing whether they work is not moving [...] --- Outline: (00:34) Background (01:52) The audit (04:52) Thoughts on the counterfactual impact of talent programmes (08:37) Proposed design (12:04) Conclusion The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5yBGo4fnqm2zKMKj/do-ai-safety-talent-programmes-work-nobody-has-run-the-study --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 1d ago

    “Beware Silver Bullets: Are we making “welfare tech” into the next animal advocacy bubble?” by Rockwell, Tom Billington

    Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata. Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is interspersed with side comments about dogs. We’ve been very slow to get this out. We wrote this and began receiving feedback on our draft before very relevant projects went live, including the announcement of Spring Innovation Fund and Rethink Priorities’ call for new animal founders. Many thanks to those who reviewed our drafts. All mistakes are our own. Summary The animal movement is at an extremely exciting stage, with many promising new ideas, funding opportunities, and talented individuals entering the space. We want to encourage this energy, while also noting a concerning pattern that we’ve observed: The effective animal advocacy world has a pattern of high levels of enthusiasm for a specific intervention that eventually gives way to a rapid downward adjustment, as expectations run ahead of the evidence [...] --- Outline: (01:05) Summary (03:17) The recurring pattern (06:42) Why EA is vulnerable to silver bullets (08:51) Why welfare tech might be the next "silver bullet" (10:42) Why are bubbles bad? (12:22) What would a healthier approach look like? (13:59) Conclusion The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 24th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QHgfRkiNFoGyysDpn/beware-silver-bullets-are-we-making-welfare-tech-into-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  3. 5d ago

    “Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on” by George Rosenfeld

    I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to me. It's more personal than what I’d usually share publicly, but I thought I’d post it here in case it resonates with anyone else. I’m very grateful to the many readers of this forum who dedicate so much of their time and energy to these problems. — When I was 12 years old, I found out that many people in other parts of the world died of easily preventable diseases, and it was possible for wealthy people to donate relatively small amounts of money in order to stop that from happening. As one example, it costs a few dollars to buy a malaria net, and on average around 5,000 dollars can prevent a death which would otherwise have happened. As a 12-year-old, I saw the world in black and white, and I didn’t like what I saw. As far as I could tell, people's decisions about how much and where to donate would literally determine whether some real humans [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 3rd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oicth6zSSP5B6vpMH/alone-again-facing-the-possibility-of-ai-takeover-as-the --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  4. Aug 28

    “Moral Imagination & Effective Altruism” by Toby_Ord

    Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'. As examples, he gives: Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens. St Gregory of Nyssa's argument (in 379 CE) that the entire institution of slavery was morally wrong. Joyce Roush's (1998 CE) idea that she should altruistically donate a kidney to help save the life of an unknown stranger.  Nielsen acknowledges that any particular act of moral imagination often builds on earlier precursors, but that this shouldn't lessen our appreciation for these major steps forward. One could think of moral imagination as a key part of making moral progress. Moral progress (moving towards better systems of morality) involves the creation of new approaches to morality, and the critiquing of what has been suggested. Through the iteration of creation and critique, we slowly make progress. Some of this process happens within moral philosophy (especially the critique), but much of it happens in the wider [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 23rd, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Zaf7FLBBmeAcXgW3Y/moral-imagination-and-effective-altruism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. Aug 18

    “What if the third wave is a puddle?” by Morgan Fairless

    The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of the effective giving community as reported by Giving What We Can, make it difficult for even hardcore sceptics (and I probably count myself among this curmudgeonly crowd) to stick to the view that we are in business as usual. There are many reasons to believe that this expected growth will happen, and I’d be remiss to not mention Nan Ransohoff's great piece on the matter. This article was a catalyst. Where before board members and execs who were particularly clued into the Bay area may have expected to see this change in the size of the giving market, Nan's piece gave this a name and salience. The third wave of philanthropy materialized slowly, and then all at once. This possibility of increased funding has now taken the shape of a near certainty in some circles. Besides the perfunctory “it may not happen” at the end of a long pitch, it is not uncommon to sit in conversations that assume the existence of this funding, and [...] --- Outline: (01:34) No such money (03:11) Smaller amounts (04:23) Absorption (06:24) What next? --- First published: July 29th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xNnafgb8BAkysaHsh/what-if-the-third-wave-is-a-puddle --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  6. Aug 17

    “What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-commitment before seeing the RCT results” by I.J.J., AlexisAt

    TL;DR NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda. We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Preliminary results are expected in October 2026. The end-line analysis is run by IPA and our academic partners, not by NOVAH. Edutainment to prevent intimate partner violence is promising, but it is still young as a field. We do not want to spend donor money scaling it unless the evidence shows it works at least as well as the strongest existing approaches. The RCT is what will tell us that. Therefore, before seeing those results, we want to make our decision rule public: We will scale our programming only if the RCT finds a statistically significant relative reduction of at least 5% in physical or sexual intimate partner violence prevalence. How quickly we proceed will depend on the size and certainty of the effect. Our current [...] --- Outline: (00:14) TL;DR (02:04) Background on NOVAH's cause area and intervention (04:03) How we are evaluating our impact (05:54) Our pre-commitment (07:10) What happens under each result? (07:14) Effect below 5%, or not statistically significant: pause and explore (07:47) Effect of 5%-20%: continue as planned (08:15) Effect above 20%: accelerate (08:33) Why did you choose a 5% reduction? (09:37) Is everything driven by this RCT? (10:55) Why make this public? (11:29) How you can hold us to this (12:00) Should more non-profits do this? (12:37) Final words (13:09) Learn more and get in touch (13:41) Appendix (13:47) Why do you use IPV-year instead of DALYs in your cost-effectiveness? --- First published: August 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lz42uekYDBmBweq9f/what-would-make-us-scale-or-stop-novah-s-pre-commitment --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  7. Aug 8

    “General capability - and capabilities generally - have no good y-axis” by Gregory Lewis🔸

    BLUF: To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’. Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our measures are of something related-to but clearly not identical-with it, thus ‘true’ AI capability can be a funhouse-mirror reflection of whatever was measured. Specifically: Benchmark score: One small step in benchmark score can be a giant leap in capability, or the opposite, or whatever else. (My 6/10 vs. your 4/10 ≠ I’m 50% better at maths than you). Elo et al: Can give a real y-axis in terms of winning chances, but doesn’t translate outside of beating others. (Going from 50% to 73% to 88% chance to get a higher score than you on a maths test ≠ gaining 0 → 1 → 2 units of maths ability over you) Epoch Capabilities Index: Analogous to IQ, so [...] --- Outline: (03:05) Introduction (04:26) Both a poor reflection and a dark glass (07:51) Human benchmarking also has a y-axis problem (12:27) A metrological elegy (12:49) The base case: benchmarks (cf. exams) (13:30) Elo et al. (16:25) (And maybe not quite 'game ability ≡ winning games', after all?) (18:28) ECI (cf. IQ) (20:56) Intervals Rarely True (25:01) Measure endogeneity (31:12) Forking IRT (34:45) (Dimensions of being, and beating, a bat) (39:40) Prediction (cf. chronometry) (41:58) Time horizons (44:34) Human "capability" is also exponential in time horizon (47:38) Intuitive/interpretative prelude (52:56) Time horizons and ECI share an axis kink (57:13) Perhaps money, as a measure, stinks the least (01:01:07) Finale: AI as normal epistemics (01:06:48) Acknowledgements The original text contained 33 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CQvdadxjCpd7i7kjA/general-capability-and-capabilities-generally-have-no-good-y --- 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. Aug 1

    “Never born, then maybe died twice” by NickLaing

    “Your balls are baked aren’t they, mate”. He would not have been born Thanks Lyndon, that describes the situation. Like almost 1 in 10 modern men, my sperm weren’t up to the task - at least not the old fashioned way. So IVF it was - the miracle that now feels almost commonplace. We landed on the moon and Woodstock changed music forever. But in 1969 a quieter event transformed the world. The first human embryo was fertilised “In vitro”, outside the body. Yet 10 years passed before one was inserted into a womb, and then born. 48 years ago, Louise Joy Brown was the first woman born through IVF. This year about a million babies will be born through IVF. IVF stands at the frontier of rich-privilege, a norm for the middle class in rich countries. In my home country New Zealand, the government even pays for it! Yet every week I meet women here in Northern Uganda who can’t have kids, and could never afford IVF. Even the human “right” to have a kid can depend on where you are born. If I was born 25 years ago, or in Uganda, my boy would never have [...] --- Outline: (00:13) He would not have been born (01:35) Our Risky Choice (03:47) He didn't die once - a routine miracle (05:33) He didn't die twice - Neonatal care (08:54) I am Grateful The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KMNk8zXLxHQXgN7rK/never-born-then-maybe-died-twice --- 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.

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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.

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