Effective Altruism Forum

Published on June 14, 2026 2:15 PM GMT Assume this is talking about majoring in Computer Science. Do you think getting high GPA (in CS major) is highly, moderately or only slightly aligned with improving AI risks research(both conceptual and emprirical) abilities? Some said they think a lot of college courses are not so useful[1], and getting good grades on tests requires practcing irrelevant ski…

Published on June 14, 2026 1:51 PM GMT Problems have hidden, repeatable structures. Here's my attempt to name them: 1. Smashed Watch There are so many issues at once that fixing one has no benefit unless you fix others too. 2. Leaky Pipe Fixing one problem causes the others to intensify. If you plug up one leak in a pipe leaking in multiple places, that increases the water pressure causing the ot…

Published on June 14, 2026 5:24 AM GMT TLDR: So there has been recent discourse on 𝕏 , and recent news of major cyber attacks that were done with the help of AI. The missing frame here is the dual-use gap : as AI models become more capable, they create more upside for defenders and more downside for attackers. The gap between the benefits and the harmful effects is getting wider. I know that soun…

Published on June 13, 2026 6:13 PM GMT People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout or of losing some kind of wholesomeness [1] . But there’s another, very simple argument against it that I have not seen anyone fully make explicit [2] , even though I think it’s ver…

Published on June 12, 2026 8:05 PM GMT We're excited to announce our June book discussion featuring The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson. Here's our schedule: Discussion Meeting: We're offering two sessions to discuss The Age of Em on Tuesday, June 23rd (1:00–2:00 PM ET or 8:00–9:00 PM ET). Q&A Session with Robin Hanson: Monday, June 29th at 4:00-5:00 PM …

Published on June 12, 2026 5:20 PM GMT Surplus is an incubator for software startups, organized by Manifund and Mox — to create massive public good in the age of transformative AI. It’s a 3 month program, starting late July in SF. We provide seed funding, advice, peers, intros, and space to focus. “Surplus” is the value created through positive-sum trades; what markets produce in abundance. Apply…

Published on June 12, 2026 4:59 PM GMT TL;DR Many biosecurity interventions assume that if we develop effective countermeasures against engineered pandemics, societies will be able to deploy them when needed. However, this assumption is largely based on conditions found in high-income countries: strong institutions, public trust, reliable healthcare systems, robust surveillance networks, and adeq…

Published on June 12, 2026 4:47 PM GMT TL;DR: We’re a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 99-1838037) making animated videos about AI safety and other topics. The IRS made its tax-exemption determination in October 2024. Our current three-person board is all staff and two of us are romantic partners, which is not ideal. We want at least two independent board members (not current staff and not expecting …

Published on June 12, 2026 4:45 PM GMT Noticed this week that https://Every.org has a few small promotions for different activities on their platform. If one signs up for a new account or has an account they haven’t used in a while, I suggest logging in, liking 3 donations/posts from others on effective orgs, & setting up a $10 monthly donation to an effective org directly from a bank account. Af…

Published on June 12, 2026 4:45 PM GMT Noticed this week that https://Every.org has a few small promotions for different activities on their platform. If one signs up for a new account or has an account they haven’t used in a while, I suggest logging in, liking 3 donations/posts from others on effective orgs, & setting up a $10 monthly donation to an effective org directly from a bank account. Af…

Published on June 12, 2026 4:38 PM GMT Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger. Hi!  From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems , a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS.  I ended up learning a lot about how GPS works and what it’s used for, and (due to my personal interest in effective …

Published on June 12, 2026 1:42 PM GMT I used an LLM to help redraft some arguments for an EA specific audience and it likely contains ca.10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. Epistemic status: The empirical claims rest on institutional sources cited at the end. The central argument, that AI safety research as a field does not ask whether its deployment t…

Published on June 12, 2026 2:08 PM GMT Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m offering this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement or service offered by CEA. TL;DR: I'm offering personal mentorship to anyone serious about starting a biosecurity group at a top university. I work on CEA's Groups team (whilst also being an Epidemiology student at…

Published on June 12, 2026 1:46 PM GMT TL;DR: Offering you free coaching in my app. We have a pro bono program w/ free spots for folks doing impact work. A real human coach doing daily check-ins plus a monthly video call. You can apply here: https://www.goalswon.com/giving-back/ . AMA in the comments. Hey I'm Joel. My co-founder Simon Newstead (active in the impact community) and I started as acc…

Published on June 12, 2026 12:16 PM GMT AI use disclosure: 0 AI used in this particular post. Perhaps about once a month someone messages me on LinkedIn or the Hive Slack community , asking how a data scientist/analyst/engineer can use their career to help animals. This is something I’ve spent nearly 5 years thinking about! I originally trained as a data science after my PhD because I wanted to b…

Published on June 12, 2026 7:28 AM GMT [AI Use Disclosure: Asked Claude to draft this, then entirely rejected its suggestions] I've read a lot of good moral philosophy linked from the EA Forum, but not much of it ( Joe Carlsmith excepted ) has focused on some of the not-evidently-utilitarian traits and dispositions one could cultivate to become the kind of person that does the most good. I'm disc…

Published on June 11, 2026 8:56 PM GMT TL;DR: We ran a Delphi study with 272 international AI experts to prioritize 24 AI risk domains from the MIT AI Risk Domain Taxonomy . In a business-as-usual scenario, experts judged a more than 10% chance of catastrophic outcomes (i.e., ‘more than 1 million human deaths or more than a USD 100B in financial loss or civilizational-scale intangible impacts’) f…

Published on June 11, 2026 7:18 PM GMT In September 2025, I'd become increasingly convinced that a fieldbuilding program for content creators could solve a long-standing bottleneck of expanding reach and trust beyond the AI safety and EA bubble. I had graduated from UCLA a few months earlier when I came across the AI-2027 report which had a significant impact on me . I rejected my six-figure tech…

Published on June 11, 2026 6:24 PM GMT A note on process: I used an AI writing assistant (Claude) to help articulate and refine this post through multiple drafts. The ideas, arguments, framework, and lived experience here are entirely my own. Every sentence reflects my thinking, beliefs, actions and my theory of change. I spent twenty years building institutional trust before I ever heard the ter…

Published on June 11, 2026 5:40 PM GMT TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset: University of Toronto University of Michigan UCLA USC NYU Columbia Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd,…