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. 3d ago

    “Eccentrically Effective” by William_MacAskill

    This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them. Below is the op-ed I wrote for The Economist in response to their leader. It's cross-posted here in full. (The "Eccentrically Effective" title came from them, but I like it.) ------- The Oxford strand of the effective-altruism movement began in November 2009 with 23 people who had pledged 10% of their income to charities that benefit the extreme poor. If you’d told us, then, that The Economist would call effective altruism “the century's biggest idea”, we’d have been incredulous. I think that claim is overstated. But as one of the movement's founders, I found a lot to like in this newspaper's latest coverage. I appreciated the even-handed view of the movement's history and the good-faith criticism. The leader article's warning that any worldview, when taken to an extreme, can lead somewhere terrible [...] --- First published: October 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imZtsr3Ww4c2zEMXA/eccentrically-effective --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 4d ago

    “76x cash transfers: too good to be true or a (missed) opportunity? An invitation for dialogue on a recent Rethink Priorities Report” by Niek Versteegde, founder GOAL 3, Channelijne (Chan) Hulshof🔹

    TL;DR GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached. A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of 7 to 17 dollars in paediatric care and 12 to 30 dollars in neonatal care. This translates to around 76× and 28× unconditional cash transfers respectively for paediatrics and neonates against GiveWell's bar, and roughly 11,700× and 4,400× on Coefficient Giving's scale against their 1,000× bar. RP corrected for study design and robustness of findings by applying a 60% internal-validity and a 30% external-validity discount to our measured mortality effects, arriving at roughly 12% for paediatric wards and 7% for neonatal units. RP concluded that even at 1-2% relative reduction, the intervention would still be cost-effective. The post concludes with an invitation for discussion on what these results mean for further research and scaling of IMPALA. Introduction GOAL 3 commissioned the Rethink Priorities Global Health and Development team to provide an external analysis of the impact and cost-effectiveness of our product ‘IMPALA.’ IMPALA is a [...] --- Outline: (00:21) TL;DR (01:42) Introduction (02:19) Understanding the problem in its context (04:12) Theory of Change (05:38) What the RP report tells us (07:43) Interpretation, strengths and limitations (09:58) Reasons the estimate may be too low or too high (11:50) Discussion: What would it take to fund scale-up now? How much more evidence, and of what kind? (16:22) Next steps (17:42) I want to read more about IMPALA, where can I do that? The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fhGryFtF7iDnFEKtr/76x-cash-transfers-too-good-to-be-true-or-a-missed --- 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. Sep 25

    “Swarm Scaling” by Toby_Ord

    Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm? We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months: 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched a sophisticated criminal attack on the AI company Hugging Face. A swarm of 10,000 agents solved a version of the longstanding Navier-Stokes problem in mathematics. It took them just 88 hours to do so, in which time they sent 5 million messages to each other and used 300 billion tokens. No doubt we will soon see even larger swarms with even more impressive capabilities. But they are not cheap. It is estimated that the swarm of 10,000 agents cost about 20 million dollars at API prices. So while they are very powerful, it will be some time before we see the million-fold reduction in cost needed for this level of power to [...] --- Outline: (02:14) HOW DO SWARMS SCALE? (08:44) IMPLICATIONS --- First published: September 21st, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EkaBCQwL5hhTtxEwR/swarm-scaling --- 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. Sep 17

    “Too many people in EA underprice the cost of a bad reputation” by GraceAdams🔸

    Summary: Good work helps build a good reputation, but it's not the only factor. Reputation also requires making your work legible, building relationships with stakeholders, and communicating with them consistently over time. I think many people in EA systematically underestimate what a bad reputation costs, largely because those costs are invisible. You can see the people who stick around. You can't see the people who decided not to work with you. I close with some practical suggestions for weighing reputation in decisions. Notes on writing: This is more of a hot-take, quickly written, with some Claude assistance in shaping it into a full post, but heavily edited and reviewed by me. This was spurred by Manifund's recent announcement but is something I generally have been wanting to write. I've written this in my personal capacity, and it's informed by working 5 years in senior roles at EA orgs. Good work is necessary, not sufficient Reputation is everything. It's a cliché for a reason. Doing good work is one of the main ways to build a good reputation, and there's an implicit belief I've noticed in many people in EA that it's the only thing that should matter. If the [...] --- Outline: (01:08) Good work is necessary, not sufficient (01:58) What a good reputation actually buys you (02:36) The invisible costs of a bad reputation (03:24) Being weird about this doesn't scale (04:40) The people we lose (05:27) What to do about it --- First published: September 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopnEjSSb5fouNJBn/too-many-people-in-ea-underprice-the-cost-of-a-bad --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  5. Sep 16

    “EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy” by Bruce Friedrich 🔸

    I want to start by noting that I am enthusiastic about everything that the EA animal welfare movement has accomplished. I am enthusiastically supportive of all of the campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals. I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm incredibly proud of that work. That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change. There are two central arguments that I hear in EA circles and that I think are worthy of reconsideration: 1) These efforts have been tried and failed. Let's move on. 2) Everyone agrees with us on factory farming, so let's focus there and stop talking about whether eating meat is unethical; that's where we meet overwhelming pushback. I don't agree with either of these statements, and I believe that some of the influx of money we’re expecting for animals should be spent on animal liberation and diet change advocacy. Here are some thoughts and questions that I think support my point-of-view. I look forward to hearing what others think. 1) The [...] --- First published: September 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imoynWhpY5AqxcaDG/ea-should-invest-in-animal-liberation-and-diet-change --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  6. Sep 14

    “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.

  7. Sep 14

    “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.

  8. Sep 9

    “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.

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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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