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An optimistic, curiosity-chasing show about the wonder and wildness of life, following the threads that connect us to the natural world. The Wild Life is, always has been, and always will be a show about the diversity of life within the animal kingdom, but it's about more than that. It's about connections. It's about how the natural world inspires our culture, movies, and technologies. It's about the patterns that persist throughout not just life, but the universe itself. It's about us. The ...
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Introduction In May 2024, Ambitious Impact (AIM) ran a program to incubate new effective giving initiatives (EGIs) in partnership with Giving What We Can. In short, EGIs focus on raising awareness and funneling public and philanthropic donations to the most cost-effective charities worldwide. In the last few years, several Effective Giving Initiati…
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This is a link post. Manifund is hosting a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards the projects that have helped with your personal journey as an EA. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding! Sign up here to g…
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While the effective altruism movement has changed a lot over time, oneof the parts that makes me most disappointed is the steadycreep of donation matching. It's not that donation matching isobjectively very important, but the early EA movement'sprincipledrejection of a very effective fundraising strategy made it clearthat we were committed to helpi…
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Our room for more funding is bigger and more urgent than ever before. Our organizational strategy will be responsive both to the total amount raised and to how many people donate, so smaller donors will have an especially high impact this year. Good Ventures recently decided to phase out funding for several areas (GV blog, EA Forum post), including…
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Someone suggested I name this post "What We Owe The Community": I think it's a great title, but I didn't dare use it... Views and mistakes my own. What I believe I think owning our EA affiliation—how we are inspired by the movement and the community—is net positive for the world and our careers. If more people were more outspoken about their alignm…
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TL;DR FarmKind is a new effective giving platform dedicated to tackling factory farming We’ve just launched - www.farmkind.giving There are many ways you can help us if you’re interested - details below FarmKind's aim Factory farming is one of the most neglected cause areas relative to the amount of suffering it causes. Globally, Farmed Animal Fund…
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Welcome to The Wild Life! On today's episode, we have a fascinating guest: wildlife cinematographer Jake Davis. Jake’s career began by focusing on the wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Growing up, he spent his summers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the Teton Range's jagged peaks and abundant wildlife fostered a deep love for nature an…
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Prepared by James Fodor and Miles Tidmarsh EAGxAustralia 2023 Committee Abstract EAGx conferences are an important component of the effective altruism community, and have proven a popular method for engaging EAs and spreading EA ideas around the world. However, to date relatively little publicly available empirical evidence has been collected regar…
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Summary Rebecca Kagan believes “EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX.” She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective part…
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In this episode of The Wild Life, animal welfare scientist Maggie Herskowitz helps us navigate the tangled webs society has woven around the treatment of animals, both wild and domestic. Gray areas, moral calculations, trophy hunting, industrial-scale fishing and livestock, and the emerging field of conservation ethics. Our conversation spans a ran…
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This is a link post. Folks in philanthropy and development definitely know that the Gates Foundation is the largest private player in that realm by far. Until recently it was likely to get even larger, as Warren Buffet had stated that the Foundation would receive the bulk of his assets when he died. A few weeks ago, Buffet announced that he had cha…
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Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org (1 min) Introductory Video (6 min) Basic Features Video Executive Summary This post introduces Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty. We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty ov…
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Highlights Destabilization could be the biggest setback for great power conflict, AI, bio-risk, and climate disruption. Polarization plays a role in nearly every causal pathway leading to destabilization of the United States, and there is no indication polarization will decrease. The United States fits the pattern of past democracies that have desc…
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Summary/Introduction Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes mor…
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I'm often asked about how the existential risk landscape has changed in the years since I wrote The Precipice. Earlier this year, I gave a talk on exactly that, and I want to share it here. Here's a video of the talk and a full transcript. In the years since I wrote The Precipice, the question I’m asked most is how the risks have changed. It's now …
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This is a link post. Introduction: The (highly interrelated) effective altruist and Rationalist communities are very small on a global scale. Therefore, in general, most intelligence, skill and expertise is outside of the community, not within it. I don’t think many people will disagree with this statement. But sometimes it's worth reminding people…
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This is a linkpost for https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin, posted in full here given its relevance to this community. Gerard has been one of the longest-standing malicious critics of the rationalist and EA communities and has done remarkable amounts of work to shape their public images behind the scenes. Note: …
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I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public. I think 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from its job board, and similar EA job placement serv…
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This is a link post. The Giving What We Can Pledge is now the 🔸10% Pledge! We cover the why (along with our near-term plans and how you can help!) below. TL;DR: The name change will help us grow awareness of the pledge by reducing brand confusion and facilitating partnerships. We see it as an important part of reaching our goal of 10,000 pledgers b…
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From Darren Margolias: I'm the Executive Director of Beast Philanthropy, the charity founded by the world's most popular YouTuber MrBeast. We recently collaborated with GiveDirectly on the video below. You can read background the project from our LinkedIn here and here (plus GiveDirectly's blog) On Thursday, July 18th I'll be recording a video AMA …
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Audio is here if you prefer. Hope you like it. I got something to offer, all I ask is your time. And forgiveness for the form: a cheesy rhyme. You’re skeptical? Makes sense. But I know your type's vice. You strike me as a purveyor, of do-gooder advice. And it's pretty damn good, I don't mean to boast, This advice always fits. Well…sort of. Almost! …
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May 2024 marked the last month of the Center for Effective Aid Policy. This post serves as the public post-mortem. I have strived for it to be interesting to the average forum reader, who may not know much about the cause area. For professionals in development, we have a few internal private write ups which we may be more interesting, such as an ov…
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This is a link post. Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Silence favors the status quo, which doesn’t favor animals It's easy to ignore factory farming. Inflation sparks public d…
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This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from May 1 2022 to March 31st 2024 (23 months). It follows the previous March-April 2022 payout report. Since the previous report was written, the Animal Welfare Fund made a conscious decision to deprioritize public reports so that fund managers can have more time and capacity to work …
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This is a link post. This represents work from several people at the NAO. Thanks especially to Dan Rice for implementing the duplicate junction detection, and to @Will Bradshaw and @mike_mclaren for editorial feedback. Summary If someone were to intentionally cause a stealth pandemic today, one of the ways they might do it is by modifying an existi…
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Hi all, just a short post to let you know that my next book, The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, is now available for preorder! This is the publisher's description: "Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we focus on humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. In …
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Recently, I've noticed a growing tendency within EA to dissociate from Rationality. Good Ventures have stopped funding efforts connected with the rationality community and rationality, and there are increasing calls for EAs to distance themselves. This trend concerns me, and I believe it's good to make a distinction when considering this split. We …
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(You can read this post as a Google Doc. You might find this easier to share with animal-sympathetic non-EAs. Also: I work at Rethink Priorities, but I'm writing in a personal capacity.) A few weeks ago, I shared some suggested responses for a Defra consultation on welfare labelling. I was really pleased to hear that many EAs and animal rights advo…
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The world is full of science and, in turn, scientists, and not enough people who truly have that spark for communicating all of that discovery and wonder to the rest of the world. People like today's guest—Dr Carly Anne York (@BiologyCarly). She's an Associate Professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University, an Animal Physiologist, a Science Communicator, and…
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Summary. Who We Are: Kaya Guides runs a self-help course on WhatsApp to reduce depression at scale in low and middle-income countries. We help young adults with moderate to severe depression. Kaya currently operates in India. We are the world's first nonprofit implementer of Step-by-Step, the World Health Organization's digital guided self-help pro…
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This is a link post. Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate In a nutshell We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These prog…
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Welcome to The Wild Life, the podcast where we explore the wonders of the natural world and the science that helps us understand it. In this episode, we have an extraordinary guest: Aidan Branney. When we first recorded this interview nearly a year ago, Aidan was working as the large carnivore scientific aid for the California Department of Fish an…
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Manifest 2024 is a festival that we organized last weekend in Berkeley. By most accounts, it was a great success. On our feedback form, the average response to “would you recommend to a friend” was a 9.0/10. Reviewers said nice things like “one of the best weekends of my life” and “dinners and meetings and conversations with people building local c…
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The Arthropoda Foundation Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won’t pay for it;…
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This post is for EAs at the start of their careers who are considering which organisations to apply to, and their next steps in general. Conclusion up front: It can be really hard to get that first job out of university. If you don’t get your top picks, your less exciting backup options can still be great for having a highly impactful career. If th…
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Crossposted from AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack. Introduction. Anthropic has an unconventional governance mechanism: an independent "Long-Term Benefit Trust" elects some of its board. Anthropic sometimes emphasizes that the Trust is an experiment, but mostly points to it to argue that Anthropic will be able to promote safety and benefit-sharin…
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Original by Leopold Aschenbrenner, this summary is not commissioned or endorsed by him. Short Summary Extrapolating existing trends in compute, spending, algorithmic progress, and energy needs implies AGI (remote jobs being completely automatable) by ~2027. AGI will greatly accelerate AI research itself, leading to vastly superhuman intelligences b…
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A couple weeks ago I announced I was going to try and break the world record cycling without hands for AMF. That post also explains why I wanted to break that record. Last Friday we broke that record and raised nearly €10.000 for AMF. Here's what happened on friday. You can still donate here. What was the old record? Canadian Robert John Murray rod…
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The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program will soon become the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy (CMEP), our future secured by a generous $6,000,000 endowment. The CMEP Endowment Fund was established in May 2024 with a $5,000,000 gift from The Navigation Fund and a $1,000,000 gift from Polaris Ventures. We now welcome contributions from other …
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Agreement 78 % of my donations so far have gone to the Long-Term Future Fund[1] (LTFF), which mainly supports AI safety interventions. However, I have become increasingly sceptical about the value of existential risk mitigation, and currently think the best interventions are in the area of animal welfare[2]. As a result, I realised it made sense fo…
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Since 2017, EA Funds has been providing grants across four distinct cause areas. While there are payout reports available, there is a lack of reports detailing the outcomes of these grants, so I delved out of curiosity into the Grants Database to review some of the proposals that received funding and evaluate their outcomes. Some of the findings we…
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TL;DR: I donated my kidney and you can too. If that's too scary, consider blood donation, the bone marrow registry, post-mortem organ donation, or other living donations (birth tissue, liver donation). Kidney donation sucks. It's scary, painful, disruptive, scarring. My friends and family urged me not to; words were exchanged, tears were shed. My r…
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Executive Summary Ansh, a 1-year-old Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charity, has been delivering an evidence-based, scientifically proven intervention called Kangaroo Care to low birth weight and premature babies in 2 government hospitals in India since January 2024. Ansh estimates that their programs are saving, on average, 4 lives a month per…
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Epistemic Status: somewhat confident: I may have made coding mistakes. R code is here if you feel like checking. Introduction: In their 2022 article, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman looked to reconcile the results from two of their papers. Kahneman (2010) had reported that above a certain income level ($75,000 USD), extra income had no as…
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This is a link post. The report concludes that the cage-free fulfillment rate is maintaining its momentum at 89%. The producer, retailer, and manufacturer industries are some of the most cage-free forward sectors when it comes to fulfillment. Some major companies across sectors that fulfilled their commitments in 2023 (or years ahead of schedule) i…
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This is a link post. A brief overview of recent OpenAI departures (Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Daniel Kokotajlo, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Pavel Izmailov, William Saunders, Ryan Lowe Cullen O'Keefe[1]). Will add other relevant media pieces below as I come across them. Some quotes perhaps worth highlighting: Even when the team was functioning at full ca…
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TL;DR It's time for an absurd challenge. On June 7th around 11:00, I'm going to (try to) break the world record for cycling without hands! 🚴🏻‍♂️ For more than 100km, I am raising money for the The Against Malaria Foundation (100% donated, costs covered by my company and myself) with the help of The Life You Can Save. Pledge your donation per kilome…
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How well do you know the details of the Giving What We Can Pledge? A surprising number of people we’ve spoken to — including many who know a lot about effective giving — shared some or all of these pledge misconceptions. Misconception #1: If you sign the pledge, you have to donate at least 10% of your income each year. The Giving What We Can Pledge…
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The Charity Commission for England and Wales has concluded its statutory inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation UK (EVF UK), which was originally launched in 2023 following the collapse of FTX. The full report on the inquiry can be found here, and the Commission's press release on the inquiry can be found here. The inquiry's scope was to examin…
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