EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas.
TL;DR: A lot of new money is about to enter effective giving. When that happens, the question "Where does a dollar do the most good?" gets harder to answer, not easier. It depends on how much money each area already has, and that amount keeps changing as the money arrives. This is why the model behind the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund doesn't just rank funds once and stop. It tracks how each fund's cost-effectiveness changes as it receives more funding, and re-ranks as it goes. Below, we explain why anyone giving at scale should use similar reasoning.
If you’re a small or mid-sized donor who makes giving decisions independently, it's relatively easy to figure out what your money is doing. For example, when you give your first $1000 to a charity that runs corporate cage-free egg campaigns, your donation will go on to fund corporate cage-free egg campaigns. When you give your second $1000 to the same charity, it will fund…corporate cage-free egg campaigns. And you will never guess what your tenth $1000 goes [...]
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Outline:
(02:37) Modeling diminishing marginal returns
(07:05) Acting as part of a group
(08:48) How the Cross-Cause Fund works
(10:42) Why you can't just follow the highest marginal number
(13:03) Acknowledgements
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First published:

October 21st, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FZkwut9d5fD2vzC5i/ccf-as-more-money-arrives-the-best-place-to-give-keeps

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT vape pen. J. is chronic—he gets attacks every day—so he never goes anywhere without his vape pen. He has successfully aborted hundreds of attacks with DMT in the two years he's been using it. Many years ago, E. had done DMT recreationally, but he had never used it to abort an attack, despite having had cluster headaches for decades.
“Do a 2-second pull, and hold it in as long as you can,” said J. to E. A few seconds later, E. could feel some effects, but the pain was still there. So he took another 2-second pull. He then stared intently at a tree in front of him for about 30 seconds. Then, his face transformed. He smiled, in utter disbelief. He started laughing and crying. The pain was completely gone. He felt clear-headed. He had never felt the pain fizzle away so [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:

October 12th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gYrYnzzcGm7oJ3Fp3/it-s-not-an-ache-it-s-a-demon-from-hell

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last long. This low salience is self-reinforcing: even people who care deeply about it seldom bring it up. Yuval Noah Harari thinks “the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history” — and almost never talks about it.
2. Our main opponent isn't the meat industry; it's inertia. If battery cages and gestation crates had always been illegal, the industry could never have gotten them legalized. Defending the status quo is just far easier than changing it.
3. The meat industry isn't the omnipotent Bond villain some activists imagine, forever scheming to win the grand battle over the future of meat. It's a bunch of middle managers in Tyson fleeces in a business park in Springdale, Arkansas, trying to hit their Q3 targets.
4. [...]
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Outline:
(00:32) On factory farming
(01:54) The future of farming
(03:59) Welfare reforms
(05:27) Unsolicited dietary advice
(06:45) Vegan advocacy
(07:51) Wild animal welfare
(08:25) Effective altruism
(09:49) Inside baseball
(11:08) On strategy
(12:23) Causes for optimism
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First published:

October 5th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c5Qcf8gcbFFHCfZNC/40-hot-takes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them.

Below is the op-ed I wrote for The Economist in response to their leader. It's cross-posted here in full. (The "Eccentrically Effective" title came from them, but I like it.)

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The Oxford strand of the effective-altruism movement began in November 2009 with 23 people who had pledged 10% of their income to charities that benefit the extreme poor. If you’d told us, then, that The Economist would call effective altruism “the century's biggest idea”, we’d have been incredulous.
I think that claim is overstated. But as one of the movement's founders, I found a lot to like in this newspaper's latest coverage. I appreciated the even-handed view of the movement's history and the good-faith criticism. The leader article's warning that any worldview, when taken to an extreme, can lead somewhere terrible [...]

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First published:

October 7th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imZtsr3Ww4c2zEMXA/eccentrically-effective

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR
GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached.
A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of 7 to 17 dollars in paediatric care and 12 to 30 dollars in neonatal care. This translates to around 76× and 28× unconditional cash transfers respectively for paediatrics and neonates against GiveWell's bar, and roughly 11,700× and 4,400× on Coefficient Giving's scale against their 1,000× bar.
RP corrected for study design and robustness of findings by applying a 60% internal-validity and a 30% external-validity discount to our measured mortality effects, arriving at roughly 12% for paediatric wards and 7% for neonatal units.
RP concluded that even at 1-2% relative reduction, the intervention would still be cost-effective.
The post concludes with an invitation for discussion on what these results mean for further research and scaling of IMPALA.
Introduction
GOAL 3 commissioned the Rethink Priorities Global Health and Development team to provide an external analysis of the impact and cost-effectiveness of our product ‘IMPALA.’ IMPALA is a [...]
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Outline:
(00:21) TL;DR
(01:42) Introduction
(02:19) Understanding the problem in its context
(04:12) Theory of Change
(05:38) What the RP report tells us
(07:43) Interpretation, strengths and limitations
(09:58) Reasons the estimate may be too low or too high
(11:50) Discussion: What would it take to fund scale-up now? How much more evidence, and of what kind?
(16:22) Next steps
(17:42) I want to read more about IMPALA, where can I do that?
The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

October 7th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fhGryFtF7iDnFEKtr/76x-cash-transfers-too-good-to-be-true-or-a-missed

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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