EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

I.
Imagine you run a charity which gives cows to people in the developing world. Your new boyfriend is a statistician and you want to impress him, so you’ve decided to look into this Monitoring and Evaluation thing he keeps going on about. So you give a bunch of people cows and then follow up a year later, and sure enough the people you gave the cows to are richer, healthier, and happier. You proudly tell this to your boyfriend and expect to reap rewards in the form of admiration, cuddles, and a ‘yes’ to your marriage proposal.
Your boyfriend, however, isn’t impressed. What if everyone in the country is getting richer, because the country is industrializing? What if the poor people you gave cows to were having an unusually hard time, and then they got back on their feet, and your cows had nothing to do with it? Apparently, in order to get a sample that really says anything about the world, you need to randomly give cows to half the people, and then check whether the people you gave cows to are doing better than the people you didn’t give cows to (a “randomized controlled trial”).
This [...]
---

First published:

March 10th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QsvFCcDR2TfSj32aM/the-joys-of-cash-benchmarking

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down.
But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines?
I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.

AI Timelines
By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have [...]
---
Outline:
(00:58) AI Timelines
(04:38) Short vs Long Timelines
(07:05) Broad Timelines
(17:55) Implications
(19:46) Hedging
(20:58) A Different World
(24:00) Longterm Actions
(28:33) Conclusions
---

First published:

March 19th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HCR2AE9it279ggiZT/broad-timelines

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Crossposted from my blog
I am very fortunate to have my job in many ways – I get to talk to, learn from, and give money to amazing people and nonprofits all around the world. I get to allocate a modest amount of resources to incredible organisations that I think are doing some of the best work to improve the world. I don’t have to fundraise for my or my team's salaries anymore. However, there are some things I’ve learned since becoming a philanthropic grantmaker that were either surprising or affected me more strongly than I expected.
I will outline some of these below. These are not meant to invoke feelings of “oh poor grantmakers who have access to money and influence” but rather “oh, I never considered things from that perspective”. Hopefully, they will also lead to more productive working relationships between funders and advocacy groups.
Here, I discuss:
How challenging the trade-offs are that funders face
The extremely poor feedback mechanisms that nonprofits have
How people treat you differently once you have access to funding, and how that changes you
The weight of saying no to good groups
Some things that make me feel cynical
Trade-offs [...]
---
Outline:
(01:18) Trade-offs are hard and money is scarce
(06:35) Nonprofits have bad feedback mechanisms
(13:00) How people treat you differently (and how that changes you)
(14:52) Its hard to say no to people
(16:08) Its easy to become cynical
(19:38) Wrapping up
---

First published:

March 11th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/umicYzuRsm6okFRKA/what-i-didn-t-expect-about-being-a-funder

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Epistemic status: A bit sad (I know that's not an epistemic status)
The best development Forum on the internet?
3 years ago a headline “FTX SBF blah blah blah” triggered my memory “oh that's right, that effective altruism thing”.

A few years earlier I had read “Doing Good Better” in our Northern Ugandan hut, and was excited by how the ideas matched my experience of seeing the BINGOs [1] on the ground here doing not-much-good at all. Soon after my wife dragged me to Cambridge for a year and I joined an EA group. I was drawn in to a beautiful crew of good, ernest people trying to do the best they could with their lives -[2] something I’d only seen before among a few people at church. I was most impressed by their veganism, practising what they preached.
But after going back to Uganda I forgot about the whole EA thing. But 3 years later the FTX headlines and a google search led me to the EA forum, which to my delight turned out to be the best place on the internet to discuss global health and development. My first foray was a not-very-good post [...]

---
Outline:
(00:16) The best development Forum on the internet?
(01:29) A steady decline
(02:59) Why?
(04:34) Is this fine?
(05:02) Is this less fine?
(06:29) How to Boost GHD discourse?
---

First published:

March 15th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4jbbjTTJ87baMrkY4/ghd-discussion-here-is-slowly-dying

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Many of us in this community are in the shocking position of thinking there's a real chance of humanity being wiped out over the next decade or two. Most of the time, we discuss that in rational terms. We talk about probabilities, and threat models, and interventions. We don’t talk as much about the emotions we have about how radically our world might change and about the possibility of it ending entirely.
There are lots of reasons for not talking about those feelings. For starters, it's often hard to know how we even do feel about it. There isn’t a straightforward societal script for how to feel about such radical world changes. People each have to figure it out for themselves, and feel very different ways. No one wants to sound extreme or crazy by talking about feeling very strongly about it. But they don’t want to sound callous either. And opening up about your feelings and being met without understanding and similarity feels alienating, particularly when it's about something so important. But the biggest reason I don’t talk about it is horror. I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t want to upset others.
[...]
---
Outline:
(01:58) A range of feelings
(04:18) How I feel
(06:46) Different people are different
---

First published:

March 7th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZDKkhoJoS7qgq2wqA/feelings-about-the-end-of-the-world

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.