Hi all,

We think the AI expertise and capital from Big Tech could help move alternative protein research forward. We'd like to see how much support there is within Big Tech companies (and even high wealth startups).

I recently posted in r/accelerate asking whether accelerating intelligence is inherently good or whether its value ultimately depends on what it accomplishes for humanity. I was unexpectedly banned, but the discussion was revealing. The most compelling response I received was that we're all dying, and that delaying ASI could mean millions of us never living long enough to benefit from longevity escape velocity (LEV). I think this is probably the strongest argument for Kurzweilian accelerationism. Every year we delay potentially costs lives, and even ASI might need considerable time to solve aging. I came away thinking that much of the philosophical disagreement between e/acc and EA is secondary to this much more urgent question.

It seems to me that the strongest challenge to this position would be to establish P(LEV | ASI) < P(LEV | advanced narrow AI focused on biotechnology), accounting for the probability of actually surviving to benefit from LEV. We don't necessarily need superintelligence to make extraordinary advances in biology, and even ASI cannot bypass the physical time required for experimentation, clinical trials, and medical deployment. Meanwhile, racing toward ASI introduces risks that more specialized AI systems might avoid. Of course, ASI could also accelerate biomedical research far beyond what narrow systems can accomplish, so the comparison is far from settled. But if the ultimate objective is to save as many people as possible from aging and death, shouldn't we be comparing these two pathways directly? What are the strongest empirical and technical arguments that pursuing advanced biotech AI without racing toward ASI gives us a better chance of reaching LEV in time? I'd especially appreciate arguments that take the urgency of mortality seriously rather than assuming we can simply afford to wait.

Together with Skyler, who also organizes the ACX meetups, I just published a guide to playing Fermi Poker and hosting your own tournament.

Below I want to briefly expand a bit on why I believe hosting Fermi Poker tournaments could be a particularly good fit for EA groups:

1. Fermi Poker sounds interesting to a lot of people who'd never show up to a regular EA meeting, and in my experience it really makes for quite a fun evening. With a small prize pool, it can attract even more people, and the questions can be EA-flavored. "How many chickens were slaughtered for meat worldwide in 2024?" is a great example question which is also fun to estimate by breaking it down: How often does the average person eat chicken? How many people are vegetarian? How does consumption vary by country/continent? How big is a portion? How much meat does one chicken yield? It's also a question people get wildly wrong. In the Wordle-style Fermi estimation game I previously built, the median first guess for this question was 10 billion. I suspect that's because many people find it hard to imagine that the number of chickens slaughtered each year could be several times larger than the entire human population. The real answer is about 78 billion.

2. The game involves Fermi estimation, calibration, Bayesian updating, world-modeling, and perspective taking. Hints are revealed between betting rounds (for the chicken question, that could for example be the average meat yield per chicken), so players have to decide how much each piece of information should shift their confidence and influence their betting behaviour. The game also teaches players to put more weight on people's track records than on their confidence or charisma.

3. In his "Reinventing Explanation" essay, Michael Nielsen argues that we learn best when the emotional stakes are as high as possible without losing the ability to think calmly, like a game show contestant who loses a prize because of a wrong answer. He notes that such experiences are hard to organize routinely. Fermi Poker makes those experiences almost routine by combining the intense emotional stakes of poker with Fermi estimation. Imagine someone who is very sure of their clever decomposition of the chicken question, bets very aggressively, and then loses and sees how far off they actually were. This is a much more memorable experience than just reading the same number on Our World in Data...

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have!

My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly. I spent the better part of a weekend reviewing the relevant literature, constructing a cost-effectiveness model, and conducting sensitivity analyses across a range of assumptions about crustacean sentience. The results were remarkably consistent. Even under relatively conservative estimates, the expected welfare gains from redirecting our daughter's treatment fund to shrimp welfare interventions substantially exceed those from prolonging the life of a single human child. My wife has accused me of abandoning our daughter. I would argue that she is allowing a deeply ingrained speciesist bias, compounded by an unusually strong genetic attachment to one particular individual, to override her commitment to doing the most good.

The organization I have identified as the optimal recipient is Shrimp Welfare Project, which works with aquaculture producers to reduce suffering among farmed shrimp, including by introducing electrical stunning equipment to render the animals unconscious before slaughter. Its public impact estimates suggest that its programs improve the welfare of approximately 1,400 shrimp per donated dollar per year. At that rate, the $23,400 our family would need to contribute toward the proposed course of treatment could instead help approximately 32.8 million shrimp. My daughter, by comparison, is one person. I am aware that this framing may strike some readers as insensitive, but I would encourage them to consider whether their discomfort is based on a defensible moral principle or merely the evolutionary accident that human beings find children with faces more emotionally compelling than small aquatic invertebrates.
I first raised this issue during a meeting with my daughter's oncologist, who had been explaining the proposed treatment regimen and its likely side effects. When she finished, I asked whether the hospital had performed a comparative cost-effectiveness analysis incorporating potential benefits to nonhuman animals. She appeared confused, so I explained that modern moral philosophy requires us to take seriously the interests of all sentient beings, regardless of their taxonomic classification. She said that her job was to treat children with cancer. I acknowledged that this was a perfectly understandable institutional objective, but pointed out that optimizing for the survival of pediatric oncology patients was not necessarily equivalent to optimizing for total welfare across all morally relevant beings. She asked whether I had any questions about the chemotherapy. I said that I had several, beginning with whether she considered shrimp capable of experiencing suffering.

My wife later described this exchange as humiliating, which I find particularly disappointing given her previous enthusiasm for effective altruism. When we first met, she was impressed that I donated ten percent of my income to highly effective charities and had written several essays about the moral importance of impartial beneficence. It is therefore difficult to understand why she has abandoned these principles now that they have become relevant to a concrete decision. She keeps insisting that our daughter is different because she is our daughter, as though genetic proximity were a morally relevant variable. I have asked her repeatedly to specify the coefficient by which she believes biological relatedness should multiply an individual's welfare weight. She has not provided a number, preferring instead to accuse me of being a sociopath.

I am not suggesting that my daughter has no moral value. Quite the opposite. Her welfare is explicitly included in my model, and I have assigned it considerable weight. She is a bright, affectionate child with a promising future, and I would be delighted if she survived long enough to finish middle school, attend college, and perhaps eventually contribute to important work in the shrimp industry. But we cannot simply ignore the opportunity costs associated with bringing about these outcomes. Every additional dollar spent on her medical treatment is a dollar that cannot be spent preventing shrimp from experiencing avoidable suffering. Every hour of potentially healthy life we purchase for her must be evaluated against the aggregate welfare of the vast number of animals whose interests we could have advanced instead. There is no principled reason to exempt my daughter from this calculation simply because I taught her how to ride a bicycle and have several thousand photographs of her on my phone.

One objection I frequently encounter concerns the uncertainty surrounding shrimp sentience. Critics point out that we do not know precisely what shrimp experience, how intense their suffering might be, or how to compare it with human suffering. These are legitimate epistemic challenges, but they do not justify assigning shrimp welfare a value of zero. The appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to model it explicitly. My spreadsheet therefore includes parameters for the probability of shrimp sentience, the relative intensity of shrimp suffering, and the number of shrimp affected by a given intervention. I have also included a parameter for the probability that my daughter survives treatment, although my wife has asked me to stop referring to this as the "human intervention success rate" in front of her. Naturally, the model is sensitive to the assumptions one makes, but I have found that even very small welfare weights can produce enormous aggregate values when multiplied by sufficiently large populations. This is a mathematical fact that no amount of crying in the hospital parking lot can invalidate.

My daughter herself has been surprisingly resistant to the argument. Last Tuesday, while I was reviewing the latest version of the spreadsheet at the kitchen table, she asked whether I was really considering refusing to pay for her treatment. I explained that I was not refusing anything; I was attempting to identify the allocation of our family's limited resources that would maximize expected welfare. She asked why I cared more about shrimp than about her. This was an extraordinarily loaded question, and one that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of impartial consequentialism. I told her that I cared about her exactly as much as I should, and that the problem was that there were simply too many shrimp for her interests to outweigh theirs. She began to cry, at which point my wife entered the room and demanded that I put away my laptop. I would have preferred to finish explaining the distinction between total and average utilitarianism, but the conversation had clearly become too emotionally charged to proceed productively.

I should also address the accusation that I am being unusually strict about cost-effectiveness when it comes to my own family's expenses. My wife has pointed to my recent purchase of a $2,700 gaming computer, a $900 ticket to a rationalist retreat, and several hundred dollars' worth of nootropic supplements as evidence that my commitment to impartiality is selective. This criticism misunderstands the concept of instrumental value. My computer allows me to run local language models and perform the calculations necessary for high-impact philosophical work. The retreat provides valuable opportunities to network with people. The supplements support the cognitive functioning upon which much of my future contribution to humanity depends. My daughter's chemotherapy, by contrast, is principally intended to benefit my daughter. While I certainly appreciate the emotional significance of that goal, it is important to distinguish between investments in people with unusually high expected impact and expenditures motivated primarily by sentimental attachment.
Indeed, the most troubling aspect of this controversy has been my family's insistence that I privilege their interests over those of strangers. My mother called yesterday to tell me that she would personally contribute toward the treatment if I was unwilling to do so. I thanked her for her generosity but explained that this would simply transfer the moral error from one household to another. I suggested that she consider donating the same amount to Shrimp Welfare Project instead, and offered to help her set up a recurring contribution. She told me to go to hell, which I found needlessly hostile. My father has since begun organizing a fundraiser among our relatives, apparently under the impression that raising enough money to cover treatment would resolve the underlying ethical problem. It would certainly resolve the immediate financial problem, but it would also demonstrate the extent to which our society systematically overallocates resources to photogenic beneficiaries with compelling personal narratives.

The fundraiser is particularly frustrating because it has received an extraordinary amount of attention despite providing almost no information about comparative cost-effectiveness. My sister posted a photograph of my daughter in a hospital bed alongside a request for donations, and within two days the campaign had raised more than $18,000. I subsequently posted a detailed explanation of the opportunity costs associated with this expenditure, including a chart showing the approximate number of shrimp whose welfare could be improved at various funding levels. My sister deleted the comment and blocked me. The following morning, I discovered that the fundraiser's description had been amended to specify that all proceeds would go directly toward my daughter's medical expenses. This is a classic example of donor preference rigidity, in which charitable contributions are artificially restricted to a predetermined beneficiary even when substantially more cost-effective opportunities exist elsewhere.

Several people have suggested that I am losing sight of the purpose of effective altruism, which is supposedly to make the world a better place rather than to provide an intellectual justification for neglecting one's family. I find this distinction incoherent. If the goal is to maximize welfare, then we must be prepared to accept conclusions that conflict with our immediate emotional intuitions. Otherwise, we are simply practicing ordinary charitable giving with a more impressive vocabulary. I have spent years criticizing people who donate to local animal shelters rather than interventions that help vastly larger numbers of animals. It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly abandon that position merely because the emotionally salient beneficiary happens to sleep in the bedroom across the hall. Intellectual consistency demands sacrifice, and I am prepared to make an enormous sacrifice on my daughter's behalf.

That said, I am willing to acknowledge certain limitations of my analysis. The cost-effectiveness estimates for shrimp welfare depend on uncertain assumptions, and the marginal impact of a large donation may differ from the average impact reported by an organization. There are also reasonable disagreements about how to aggregate welfare across species and whether human lives possess certain values that are not adequately represented by suffering-adjusted time. These issues deserve serious consideration, and I would welcome a rigorous technical critique from anyone capable of engaging with the model on its own terms. Unfortunately, the criticisms I have received so far have consisted almost entirely of personal attacks, anecdotes about my daughter's kindness, and emotionally manipulative references to the possibility that she might die. None of these constitutes a sensitivity analysis.

My wife has now informed me that she intends to proceed with treatment regardless of my objections and has asked me to stay with my brother for the time being. I respect her autonomy, although I believe she is making a serious moral mistake, and I am disappointed that she has chosen to end our discussion before we could reach a consensus. I have offered to meet with her, my daughter's oncologist, and an independent animal-welfare researcher to review the relevant evidence in a neutral setting. So far, nobody has accepted the invitation. In the meantime, I am continuing to refine the model and have submitted a preliminary version to several members of the effective altruism community. One respondent suggested that I was confusing a speculative aggregate welfare estimate with an actual moral obligation to withhold treatment from my child. I have asked him to elaborate, but he has not replied.

I remain hopeful that my daughter will eventually understand the reasoning behind my position. I have spent eleven years teaching her the importance of kindness, compassion, and caring for those less fortunate than herself. We have discussed animal suffering at length, and she knows that moral concern should not be limited to those who look like us. She used to get upset when she saw insects struggling in the swimming pool, and I was always proud of her for insisting that we rescue them. It is therefore painful to see her reject the same principles now that the beneficiaries are less familiar and the costs more personal. I love my daughter more than anything in the world, but there comes a point when love must give way to reason.

I only wish she cared about the shrimp as much as I do.

Hi,

No university degree, 29 y o

Ontario canada

I am thinking of taking up an entry level job, but I could do school etc. What should I do? Isn't volunteering for political organizations like the ndp helpful? Why is systemic change not more valued by EA?

I tried the ea org site and AI and I can look into that more if thats your advice.

You hear about these famous persons making huge donations. Most persons can never match those big numbers, but what is it relative to my own net worth?

So I worked on a little website to check that easily:
Isitpeanuts.com

For example the 100M Bezos ga e to the Mamdani campaign promises is only 0.031% of his wealth. If your net worth is 800k$ it's 220$ in comparison.

Another Jensen Huang just donated 75M to the Vanderbilt University, it's 0.037% or 300$ if your net worth is 800k$.

How does that put things in perspective for you?

Hey,

So, off the bat, excuse the ragebait title. Full disclosure, I am pretty familiar with EA, as familiar as one can be without actually belonging to EA itself, but I am not EA. Most people probably think of me as a commie or a socialist, or at least an anti-imperialist and DEFINITELY an anti-zionist. I think there's some overlap, as there are with most ideologies, of EAs and leftists wanting to make the world better.

I know EAs arent all AI doomers, utilitarians or longtermists, but those things do turn me off from it, especially the latter two.

I have a real genuine curiousity for EAs, and I respect the openmindedness of the community, though I do think rationalists usually do take hypotheticals a tad bit too far.

But my real gripe right now is in the title. It's not about my old timey socialist ideology asking why EAs don't love the proletariat, though I'm sure you could raise many critiques about how EAs leave very little room for structural change. Nope, it's much more selfish than that.

I am a poor. I've gone to university, I've studied nonsense and I have not converted that education into a career, other people in my family have it better than me. My education will never become a career and I am very limited in terms of changing paths in life. So, while I technically do have a job, I view myself as just unemployed. I dont make enough money, I don't have a set schedule or guaranteed hours, and I haven't had anything better than this for many years. I dont want to share the exact details of my job, but it's far from glamorous and most of my coworkers are exploited immigrants, just to paint a clearer picture.

So in my future, I'm looking at a bright career of "unskilled" labour, or some other job that requires no training or education (or well, I'm not looking forward at all, even writing about my future freezes my soul). So even if I wanted to give EA a chance, what the hell would I even have to offer? I've looked for this question before, several other times, on reddit or on the forums, but it's always from the perspective of people who want EAs to help poor people, never about what poor people can do to help others.

Tl;dr: I am poor and I have no future. What could I possibly ever offer EA?

As EA is now increasingly part of the discourse, what are the common misconceptions you see?

AI Safety start-up!

The Journal of Effective Altruism (journal-ea.com) is the first international, peer-reviewed journal (ISSN 3136-294X) dedicated exclusively to research on effective altruism. We're looking for editors and advisors to help develop this new journal and the future of EA scholarship.

Why it matters

EA-related research is growing fast. But it's currently scattered across different disciplines and venues, and much of it never gets beyond working papers and forum posts. The journal aims to bring together these works to a rigorous common home: one place where researchers across EA-related disciplines can publish, find each other's work, collaborate, and build a community. The journal can also promote visbility of EA scholarship and allow readers to easily keep track of new research in the field. 

As one of our first editors, you'll help set the standards, scope and culture of the journal for a growing field. 

What you'll do

• Handle submissions in your area: initial screening, inviting reviewers, and making recommendations
• Help shape editorial policy
• Encourage strong submissions from your own networks
• Working remotely. Typically 1~5 hours a month.
• This is a volunteer role. However rewards might be provided upon satisfactory work.

Who we're looking for

• PhD, doctoral candidacy, or significant research experience in a relevant field. (If you don't have sufficient qualifications, feel free to apply too--editorial assistant, communications editor, and typesetter positions are also open.)
• Familiarity with research on effective altruism.
• Sound judgment, fairness and reliability.
• Bonus: experience with peer review, editing, and translation.

How to apply

Send your CV to editorial@journal-ea.com. Indicate if there is a specific role or section you would like to work as. Inquiries are welcome at the same address.

Know someone who'd be a great fit? Please share this post.

Subscribe to our email newsletter to receive future updates. Submission calls coming soon! 

We often hear jokes about government workers and corporate workers income .

Meanwhile, NGO workers can have a different situation, with salaries sometimes funded by donations and grants intended to support social causes.

I'm curious about something: Does knowing that your salary is funded by money intended to create social impact change how you view your work?

Does it make you feel more responsible for the cause, or do you see it simply as doing your job and earning an honest living?

I'd love to hear from people working in NGOs.

No judgement, just curiosity!

i know about coefficient giving, but are there any other organizations/companies i can apply to where i push forward philanthropy work? i’m deeply passionate about corporate social responsibility, and am currently at a big 4 dealing with nonprofit partnerships, giving campaigns, and strategic social impact goals. i previously ran a competitive grant cycle for a client (wrote the grant, helped them publish, hired reviewers, helped them disperse funds, and post award monitoring) would like to do more with a wider scope, where can i start looking? open to all suggestions but am looking to do go through a private company/ fund before non profits bc i already have a solid skill set, don’t want to focus in on just one issue area yet, and like being able to deploy the purse strings

Here is a google sheets tracker for donations, that you can hopefully use your entire life!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qh9_FYPhN4UMbDTDu-qO-q9MFPLJ2k5LyCTVPBxqv9k/template/preview

Note: Claude did most of the work, I just made it more visually pleasing.

I recently got the email for round 1 interview. Does anyone know what specific things to prepare for before giving the interview?

Hi effective altruists,

Here are some more questions about applying computational chemistry to alternative proteins (using Python), based on Good Food Institute's pages.

https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-plant-based-meat/#h-ingredient-optimization
https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-cultivated-meat/

The key steps outlined in GFI's plant-based meat page above are (a) ingredient optimization (b) end product formulation. For cultivated meat, the key steps are (a) extracting cell samples from live animals (b) designing cell culture media & scaffolds (c) bioreactor design. 

For each of these steps, how can we perform in-silico simulations in Python? What mathematical chemistry techniques are needed for these (eg. is the theory of Maillard reactions useful)? What software packages are best suited for this (eg. is Quantum-Espresso useful), and what algorithms should we add? 

Please let us know if you have any thoughts about this, or if you'd like to chat about this in more detail. Thanks!

Hi everyone!

Some asylum seekers in New Zealand would like their cases to be allocated sooner. Should they have the right to make such a request? If an asylum claim is ultimately declined, the applicant is generally required to leave New Zealand. So this proposal is not intended to extend anyone's stay.

A petition submitted to the New Zealand Parliament proposes giving standard onshore asylum seekers the right to request earlier case allocation without having to demonstrate exceptional circumstances, while retaining existing priority categories.

The potential benefit is straightforward: applicants who want earlier allocation would have a way to express that preference, without automatically moving ahead of those already entitled to priority.

The Government's 2026 Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill proposes tighter rules for parts of the asylum process in response to concerns that the system may be exploited. This proposal takes a different approach by focusing on applicants who actively want earlier allocation.

From an effective altruism perspective, could such a change improve procedural fairness without imposing disproportionate administrative costs or disadvantaging other applicants?

New Zealand Parliament allows people living overseas, including non-citizens, to sign its petitions.

View the parliamentary petition

I'd welcome your views on the potential benefits, costs and practical challenges. If you agree with the proposal, you're welcome to sign.

Thanks for reading!