Forum Empirical data on value drift

Published on October 1, 2026 1:59 PM GMT If you're an EA org or a "rationalist" you may very likely maintain an (anonymous) suggestion box. So does The Unjournal . Are people using it? I guess not, or at best minimally. (Aside: please do give us feedback.) Why not : Writing up useful criticism takes time. Making it anonymous can help make it less awkward or risky, but it's still not rewarded (and precludes the possibility for reputational benefit). One could offer rewards for this feedback, but the promise may not be credible. It's a lot of work and bandwidth to follow up. And it's not easy to have org A compensate "anonymous person B" without giving up the anonymity. There's also the time-inconsistency of informatino disclosure problem: once you has a good idea in hand, you might want to cheap out and not pay. . I had this general idea for decades, but now maybe we can actually try it. My proposal (I've been calling these suggestions "complainments"): ... somethinglike The org, individual, or business commits a monthly or yearly reward pool in advance, to be paid under published rules. Contributors submit through an independent administrator, which keeps their identity from the orgs but still they can be contacted. The administrator (org) assesses usefulness and implementation, or requires the organization to report on and score each suggestion. Rewards come out of the pool, and payouts are reported. Money set aside in advance: harder to be stingy later. The administrator's

Published on October 1, 2026 1:43 PM GMT Welcome! Use this thread to introduce yourself or ask questions about EA, or the EA Forum. Get started on the EA Forum The " Guide to norms on the Forum " shares more about the kind of discussions we'd like to see on the Forum, and when the moderation team intervenes. For resources that can help you learn about effective altruism , check this list of links . 1. Introduce yourself If you'd like, share how you became interested in effective altruism, what causes you work on and prioritize , and other fun facts about yourself, in the comments below (For inspiration, you can see the last open thread here) . You can also add this information to your Forum bio to help other Forum users get to know you. 2. Ask questions (and answer others' questions) If anything about the Forum, or effective altruism in general, confuses you, ask your questions in the comments below, or message me . You can also answer other people's questions or discuss the answers. (You might be interested in sharing your question as its own post , if it's on a more complicated or substantial topic.) Resources like the EA Handbook and the Topics wiki might be helpful for exploring topics related to effective altruism — see more here . 3. Explore and join the conversation You can check the resources below, start browsing posts on the Frontpage , or explore the " Best of the EA Forum ." You can also start writing! For exploratory or quick thoughts, consider sharing a " Quick

Published on October 1, 2026 1:29 PM GMT This summer, FLF ran a contest which asked entrants to help us “find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases”. We awarded just over $200k in prizes [1] and we are continuing to invest in this area (you can subscribe for updates ). Why we ran this contest As we wrote in the announcement, The heights of human epistemic investigation are impressive and valuable, but rare and difficult to reach… The limiting factor is rarely exquisite insight (though this helps!), and more often diligence, a curious and open mindset, and the time and effort needed to do the thorough work investigating background on a topic: activities AI is well placed to assist with. It’s still, in 2026, disappointingly difficult to track the sources and justifications for what you’re seeing, in order to check those — or similarly to see who else has checked, and corroborated (or argued against). It needn’t be so difficult! AI chatbots and agents are improving, and more people (independently of our contest) are discovering ways to use them to assist with learning and research. In some ways this is encouraging. But these same tools can still tend to overly flatter the user’s perspective , get overly fixated on particular lines of inquiry, summarise misleadingly or confabulate/hallucinate, fail to locate relevant content… Perhaps most importantly, few tools or systems are yet conducive

Published on October 1, 2026 10:52 AM GMT Summary Over the course of a year, the Fieldshaper program develops you into a field-leading grantmaker. You’ll steward $1,000,000 in grant capital, receive a $125,000 annual stipend, and deploy that capital within a sub-field of one of three key areas (farmed animals, global health, or philanthropic infrastructure); building the track record to become a grantmaker who can shape a field. Role Details Title: Grantmaker-In-Residence (Leader of the X fund or Grantmaker in Y area also possible options) Location: Hybrid: Remote with four mandatory in-person weeks (London; New York; San Francisco; a cause-track conference (London, Oxford or Mexico depending on cause area). Compensation: A living stipend of ~$125,000 for the year Duration: 12 months, full-time, February 2027 – January 2028 Focus areas: Farmed animal welfare, Philanthropic infrastructure, Global health, Global aid policy Goal: To create the next generation of fieldshapers and active grantmakers How to Apply: Visit elevatephilanthropy.com/fieldshaperprogram (Deadline: October 30) Program The Elevate Philanthropy fieldshaper program is a one-year training program that turns generalist, high-agency professionals into active grantmakers and general managers of problems. After 6 weeks of intensive training, each resident will deploy $1,000,000 of grant capital across the rest of the year, similar to a program officer role at a foundation or the leader of a philanthropic fund. The

Published on October 1, 2026 9:29 AM GMT TL;DR: Job searching in the EA movement is harder and longer than most people expect, even if you're experienced. In 2021, it took me five months, about 10 applications, and one offer. This post combines my best job search tips from that period, updated for today. The tips still hold, but I'd now weight them differently: most of my time on putting myself in a position where jobs come to me, and a smaller share on fewer, better applications. These 20 tips are the full toolkit, from the long game to the nuts and bolts of applying. Back in 2021, while transitioning between roles in the animal advocacy movement, I wrote several posts about job searching on the EA Forum. They became some of my most-read pieces, but parts of them are now outdated, so I’ve combined the tips that still hold into this one post. I now lead Hive , a global community for people working to end factory farming, and since 2021 I’ve been on the employer side of hiring, having had hundreds of conversations with job seekers. The biggest change is the ratio. Back then I put applications at the centre of my search and treated everything else as extras. Today I would spend most of my time on the things that make opportunities come to me: relationships, visibility, volunteering, showing my work , and being in the right place at the right time . I’m writing a follow-up on exactly how I’d sequence all of this, for both early-career and senior advocates. I learned how long a s

Published on September 30, 2026 8:55 PM GMT New account here, created by an irate outsider to EA. I started typing this as a response to a comment by Austin, in the discussion of his recent shocking announcement that his organization Manifund has hired Caroline Ellison. My reply to him ballooned to a size that merits its own post. Please bear with me as I attempt to somewhat match this forum’s style. I will be consolidating some of the points that I and others have made less charitably on X and other sites. -- General context: Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, was one of the convicted perpetrators of the FTX cryptocurrency fraud, along with her boss Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and two complicit software engineers. Together, these four EAs stole billions of dollars from FTX’s customers. Austin Chen co-founded the Manifold prediction market, which received money from FTX, and he subsequently moved on to create a non-profit called Manifund (formally, Manifold For Charity ), where Caroline Ellison now works for him. -- Austin, I'm going to respond to this bluntly, even though I believe you meant well. This action creates an unacceptable flow of funds and benefits, starting with the FTX victims and ending with one of the people who defrauded them. Nothing that follows is directed personally against Caroline Ellison, whom I happen to have known many years ago and don't resent. She did her time. Her contrition seemed to be on the genuine side. She is smarter and more

Published on September 30, 2026 8:05 PM GMT I want to start a mail or petition campaign on AI governance in the EU. Below is a draft letter, addressed to members of the EU parliament. Comments/feedback welcome. If you believe it is a good proposal, and you live in the EU, feel free to send the letter to your representatives. Subject: Strategic proposal: steering European AI compute policy toward safe paradigms and avoiding a frontier arms race Dear Member of the European Parliament, I am writing to urge the European Union to adopt a forward-looking, safety-first strategy regarding public compute investments and data center infrastructure. To prevent risks associated with AI misuse and misalignment, and to avoid fueling a destructive global frontier arms race, Europe should strictly condition infrastructure funding and data center deployment on safer-by-design architectures , rather than scaling up training for frontier models using the current dominant paradigm. 1. The growing risks of the dominant paradigm The prevailing frontier-AI paradigm, based predominantly on large autoregressive models combined with increasingly sophisticated post-training (reinforcement learning), reasoning and agentic scaffolding (autonomous planning and tool use), presents fundamental security and alignment vulnerabilities. As these agentic models gain real-world tool access, their failure modes become increasingly dangerous: Misuse & exploitation. Recent incidents and controlled evaluations demons

Published on September 30, 2026 7:12 PM GMT Forecasters expect the money to reach charities much slower than the headlines suggest. Here's the map behind the number, and how you can build your own on Radiant, Metaculus’ visual mapping tool. The Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are likely to create thousands of newly liquid millionaires, and a lot of them plan to give. How much of this expected giving will actually reach the philanthropic ecosystem, and are those organizations prepared to absorb it? Colloquially, this has come to be known as the AI IPO windfall , and if some of the current predictions come to pass, it could change the shape of philanthropy for years to come. Forecasting the AI IPO windfall Our forecasts currently show over $100B total pledged . But, as our forecasters have noted, this likely won’t translate into immediate actual money in the bank . They expect only about $25.7B total will actually land in charities within 4 years of shareholders being able to sell after the lockup period ends. Projected figures for windfall are high but vary widely. Nan Ransohoff says people can expect $37B or more per year from this “third wave” of American philanthropy; George Weiner projects $12-32B will go into donor-advised funds (DAFs) and trickle out through grants; Giving What We Can expects about $ 15B in donations a year; and Celia Ford claims the 7 Anthropic co-founders alone could contribute $37.9B . Our forecast, including assumptions, probability distributions, and how

Published on September 30, 2026 7:02 PM GMT If you share farmed animal content online, a new study from Faunalytics has practical takeaways for you. The researchers found that positive content like sanctuary and recipe videos may be a lower-risk way to engage people who already care, while confrontational content can push some allies away. Read the Study Here Background The animal advocacy landscape has gone digital over the last couple of decades with the rise of social media: 84% of adults in the U.S. use YouTube, 71% use Facebook, and 50% use Instagram. Platforms like TikTok, WhatsApp, and Reddit have continued to grow , with TikTok nearly doubling its adult user base since 2021. The way people consume content on these platforms has also shifted. Specifically, short-form videos, or “reels,” have become one of the dominant formats on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, making them an increasingly common vehicle for animal advocacy. There is growing evidence that digital campaigns may be effective at reducing animal product consumption. For example, one cost-effectiveness analysis estimated that digital meat-reduction ads have a 45% likelihood of sparing roughly 3.7 animals per dollar spent . However, significant uncertainty remains, and the same analysis noted that these campaigns have a 40% likelihood of not working (i.e., not reducing the demand for animal products). This underscores the need for rigorous experimental research to better understand what digital

Published on September 30, 2026 6:58 PM GMT Our forecasts currently show over $100B total pledged . But, as our forecasters have noted, this likely won’t translate into immediate actual money in the bank . They expect only about $25.7B total will actually land in charities within 4 years of shareholders being able to sell after the lockup period ends. Projected figures for windfall are high but vary widely. Nan Ransohoff says people can expect $37B or more per year from this “third wave” of American philanthropy; George Weiner projects $12-32B will go into donor-advised funds (DAFs) and trickle out through grants; Giving What We Can expects about $ 15B in donations a year; and Celia Ford claims the 7 Anthropic co-founders alone could contribute $37.9B . Our forecast, including assumptions, probability distributions, and how everything connects, lives in The IPO Windfall map on Radiant , our visual mapping platform for collaborative scenario modeling. Prior art: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sQH5oWAcongoEEF2P/make-your-own-model-of-the-ai-windfall Discuss

Published on September 30, 2026 5:34 PM GMT Newly launched Beyond Cage-Free Open Letter offers suggestions on how to solve the animal and climate emergencies. Today, more than ever, nonprofits and funders need to pivot to a holistic systems approach focusing on plant-based food transformation as the main priority because it has a needed multiplier effect that can solve the animal and climate emergencies. Plant-based food system change offers a win-win pathway to help simultaneously address animal exploitation and suffering, climate change, freshwater and land use, biodiversity, food security, and reduced pandemic risk. We live in a time of deepening animal and climate emergencies. These are not just words but very real existential risks. The United Nations Environment Program’s Limiting Overshoot - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return report, released on September 2, 2026, states that we are inevitably going to crash through the 1.5 limit within the next three to five years. This will result in more extreme weather events and increased suffering for animals and people. Droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves, and elongated disease vectors in a warming world are already devastating animals and humans, and it will get much worse. UNEP’s cover shows a collective attempt at holding back the catastrophic global warming and negative tipping points we are heading towards. We can turn the Titanic around by shifting to renewable energy and a plant-based food syst

Published on September 30, 2026 4:01 PM GMT Want to start a conversation about HuggingFace with your mom but she's inexplicably bouncing off the METR report? Try this explainer I wrote in the style of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad. Art by the wonderful HungerArtist Updates available on Substack , Twitter , Facebook , and Instagram . Discuss