EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

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 [...]
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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.
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First published:

September 7th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5yBGo4fnqm2zKMKj/do-ai-safety-talent-programmes-work-nobody-has-run-the-study

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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 [...]
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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.
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First published:

August 24th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QHgfRkiNFoGyysDpn/beware-silver-bullets-are-we-making-welfare-tech-into-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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.
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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.
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First published:

September 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oicth6zSSP5B6vpMH/alone-again-facing-the-possibility-of-ai-takeover-as-the

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
St Gregory of Nyssa's argument (in 379 CE) that the entire institution of slavery was morally wrong.
Joyce Roush's (1998 CE) idea that she should altruistically donate a kidney to help save the life of an unknown stranger.
Nielsen acknowledges that any particular act of moral imagination often builds on earlier precursors, but that this shouldn't lessen our appreciation for these major steps forward.
One could think of moral imagination as a key part of making moral progress. Moral progress (moving towards better systems of morality) involves the creation of new approaches to morality, and the critiquing of what has been suggested. Through the iteration of creation and critique, we slowly make progress. Some of this process happens within moral philosophy (especially the critique), but much of it happens in the wider [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:

August 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Zaf7FLBBmeAcXgW3Y/moral-imagination-and-effective-altruism

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The world of private philanthropy may be in for a period of large growth. News of Coefficient Giving increasing their funding for GiveWell to one billion in the near-term, and the general growth of the effective giving community as reported by Giving What We Can, make it difficult for even hardcore sceptics (and I probably count myself among this curmudgeonly crowd) to stick to the view that we are in business as usual.
There are many reasons to believe that this expected growth will happen, and I’d be remiss to not mention Nan Ransohoff's great piece on the matter. This article was a catalyst. Where before board members and execs who were particularly clued into the Bay area may have expected to see this change in the size of the giving market, Nan's piece gave this a name and salience. The third wave of philanthropy materialized slowly, and then all at once.
This possibility of increased funding has now taken the shape of a near certainty in some circles. Besides the perfunctory “it may not happen” at the end of a long pitch, it is not uncommon to sit in conversations that assume the existence of this funding, and [...]
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Outline:
(01:34) No such money
(03:11) Smaller amounts
(04:23) Absorption
(06:24) What next?
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First published:

July 29th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xNnafgb8BAkysaHsh/what-if-the-third-wave-is-a-puddle

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.