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Curated and popular this week
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Author’s note: This is an adapted version of my recent talk at EA Global NYC (I’ll add a link when it’s available). The content has been adjusted to reflect things I learned from talking to people after my talk. If you saw the talk, you might still be interested in the “some objections” section at the end.
23 November: edited to make a slight terminological change to one of the approaches (precise probabilities --> precise probabilities to as many things as you can)
Summary
Wild animal welfare faces frequent tractability concerns, amounting to the idea that ecosystems are too complex to intervene in without causing harm. However, I suspect these concerns reflect inconsistent justification standards rather than unique intractability. To explore this idea:
* I provide some context about why people sometimes have tractability concerns about wild animal welfare, providing a concrete example using bird-window collisions.
* I then describe four approaches to handling uncertainty about indirect effects: spotlighting (focusing on target beneficiaries while ignoring broader impacts), ignoring cluelessness (acting on knowable effects only), assigning precise probabilities to all outcomes, and seeking ecologically inert interventions.
* I argue that, when applied consistently across cause areas, none of these approaches suggest wild animal welfare is distinctively intractable compared to global health or AI safety. Rather, the apparent difference most commonly stems from arbitrarily wide "spotlights" applied to wild animal welfare (requiring consideration of millions of species) versus narrow ones for other causes (typically just humans).
While I remain unsure about the right approach to handling indirect effects, I think that this is a problem for all cause areas as soon as you realize wild animals belong in your moral circle, and especially if you take a consequentialist approach to moral analysis. Overall, while I’m sympathetic to worries about unanticipated ecol
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Today we’re announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree
Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help.
Our mission
ClusterFree’s mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research.
Cluster headache (also known as ‘suicide headache’) is considered the most painful condition known to mankind. We believe it is one of the largest sources of preventable extreme suffering in humans today. Every year, about 3 million adults (and an unknown number of minors) suffer from this debilitating condition.
And yet, even in the EU, only 47% of the cluster headache population had unrestricted access to standard treatments (primarily oxygen and triptans) in 2019. Despite affecting a similar number of people as multiple sclerosis, global investment into cluster headache is minuscule.
At the same time, countless patients have reported previously unattainable relief using certain psychedelics, even at low doses. For example, psilocybin, LSD and 5-MeO-DALT can effectively prevent attacks, and N,N-DMT can abort attacks within seconds and also have some preventative effects. However, these life-saving treatments are inaccessible to the vast majority of patients.
We want to tackle these problems by:
* Publishing open letters demanding that governments, regulatory bodies, and medical associations worldwide take action immediately, with a focus on easing restrictions around psychedelic use.
* Providing patient groups with high-quality resources and supporting their advocacy efforts.
* Engaging with policymakers globally to advocate for better access to treatments.
* Publishing research on cluster headache and supporting other researchers in the field.
* Collaborating with entrepreneurs and philanthropists motivated to bring new, effective treatments to market.
About us
ClusterFree is a non-profit initiative incubated by the Qualia Research Insti
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I’ve spoken with hundreds of entomologists at conferences the world over. While there’s clearly some self-selection (not everyone wants to talk to a philosopher), my experience is consistent: most think it’s reasonable to care about the welfare of insects. Entomologists don’t regard it as the last stop on the crazy train; they don’t worry they’re getting mugged; they don’t think the idea is just utilitarianism run amok. Instead, they see some concern for welfare as stemming from a common-sense commitment to being humane in our dealings with animals.
Let’s be clear: they embrace “some concern,” not “bugs have rights.” Entomologists generally believe it’s important to do invasive studies on insects, to manage their populations, to kill them to document their diversity. But given the choice between an aversive and a non-aversive way of euthanizing insects, most prefer the latter. Given the choice between killing fewer insects and more, most prefer fewer. They don’t want to end good lives unnecessarily; they don’t want to cause gratuitous suffering.
It wasn’t always this way. But the science of sentience is evolving; attitudes are evolving too. These people work with insects every day; they constantly face choices about how to catch insects, how to raise them, how to study them, how to end them. Questions about insect monitoring, use, and management are top of mind. Questions about how to treat insects, therefore, are hard to avoid.
So, the welfare of insects is not just—or even primarily—a “weird EA thing.” The people who work with these animals think they’re worth some care. Lots of ordinary people do too. And we, who show our concern for suffering through spreadsheets, are one more voice in that chorus.
Let’s be clear again: nothing follows about cause prioritization from the attitudes of entomologists (or anyone else). I'm not saying: “Entomologists sometimes try to be marginally nicer to their insects; so, all the money should go to bugs.” I do not think that a
Slight update to the odds I’ve been giving to the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) before the end of 2032. I’ve been anchoring the numerical odds of this to the odds of a third-party candidate like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson winning a U.S. presidential election. That’s something I think is significantly more probable than AGI by the end of 2032. Previously, I’d been using 0.1% or 1 in 1,000 as the odds for this, but I was aware that these odds were probably rounded.
I took a bit of time to refine this. I found that in 2016, FiveThirtyEight ... (read more)
The NPR podcast Planet Money just released an episode on GiveWell.
Self-driving cars are not close to getting solved. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Andrej Karpathy, the lead AI researcher responsible for the development of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software from 2017 to 2022. (Karpathy also did two stints as a researcher at OpenAI, taught a deep learning course at Stanford, and coined the term "vibe coding".)
From Karpathy’s October 17, 2025 interview with Dwarkesh Patel:
... (read more)I just want to point out that I have a degree in philosophy and have never heard the word "epistemics" used in the context of academic philosophy. The word used has always been either epistemology or epistemic as adjective in front of a noun (never on its own, always used as an adjective, not a noun, and certainly never pluralized).
From what I can tell, "epistemics" seems to be weird EA Forum/LessWrong jargon. Not sure how or why this came about, since this is not obscure philosophy knowledge, nor is it hard to look up.
If you Google "epistemics" phil... (read more)
I agree this is just a unique rationalist use. Same with 'agentic' though that has possibly crossed over into the more mainstream, at least in tech-y discourse.
However I think this is often fine, especially because 'epistemics' sounds better than 'epistemic practices' and means something distinct from 'epistemology' (the study of knowledge).
Always good to be aware you are using jargon though!
I find "epistemics" neat because it is shorter than "applied epistemology" and reminds me of "athletics" and the resulting (implied) focus on being more focused on practice. I don't think anyone ever explained what "epistemics" refers to, and I thought it was pretty self-explanatory from the similarity to "athletics".
I also disagree about the general notion that jargon specific to a community is necessarily bad, especially if that jargon has fewer syllables. Most subcultures, engineering disciplines, sciences invent words or abbreviations for more efficient communication, and while some of that may be due to trying to gatekeep, it's so universal that I'd be surprised if it doesn't carry value. There can be better and worse coinages of new terms, and three/four/five-letter abbreviations such as "TAI" or "PASTA" or "FLOP" or "ASARA" are worse than words like "epistemics" or "agentic".
I guess ethics makes the distinction between normative ethics and applied ethics. My understanding is that epistemology is not about practical techniques, and that one can make a distinction here (just like the distinction between "methodology" and "methods").
I tried to figure out if there's a pair of su... (read more)
Your help requested:
I’m seeking second opinions on whether my contention in Edit #4 at the bottom of this post is correct or incorrect. See the edit at the bottom of the post for full details.
Brief info:
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... (read more)My contention is about the Forecasting Research Institute’s recent LEAP survey.
One of the headline results from the survey is about the probabilities the respondents assign to each of three scenarios.
However, the question uses an indirect framing — an intersubjective resolution or metaprediction framing.
The specific phrasing of the question is q
If the people arguing that there is an AI bubble turn out to be correct and the bubble pops, to what extent would that change people's minds about near-term AGI?
I strongly suspect there is an AI bubble because the financial expectations around AI seem to be based on AI significantly enhancing productivity and the evidence seems to show it doesn't do that yet. This could change — and I think that's what a lot of people in the business world are thinking and hoping. But my view is a) LLMs have fundamental weaknesses that make this unlikely and b) scaling is running out of steam.
Scaling running out of steam actually means three things:
1) Each new 10x increase in compute is less practically or qualitatively valuable than previous 10x increases in compute.
2) Each new 10x increase in compute is getting harder to pull off because the amount of money involved is getting unwieldy.
3) There is an absolute ceiling to the amount of data LLMs can train on that they are probably approaching.
So, AI investment is dependent on financial expectations that are depending on LLMs enhancing productivity, which isn't happening and probably won't happen due to fundamental problems with LLMs and due t... (read more)
People in effective altruism or adjacent to it should make some public predictions or forecasts about whether AI is in a bubble.
Since the timeline of any bubble is extremely hard to predict and isn’t the core issue, the time horizon for the bubble prediction could be quite long, say, 5 years. The point would not be to worry about the exact timeline but to get at the question of whether there is a bubble that will pop (say, before January 1, 2031).
For those who know more about forecasting than me, and especially for those who can think of good w... (read more)
Here are my rules of thumb for improving communication on the EA Forum and in similar spaces online:
- Say what you mean, as plainly as possible.
- Try to use words and expressions that a general audience would understand.
- Be more casual and less formal if you think that means more people are more likely to understand what you're trying to say.
- To illustrate abstract concepts, give examples.
- Where possible, try to let go of minor details that aren't important to the main point someone is trying to make. Everyone slightly misspeaks (or mis... writes?) all the time. Attempts to correct minor details often turn into time-consuming debates that ultimately have little importance. If you really want to correct a minor detail, do so politely, and acknowledge that you're engaging in nitpicking.
- When you don't understand what someone is trying to say, just say that. (And be polite.)
- Don't engage in passive-aggressiveness or code insults in jargon or formal language. If someone's behaviour is annoying you, tell them it's annoying you. (If you don't want to do that, then you probably shouldn't try to communicate the same idea in a coded or passive-aggressive way, either.)
- If you're using an uncommon word
... (read more)I used to feel so strongly about effective altruism. But my heart isn't in it anymore.
I still care about the same old stuff I used to care about, like donating what I can to important charities and trying to pick the charities that are the most cost-effective. Or caring about animals and trying to figure out how to do right by them, even though I haven't been able to sustain a vegan diet for more than a short time. And so on.
But there isn't a community or a movement anymore where I want to talk about these sorts of things with people. That community and movement existed, at least in my local area and at least to a limited extent in some online spaces, from about 2015 to 2017 or 2018.
These are the reasons for my feelings about the effective altruist community/movement, especially over the last one or two years:
-The AGI thing has gotten completely out of hand. I wrote a brief post here about why I strongly disagree with near-term AGI predictions. I wrote a long comment here about how AGI's takeover of effective altruism has left me disappointed, disturbed, and alienated. 80,000 Hours and Will MacAskill have both pivoted to focusing exclusively or almost exclusively on AGI. AGI talk h... (read more)
I'd distinguish here between the community and actual EA work. The community, and especially its leaders, have undoubtedly gotten more AI-focused (and/or publicly admittted to a degree of focus on AI they've always had) and rationalist-ish. But in terms of actual altruistic activity, I am very uncertain whether there is less money being spent by EAs on animal welfare or global health and development in 2025 than there was in 2015 or 2018. (I looked on Open Phil's website and so far this year it seems well down from 2018 but also well up from 2015, but also 2 months isn't much of a sample.) Not that that means your not allowed to feel sad about the loss of community, but I am not sure we are actually doing less good in these areas than we used to.
My memory is a large number of people to the NL controversy seriously, and the original threads on it were long and full of hostile comments to NL, and only after someone posted a long piece in defence of NL did some sympathy shift back to them. But even then there are like 90-something to 30-something agree votes and 200 karma on Yarrow's comment saying NL still seem bad: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H4DYehKLxZ5NpQdBC/nonlinear-s-evidence-debunking-false-and-misleading-claims?commentId=7YxPKCW3nCwWn2swb
I don't think people dropped the ball here really, people were struggling honestly to take accusations of bad behaviour seriously without getting into witch hunt dynamics.
What AI model does SummaryBot use? And does whoever runs SummaryBot use any special tricks on top of that model? It could just be bias, but SummaryBot seems better at summarizing stuff then GPT-5 Thinking, o3, or Gemini 2.5 Pro, so I'm wondering if it's a different model or maybe just good prompting or something else.
@Toby Tremlett🔹, are you SummaryBot's keeper? Or did you just manage its evil twin?
Since my days of reading William Easterly's Aid Watch blog back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I've always thought it was a matter of both justice and efficacy to have people from globally poor countries in leadership positions at organizations working on global poverty. All else being equal, a person from Kenya is going to be far more effective at doing anti-poverty work in Kenya than someone from Canada with an equal level of education, an equal ability to network with the right international organizations, etc.
In practice, this is probably hard to do, since it requires crossing language barriers, cultural barriers, geographical distance, and international borders. But I think it's worth it.
So much of what effective altruism does, including around global poverty, including around the most evidence-based and quantitative work on global poverty, relies on people's intuitions, and people's intuitions formed from living in wealthy, Western countries with no connection to or experience of a globally poor country are going to be less accurate than people who have lived in poor countries and know a lot about them.
Simply put, first-hand experience of poor countries is a form of expertise and organizations run by people with that expertise are probably going to be a lot more competent at helping globally poor people than ones that aren't.
I agree with most of you say here, indeed all things being equal a person from Kenya is going to be far more effective at doing anti-poverty work in Kenya than someone from anywhere else. The problem is your caveats - things are almost never equal...
1) Education systems just aren't nearly as good in lower income countries. This means that that education is sadly barely ever equal. Even between low income countries - a Kenyan once joked with me that "a Ugandan degree holder is like a Kenyan high school leaver". If you look at the top echelon of NGO/Charity leaders from low-income who's charities have grown and scaled big, most have been at least partially educated in richer countries
2) Ability to network is sadly usually so so much higher if you're from a higher income country. Social capital is real and insanely important. If you look at the very biggest NGOs, most of them are founded not just by Westerners, but by IVY LEAGUE OR OXBRIDGE EDUCATED WESTERNERS. Paul Farmer (Partners in Health) from Harvard, Raj Panjabi (LastMile Health) from Harvard. Paul Niehaus (GiveDirectly) from Harvard. Rob Mathers (AMF) Harvard AND Cambridge. With those connections you ca... (read more)
There are two philosophies on what the key to life is.
The first philosophy is that the key to life is separate yourself from the wretched masses of humanity by finding a special group of people that is above it all and becoming part of that group.
The second philosophy is that the key to life is to see the universal in your individual experience. And this means you are always stretching yourself to include more people, find connection with more people, show compassion and empathy to more people. But this is constantly uncomfortable because, again and again,... (read more)
[Personal blog] I’m taking a long-term, indefinite hiatus from the EA Forum.
I’ve written enough in posts, quick takes, and comments over the last two months to explain the deep frustrations I have with the effective altruist movement/community as it exists today. (For one, I think the AGI discourse is completely broken and far off-base. For another, I think people fail to be kind to others in ordinary, important ways.)
But the strongest reason for me to step away is that participating in the EA Forum is just too unpleasant. I’ve had fun writing stuff on the... (read more)
Here is the situation we're in with regard to near-term prospects for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is why I'm extremely skeptical of predictions that we'll see AGI within 5 years.
-Current large language models (LLMs) have extremely limited capabilities. For example, they can't score above 5% on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, they can't automate any significant amount of human labour,[1] and they can only augment human productivity in minor ways in limited contexts.[2] They make ridiculous mistakes all the time, like saying somethin... (read more)
Have Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead, or Holden Karnofsky responded to the reporting by Time that they were warned about Sam Bankman-Fried's behaviour years before the FTX collapse?
Will responded here.
Yann LeCun (a Turing Award-winning pioneer of deep learning) leaving Meta AI — and probably, I would surmise, being nudged out by Mark Zuckerberg (or another senior Meta executive) — is a microcosm for everything wrong with AI research today.
LeCun is the rare researcher working on fundamental new ideas to push AI forward on a paradigm level. Zuckerberg et al. seem to be abandoning that kind of work to focus on a mad dash to AGI via LLMs, on the view that enough scaling and enough incremental engineering and R&D will push current LLMs all the way ... (read more)
Just calling yourself rational doesn't make you more rational. In fact, hyping yourself up about how you and your in-group are more rational than other people is a recipe for being overconfidently wrong.
Getting ideas right takes humility and curiosity about what other people think. Some people pay lip service to the idea of being open to changing their mind, but then, in practice, it feels like they would rather die than admit they were wrong.
This is tied to the idea of humiliation. If disagreement is a humiliation contest, changing one's mind can fe... (read more)