Effective Altruism Forum

Published on August 22, 2026 8:42 PM GMT The past few months I've been noticing that several conversations I've had with people working in AI Safety end up on people feeling like the can't talk to anybody outside their field about how the work feels for them. Time and time I'm hearing that the problem is not on if their friends agree or not with them, but rather that they don't have enough contex…

Published on August 22, 2026 2:21 AM GMT A pitch to join AI safety, or fund it – prompted by the summer AI started hacking companies. Posted mostly as a resource, since probably most EA folks are already familiar with AI safety arguments. I recommend reading from my blog since image captions + footnotes didn't carry over cleanly. The strange thing about pivotal moments is how ordinary they feel f…

Published on August 22, 2026 2:13 AM GMT A proposed strategy to attract competent, experienced talent Thank you to Roman at Constellation for reminding me that I had a draft on this, and Denis for the comment that inspired it! Pictured: Mid-career professional transitioning into AI safety. Left: original career; middle: fellowships; right: full-time AI safety position. AI safety has a problem. As…

Published on August 21, 2026 9:36 PM GMT Why I favor fallibilism over cluelessness I’ve long been struck by a structural commonality between radical skepticism and cluelessness worries . Since the EA Forum has been discussing cluelessness this week , I figured I’d take another stab at explaining why I don’t find it a credible concern. (Too late to qualify for the official contest , alas.) Skeptic…

Published on August 21, 2026 7:54 PM GMT Note: In my view, one of the most impactful opportunities for university students is running a great club for an important cause. E.g, a student group focused on Effective Altruism, AI Safety, Moral Ambition, Animal Welfare, Global Development, improving policy or politics, or other important causes. This document lists ideas other than organizing a high-i…

Published on August 21, 2026 7:18 PM GMT In my view, starting or growing university EA groups is one of the best opportunities to do good while in school. As a grad student working part time at Coefficient Giving, I believe that (per hour) time spent building our EA Group has been similarly impactful to grantmaking work. I’m proud to have been part of the organizing team which revitalized Princet…

Published on August 21, 2026 6:53 PM GMT This post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation. TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless. [1] To avoid choosing actions at random, I decided to write a decision procedure…

Published on August 21, 2026 6:35 PM GMT I'd prefer we stop improving AI before we hit ASI. But if we don't, I think we should implement something like socialism right before. I am not currently a socialist and have mostly identified in the abundance center left wing of liberalism. Socialism is a loaded term so let me try to clarify. What I mean is stripping all humans of longterm control of capi…

Published on August 21, 2026 3:28 PM GMT This is part 3 in my unofficial series on how to run great event sessions. In part one, I ranted about panels and (certain versions of!) group brainstorming , and in part two I strongly recommended microphones . Also on my substack . Choosing which sessions (or “content”) to run at an event is a difficult task. If you’re an event organizer, part of your jo…

Published on August 21, 2026 12:23 PM GMT Cross-posted from Substack and LinkedIn . I often get asked how our effective giving recommendations compare to some of the larger charities people are already familiar with. Here I’m going to make one such comparison, showing why GiveWell’s Top Charities , which we recommend in global health, are likely more than 100x more cost-effective at saving childr…

Published on August 20, 2026 10:01 PM GMT Like many submissions to the Cluelessness Competition, this essay wasn't featured in the entries list for some criteria reason, so I am asking for potential feedback here.  I think a summary of this post is sufficient (paste into Claude), because it is long, and you might expect the argument I am trying to make. Critiquing premise three (from the summary …

Published on August 20, 2026 7:27 PM GMT We're hiring a Head of Legal to lead GiveWell's legal function and build a team that can scale with our expected growth. This role will serve as a strategic thought partner to senior leadership, own GiveWell's legal portfolio and strategy, and oversee our Grants Administration function. This is a founding leadership role: you'll design the systems, process…

Published on August 20, 2026 7:21 PM GMT In the past three years, Manifund has run a regranting program , in which external donors who are less enmeshed in AI safety can delegate a budget to people with expertise, good track records, and wide networks . This year, we’re also offering the option to join as a self-funded regrantor. If you have a significant amount of money to donate and you want to…

Published on August 20, 2026 3:43 PM GMT By Zershaaneh Qureshi | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify | Read transcript Episode summary If a billion people are using ChatGPT every month, and there’s a 1-in-1,000 chance of really misaligned behaviour, that’s going to affect a lot of people, and could be really harmful. … Any kind of misalignment pretty much is bad. There’s many ways to be misalign…

Published on August 20, 2026 2:14 PM GMT This is a crosspost from my blog post . It's meant as a bit of an introduction to an extreme-suffering focused worldview. We spend most of our lives caught up in the boring details of our everyday life - thinking about what we’ll have for lunch, how to complete that assignment for work, and what we’re going to tell our friend after that awkward interaction…

Published on August 20, 2026 1:58 PM GMT What is there in the neural network before learning happens ? Before training begins, we usually think of a neural network as though nothing has happened yet. The weights are random, model has seen no data and recieved no gradients. We naturally think that whatever intelligence it eventually develops must come later. But there is something strange about th…

Published on August 20, 2026 1:54 PM GMT After being invested in AIxBio for some time now, I have accepted it as my niche mainly because I love dealing with fields that has high risk and where getting things right genuinely matters. And to me, biology represents the highest end of that spectrum. While I have a deep knowledge in building computing systems and security in cloud, I lack the groundin…

Published on August 20, 2026 1:00 PM GMT In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit , who was working on national security policy at OpenAI and was thinking about how to prepare for a future in which models could seriously assist attackers in creating pandemics. We had a call, and when I shared notes with my team their main response was: "maybe start with not making models that can do that?" Which is, in many w…

Published on August 20, 2026 8:57 AM GMT Summary We are currently automating the majority of our program operations, so that we can significantly scale our programs without the admin growing at the same speed. A task is worth automating for one of three reasons: 1) S peed , 2) Evening out the workload , or 3) Reliability and quality. A fourth reason is different in kind: some things were never po…

Published on August 20, 2026 8:10 AM GMT We are looking for an organised and plugged-in Grants & Programme Manager to handle our grants initiatives and run our Impact Fellowship programme. The role will consist of handling the logistics for grant cycles, from application to final impact reporting, while actively building partnerships with established and emerging filmmakers and film institutions,…