EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

The EATS act—now called the save our bacon act—would make it illegal for states to pass animal welfare laws that apply to products produced out of state. This would gut most state level animal protection. It would be the worst law for animal welfare ever passed, and would consign hundreds of millions of animals to a life in a cage. Terrifyingly, it has been added to the recent farm bill (though fortunately, even if it passes, egg laying hens will be spared). It will be voted on in the next few days, so this is EXTREMELY TIME SENSITIVE!
There is an amendment to the farm bill that representatives could vote for called the Luna amendment which would remove the EATS act from the farm bill. This would save countless animals from extreme suffering and prevent the dissolution of most animal protection laws. It would be a catastrophe for animal welfare of historic proportions.
Fortunately, there is something you can do about it. See this document for a lot more detail, including fairly easy steps like emailing your representative. Please, please, do some of these things. This is truly a pivotal moment for animals, and how we act today might [...]
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First published:

April 28th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GLixYBHyaLHsnAoDG/time-sensitive-urgent-animal-welfare-action

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Summary
EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off.
My Experience with Forecasting
For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, despite quitting, I’m still #8 on the platform. Additionally, I have done well on real-money prediction markets (Polymarket), earning mid-5 figures and winning a few AI bets. I say this to suggest that I would gain status from forecasting being seen as useful, but I think, to the contrary, that the EA community should stop funding it.
I’ve written a few comments throughout the years that I didn’t think forecasting was worth funding. You can see some of these here and here. Finally, I have gotten around to making this full post.
Solution Seeking a Problem
When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems. You solve problems by starting with [...]
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First published:

April 25th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zmbfZjK54xF4oGjSB/forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop-funding-it

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series!
On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me.
At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the definition made itself known: “yeah, it's just a bunch of wankers who pretend to have social impact, but all they do is go to conferences and raise money and they’ve never had any impact at all.”
I have never had any chill. I did not develop it in that moment. If anyone is going to say EA is just a bunch of wankers, it's going to be me, newbie.
“That's interesting, Ben, but I think it's a serious misconception — you might not be aware that EA has literally raised billions of dollars for global health charities, which very likely saved hundreds of thousands of children's lives (do you hate children, Ben?) They have literally stopped millions of hens being tortured in cages too small for them [...]
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First published:

April 17th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sA5iFynuMJQAuJ6ku/my-lover-effective-altruism

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas is wild animal welfare (WAW), where uncertainty about tractability makes identifying cost-effective interventions particularly challenging. While much of the current WAW work rightly focuses on academic field-building (see Elmore & McAuliffe, 2024), it is worth determining whether there are viable, near-term interventions that are already available or close to implementation.
With this goal in mind, we have developed the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database (WAWID). This project evaluates an array of interventions that may be promising for improving WAW in the (relatively) near term, evaluating them relative to criteria of interest to funders, advocates, researchers, and potential implementers across the WAW space.
The WAWID is available here:
Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database The landing page includes a full list of the interventions and evaluation criteria. This report explains how we developed the WAWID, what we think you can learn from it, and suggest some future directions for this work (conditional on funding). A future report will provide some descriptive statistics.
How we developed the WAWID
We launched this project in [...]
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Outline:
(01:34) How we developed the WAWID
(08:14) Initial observations
(13:13) Limitations
(15:20) Future Directions
(16:48) Acknowledgements
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First published:

March 25th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pEbiEmeu2agEHJgyu/a-database-of-near-term-interventions-for-wild-animals

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments.
Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild.
The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism) In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent events due to my actions.
My exposure to EA at that time was mostly through people who took high-paying careers in order to “earn to give” to global health charities, which I had written about in the Washington Post. I also knew the movement cared a lot about animal welfare. I was aware that there were people worried about catastrophic risks, and specifically about AI; this had come up in a profile I wrote of Open Philanthropy (my now-employer, albeit under a new name these days). But I still broadly thought of EA as the bednets and cage-free commitments people.
I was really taken aback by how dominant discussions of AI risk were at the event. The marquee panel featured Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, future If Anyone Builds It [...]
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Outline:
(03:31) What should I learn from bungling this?
(06:43) Listen to the people saying stuff will get weird
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First published:

April 16th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9FPxMET3W4wewwSyf/the-ai-people-have-been-right-a-lot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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