Effective Altruism Forum

Published on May 5, 2026 4:16 PM GMT By: By Zershaaneh Qureshi | Published February 24th, 2026 This is a crosspost of the full text of How AI could create the world’s biggest problems from 80,000 Hours's website. Imagine you're living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly…

Published on May 5, 2026 4:00 PM GMT Jasmine Brazilek & Miles Tidmarsh: Compassion in Machine Learning Preprint, March 2026: Full paper | HuggingFace resources | Animal Harm Benchmark (AHB) TL;DR Making future transformative AI care about animals as well as humans is likely to massively affect the value of the future . There are people in labs who care , but they need benchmarks and methods that …

Published on May 5, 2026 3:23 PM GMT Crosspost . 1 Introduction Maybe the best paper I’ve ever read is called People in Suitcases by Kacper Kowalczyk. I do not think there is anything plausible deontologists can say in reply. I thought I’d summarize the paper, and also discuss some results from related papers to show why there is no way out for the deontologist. Pack your bags deontologists, you …

Published on May 5, 2026 1:30 PM GMT “How are we to live, in a world in which there is so much unnecessary suffering? Magnus Vinding looks unflinchingly at that question, and gives an answer that is realistic, and yet inspiring. Read this book. It may change your life.” — Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation I have just published a book: What if the point of self-improvement were not just to…

Published on May 5, 2026 7:36 AM GMT TL;DR: AI has raised the bar for appearing competent, making formal job applications harder to win than ever. Two things still cut through: judgment you can defend, and the surface area you've built before you needed a job. Acknowledgements: thank you to Kevin Xia for your feedback on this post! The baseline has moved A well-structured report, a clear email, a…

Published on May 4, 2026 11:04 PM GMT Coefficient Giving is scaling its giving significantly, both this year and into the future. To support that growth, we're hiring Research Fellows and Strategy Fellows to join our Cause Prioritization team. These roles will help prioritize and launch new $100 million+ Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) funds , design the systems we use to evaluate our impact, a…

Published on May 4, 2026 5:29 PM GMT Pain without a sufferer: a speculative model of invertebrate experience, drawn from no-self psychopathy and Buddhist phenomenology, and what it predicts about welfare ranges. This is Part 4 of a five-part sequence on welfare ecology. Part 1 introduces the ethical premises. Part 2 covers the empirical landscape. Part 3 covers interventions. Part 5 covers AI. A …

Published on May 4, 2026 4:13 PM GMT ( Crosspost ). If you’re young and online, you’re probably maxxing something . Maybe you’re looksmaxxing: trying to maximize your hotness (e.g. by hitting yourself in the face with a hammer ). Maybe, like Clavicular, you do it just to mog other people—to look better than they do. But good looks reach diminishing marginal returns. You get a reasonable boost fro…

Published on May 4, 2026 4:07 PM GMT 0. I don't work at AIM.. why care about this? This taxonomy is written from AIM's perspective, but it may be helpful more broadly: If you're starting a new charity, incubating others, or doing charity idea research: The taxonomy gives you a structured way to think about which ideas to pursue, what founder profile fits, and what research and support each idea n…

Published on May 4, 2026 3:58 PM GMT This is a crosspost from my Substack: https://themarginalhour.substack.com/p/welfare-maxxing-donations-or-high I found this draft sitting in the depths of my Obsidian vault, and thought I’d finish it up and post it! Epistemic status: low, uncertain if this is accurate. Keen to hear feedback. Introduction If you can’t/don’t want to be vegan, is it better to eat…

Published on May 4, 2026 3:30 PM GMT On behalf of OAISI , we're excited to be running our fourth iteration of ARBOx (Alignment Research Bootcamp Oxford), a 2-week intensive designed to rapidly build skills in AI safety. This year, we're considering running two concurrent streams for the first time. ARBOx4 is an in-person, full-time programme running from 28 June to 10 July 2026 at Trajan House in…

Published on May 4, 2026 1:02 PM GMT Hey everyone, I have a question for you that could inform an EA related research question: What do you believe to be the most important reasons to support multiple different interventions? If you donate to a single fund that itself supports multiple interventions, what reasoning should apply to the fund's allocation decisions? This question is relevant as I am…

Published on May 4, 2026 12:54 PM GMT There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how f…

Published on May 4, 2026 11:25 AM GMT I recently published a research project on what I call the AI Criminal Mastermind , an AI agent that plans, facilitates and coordinates a crime by on-boarding human 'taskers'. In heist films, a criminal mastermind is a character who plans a criminal act, coordinating a team of specialists to rob a bank, casino or city mint. I argue that AI agents will soon pl…

Published on May 3, 2026 5:56 PM GMT From soil-welfare research to the New World Screwworm: a practical portfolio for wild-invertebrate welfare. This is part 3 of a five-part sequence on welfare ecology. Part 1 introduces the ethical premises. Part 2 covers the empirical landscape. Part 4 explores a model of invertebrate suffering. Part 5 covers AI. In part 2 , I argued that land use is a key lev…

Published on May 3, 2026 3:10 PM GMT Scott Alexander has a recent piece about "deontological bars" in the context of AI safety. He describes the state of the discourse like this: I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an internal debate in the AI safety movement. Some people want to work with the least irresponsible AI labs, helping them “win” the “race” and hopefully do a better job cre…

Published on May 3, 2026 11:22 AM GMT This is a crosspost for the Pen & Paper Argument on Computational Functionalism Debate . This website has "A structured assembly of arguments in support of and challenging digital consciousness". It was announced on the EA Forum on 7 November 2025. "The current project lead is Chris Percy PhD ". Overview The algorithm that is conscious in a computer can, by C…

Published on May 3, 2026 8:47 AM GMT Epistemic status: Quick write-up to get the idea out there. “Plans are worthless, planning is everything” - Dwight D. Eisenhower Many governments say they want to be agile, I’ve seen this in many different policy documents, but words are cheap. If you want to be agile, you can’t just say you want to be agile, you need to design mechanisms to make it happen. I …

Published on May 2, 2026 11:43 PM GMT I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference. It’s hard to convey in words. My reflection afterwards was something like “What the fuck w…

Published on May 2, 2026 8:58 PM GMT (Image by Henri Cartier-Bresson, France, 1938) I recently revisited this EAG talk by Helen Toner in 2019 about sustainable motivation, and in it, she says, "I would love for people, when they leave this talk today, to ask someone about what they find joy and meaning in other than work. I think we should talk about those things and celebrate them. It’s a fun qu…