Wild animal welfare is the welfare of non-human animals under natural conditions, and the study of interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals. Wild animals outnumber animals in factory farms by several orders of magnitude.[1] Despite this, the welfare of animals in the wild has received very limited attention. A comprehensive online bibliography in this area lists about fifty publications, most of which are published online or in relatively unknown journals.[2] Wild animal ...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström on 10 March 1973) is a Swedish philosopher. He is a professor at the University of Oxford, the founder and former director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and the author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Further reading Khatchadourian, Raffi (2015) The doomsday invention: will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?, The New Yorker, November 16. External links Nick Bostrom. Official website. Radio Bostrom. Audio narrati...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
The neglectedness of a problem (also called its uncrowdedness) is the amount of resources currently allocated to solving it. Neglectedness is one of the three factors in the ITN framework. Further reading Christiano, Paul (2014) Neglectedness and impact, 80,000 Hours, January 14. Oesterheld, Caspar (2020) Complications in evaluating neglectedness, The Universe From an Intentional Stance, June 25. A blog post noting a number of issues that make the estimation of neglectedness more complicated ...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Moral patienthood is the condition of deserving moral consideration. A moral patient is an entity that possesses moral patienthood. While it is normally agreed that typical humans are moral patients, there is debate about the patienthood of many other types of beings, including human embryos, non-human animals, future people, and digital sentients. Moral patienthood should not be confused with moral agency.[1] For example, we might think that a baby lacks moral agency - it lacks the ability ...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.[1][2] Longtermism may be seen as following from the conjunction of three core claims:[3] 1. Future people matter morally. 2. If Earth-originating intelligence is not prematurely extinguished, the vast majority of people that will ever exist will exist in the future. 3. People alive today can predictably influence whether these people exist and how well their lives go. Types of l...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
The long-term future focuses on possible ways in which the future of humanity may unfold over long timescales. Bostrom's typology of possible scenarios Nick Bostrom has identified four broad possibilities for the future of humanity.[1] First, humans may go prematurely extinct. Since the universe will eventually become inhospitable, extinction is inevitable in the very long run. However, it is also plausible that people will die out far before this deadline. Second, human civilization may plat...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
The logic of the larder is an objection to the argument that people concerned with farmed animal welfare should abstain from consuming products derived from animals raised in factory farms. The objection is that reducing demand for meat, eggs or milk causes fewer animals to come into existence, and thus reduces net animal welfare. A number of responses have been given to this objection. First, many of the animals raised in factory farms have net negative welfare. Causing fewer of these animal...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Over 60 billion land-dwelling animals are killed each year. The overwhelming majority of these animals are raised in factory farms, where conditions can involve "intense confinement, inhibition of natural behaviors, untreated health issues, and numerous other causes of suffering".[1] It’s difficult to measure and quantify the welfare of farmed animals, but some have suggested that the lives of many farmed animals are net-negative - that is, their negative experiences outweigh their positiv...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
This is a transcript of a conversation between Paul Christiano and Eliezer Yudkowsky, with comments by Rohin Shah, Beth Barnes, Richard Ngo, and Hold…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
The EA Forum hosts research, discussion, and updates on the world's most pressing problems. Including global health and development, animal welfare, AI safety, and biosecurity.| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Published on August 25, 2025 5:21 AM GMT Compute. Algorithms. Data. AI systems learn their values and behavior through vast datasets labeled by human annotators. These workers decide what counts as harmful, credible, or biased, often under strict guidelines but still with discretion that shapes outcomes. The annotator workforce numbers in the millions globally, employed through platforms like Mechanical Turk, Appen, Scale AI, and DataAnnotation.tech. Despite their pivotal role, most annotator...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 24, 2025 7:39 PM GMT My chapter "Artificial Intelligence Safety as an Emerging Paradigm" has just been published in the new edited volume: Ethics in Artificial Intelligence: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Steven S. Gouveia. In the chapter, I frame and examine AI safety in terms of Kuhn's paradigms: I argue that the nature of the alignment problem is such that it calls for its own paradigm as the research necessary to solve it goes beyond the typical desiderata i...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 24, 2025 10:37 AM GMT Animal welfare is often (if not always) concerned with reducing suffering. Do humans sincerely value adding more years of positive well-being to animal lives? Discuss| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 24, 2025 10:32 AM GMT Hi all, We’re excited to share that our panel, “How to NOT Ruin the World with Your Good Intentions,” has been accepted into the community voting round for SXSW 2026. With your support, we can bring impactful ideas onto one of the world’s largest stages for innovation and culture. Why this matters Far too often, well-intentioned projects, policies, and even careers backfire—causing more harm than good. At Consultants for Impact, we work ...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 24, 2025 9:50 AM GMT TL;DR: I'm trying to get across an emotionally useful framework for thinking about emotionally useful frameworks (optimisms), "the bar of success" and personal responsibility. Every agent faces a fundamental problem: When to stop thinking and start acting? (exploring/exploiting) Humans have solved this by becoming satisficers. Instead of figuring out the optimal action at every point in time, we merely act in a way that feels "good enough". From the pe...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 24, 2025 3:33 AM GMT Achieving moral excellence is achieving moral autonomy, stages 5 and 6 on Kohlberg's scale. Greco-Roman Stoicism, greatly influenced by the West's discovery of Buddhism, preached moral excellence and, therefore, autonomy. This meant that those seeking such excellence no longer depended on conventions or legal codifications that, as casuistry, designated good and evil. The moral man—Stoicism was strongly masculine—assumes the revelation of s...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 23, 2025 2:18 PM GMT Here are the most common mistakes I see when I’m providing coaching to AI safety founders: Premature exploitation on charity ideas Doing it yourself instead of hiring or outsourcing Not learning enough (focus more on business skills) Not taking into account personal fit Spend more time generating and comparing ideas I’ve had this conversation a million times: Them: What do you think of my idea? Me: Ideas aren’t good or bad. They are good or ba...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 23, 2025 1:45 PM GMT cross-posted from my blog Introduction We live in an era of unprecedented passport checks, visa quotas, and detention centers, a world that regulates human movement more tightly than at any other point in history. Some scholars and activists think we’ve gone too far; they think that this hyper-restriction is neither just, nor economically rational. One of these groups is Effective Altruism (EA), a social movement that aims to identify which intervent...| Effective Altruism Forum
Published on August 23, 2025 3:22 AM GMT Key researchers at Anthropic took some counterproductive actions.[1] I hoped someone else would write a comprehensive post about this. I’m not a Bay Area insider, and did not track Anthropic closely. But I keep seeing people discuss incidents in side-conversations. The community needs an overview of what their researchers did over time since starting to collaborate at OpenAI. Especially given that the focus of their work shifted after people linked ...| Effective Altruism Forum
When H.R.1 (the "Big Beautiful Bill") passed in the U.S. on July 4th, I wondered what it meant for farmed animals. So, I decided to use AI to do a qu…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
It’s deadline time. Over the last decade, many of the world’s largest food companies — from McDonald’s to Walmart — pledged to stop sourcing eggs fro…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
A crucial consideration is a consideration that warrants a major reassessment of a cause or intervention. The concept was introduced by Nick Bostrom in a 2007 article[1] and applied in subsequent publications.[2][3] Related concepts Besides introducing the concept of a crucial consideration, Bostrom introduced two other related concepts. First, a crucial consideration component, or a consideration that is not itself a crucial consideration, but has the potential to become one when conjoined ...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
(I am writing this post under a pseudonym because I don’t want potential future non-EA employers to find this with a quick google search. Initially m…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Work on global health and development can involve improving public health, reducing poverty, or increasing economic growth, especially in low-income countries, where these issues tend to be most pressing. In 2013, roughly 767 million people lived on less than the equivalent of $1.90 per day, adjusted for purchasing power.[1] Lack of economic resources directly affects many aspects of people’s lives, including access to education and healthcare. Poverty and poor health also seriously hinder...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
What is the definition of Effective Altruism? What claims does it make? What do you have to believe or do, to be an Effective Altruist? …| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Hello AstralCodexTen readers! You might also enjoy this series on estimating value, or my forecasting newsletter. And for the estimation language u…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Summary • As part of a Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) grant, I have updated the cost effectiveness of preparing for agricultural catastrophes su…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
This is a linkpost to a notebook I've written which uses Squiggle to quantify uncertainty in GiveWell's estimate of cost per death averted by the Aga…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Summary * The most popular career paths that effective altruists in the survey (EAs) plan to follow are in earning to give roles (38%) and working a…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Summary I have consolidated publicly available grants data from EA organizations into a spreadsheet, which I intend to update periodically[1]. Totals…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
In my cost-effectiveness estimate of corporate campaigns, I wrote a list of all the ways in which my estimate could be misleading. I thought it could…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Paul Christiano, a researcher at OpenAI, discusses the current state of research on aligning AI with human values: what’s happening now, what needs t…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Summary Currently, we can’t compare the impact of speculative interventions in a principled way. When making a decision about where to work or donate…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
➡️ Effective altruism is a joint effort. Our goal is to make the EA Forum a great space for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good w…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Effective altruism (EA) is an ongoing project to find the best ways to do good, and put them into practice. This series of articles will introduce you to some of the core thinking tools behind effective altruism, share some of the arguments about which global problems are most pressing, and help you to reflect on how you personally can contribute.| forum.effectivealtruism.org
EA Survey 2020: Community Demographics • Summary * We collected 2,166 valid responses from EAs in the survey * The composition of the EA community…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
A certificate of impact (also known as an impact certificate) is a kind of altruistic instrument at the center of a funding model proposed by Paul Christiano. Certificates of impact attempt to harness the benefits of the price system in altruistic contexts, where prices are usually unavailable. In this model, altruistic work receives some or all of its funding after completion rather than beforehand. Once an individual or organization completes work with a positive social impact, they can app...| forum.effectivealtruism.org
Summary • Background The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund publicly launched in late February. We're a philanthropic fund that makes grants and investmen…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
I sent a two-question survey to ~117 people working on long-term AI risk, asking about the level of existential risk from "humanity not doing enough…| forum.effectivealtruism.org
