I have an EA blog!
Trying to figure out how EA can use AI better, both to uplift current orgs and maybe create new tools to positively reshape the world.
I’m really keen to meet people building things with AI, and people interested in making more of that happen within EA. Please have a really low bar for reaching out.
Although I am guilty of this myself—having dozens of biosecurity blog post ideas and drafts that I haven’t managed to post.
Why not link to them in a public gdocs with the [UNFINISHED DRAFTS] in the title? I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have posted half the blog posts I have here if I had tried to polish them before releasing them (and many of them still have incomplete sentences and todos for me to edit them!)
Made a first pass of the curriculum! https://docs.google.com/document/d/11E7FOKyCIo0ijKI-9ddCErMQhL8GeMbgFGJ7NEZKtTE/edit?usp=sharing
Would love for anyone here to comment on their favorite readings from there/which specific readings they’d add
I asked Claude about some options, and previous grants they had funded. Here’s what I got:
EA Infrastructure Fund:
Hear This Idea — podcast on pressing problems
EA mental health program — served ~175 EAs
Individual salary — prioritization research and community building
EA Australia — stipend for first paid CEO
EA Poland — effective fundraising platform
Meta Charity Funders:
Giving Multiplier — donation matching for effective charities
High Impact Athletes — athletes fundraising for effective charities
One individual — coordinating EA submissions to UK consultation
EA UK, Indonesia, NZ, Philippines — national orgs CEA stopped covering
Manifund: regranting platform, good for small weird asks
Also, if someone here has a promising idea and can show that on a short Gdocs you can just ask me for money. I have some, and I can direct you to friends with good judgement who have more.
could you link the blog post as a Google docs here? (could be with access on request if you’re feeling shy).
I might do a first pass of the curriculum on my spare time and I’d love to piggyback on someone else’s previous thinking.
I’d recommend you spend absolutely zero time polishing it before putting it here if you think that will make it less like that you share it (see my blog for a somewhat brazen embrace of that principle: https://myea.blog)
For another angle on this. What’s the characterization of the “truth-seeking” virtue that propels you on the way to becoming Holden Karnofsky (or to becoming as Holden-like as you can).
Seems like a decent intro to the topic, but it’s not what I’m interested on.
On a quick skim, they seem to concern themselves with “baseline” virtues, a standard that most utilitarians should follow, derived from simple, common-sense considerations. I’m much more interested on “speculative” or “frontier” virtues. Character traits that, if relentlessly followed, could expose you to a much higher impact ceiling. Some candidates:
Openess: the scientific revolution and the literature on ideas as non-rival good that drive growth, suggest that some forms of “sharing” could have outisized, possibly persistent effects on the world. What’s the shape of the virtue that leads to to seek the most valuable forms of sharing (somewhat related blog post from me)
Kindness: most of your impact will come from others in your sphere of influence granting you affordances to act on the world. There’s habits, that when consistently aplied, make others more enthusiastic about granting you such affordances (Sam Altman and how quickly he responds to emails is an example that comes to mind. You don’t have to agree with his values, but I think he’s a very good case study for many relational viirtues)
Integrity: if you’re an ambitious consequentialist, you could aim to affect the way our society/civilization conceives the good life (e.g. think of the founding fathers). How important is the integrity of your daily behavior for that? What are the traits you’d like to embody precisely because of their effect on your civilization’s character? (somewhat related)
I have some writings on my blog related to some of these. I might come back later to link them here once I’m on my computer.
Not sure I know the biggest gap overall (and I think here you mostly should prioritize based on where you have a starting approach/personal fit) but I’ve seen a few uni groups really annoyed at how slow and non-transparent the current grant process feels.
My sense is that grants to uni groups work at tr pace that most grants in the EA space do, but when you’re a small uni group and not used to planning ahead, it feels great if you can reach for support (and guidance on using/not getting the money) faster.
I use this lapel microphone (one for me, one for my conversation partner) and any sound recorder app on my phone. It’s plug-and-play, and keeping the audios is really fun!
I’m only now setting up the transcription on my mac, but I’ll try Macwhisper for that and I expect it will work well.
I loved the anxious tortured voice of the piece. Laughed out loud here:
I wanted to find a place for my sensitivity. I applied for five universities with a screed on the nature of suffering, and the ways in which art shows us we are not alone in it (I’d share an excerpt but I’d prefer to actually die).
Not sure if this is a trend, but feels like 2026 is headed to be an EA Blogs Renaissance (at least if you happen to share my particular tastes). Some pieces I’ve enjoyed recently:
Imprinting—Attachment and fear around cause prioritization. Extremely wholesome blog
Everything Cate Hall. Her TED talk is so well done that I’ll link it here
Can you imagine Ajeya Cotra officiating your wedding?
Philanthropy can be much better in so many myriad ways, here’s two a month, from Joey Savoie
Can love power a retreat from cruel animal practices? (Lincoln Quirk!)
Father Matt, the OG EA Renaissance writer
I might even be writing something myself!
I’d be really curious for a version of this piece more centered around the specific details of Sullivan’s life (which I basically know nothing about).
The post intro seems to tease a bit that possibility, but the rest of your points are mostly “we should do the important good thing”, which is a message worth repeating, but doesn’t feel too novel to this audience
I loved how both the title of the post and the first section foreshadow the wild animal welfare turn in the middle of the post. It was truly enjoyable read!
What are some groups or communities outside mainstream EA that would be worth engaging in our efforts to reduce existential risks? What are some specific areas or projects we could work on together?
Here’s a few other questions that approach that from different angles:
* Who’s the audience for your new book? Within them, who would be most keen to help reduce x-risk, even if it’s not through EA-affiliated orgs or projects?
* What points in common does EA have with the UK Progress community? What can we do on the margin to work more closely together on our shared priorities?
Well, AI sentience probably has <100 people and I’d be joyful if that increased to 1k. I’m still interested even if the question is “How can we fail less misserably at creating a talent pipeline?”
Yep, agree that linear averages might not be the best tool for that. The product of odds sounds interesting. I might give it a read and see if it’s easy to keep track of in my mind
Oh, amazing! I didn’t knew Alex had a Substack. And indeed, it’s full of advice for using LLMs for work.
Here’s a relevant link for those interested: https://lawsen.substack.com/p/lean-into-laziness
On the same genre there’s also these posts from Shakeel Hashim and Peter Hartree on how they use LLMs:
For anyone considering working on the ORCID-TAXID mapping tool, I suspect it might be an unusually approachable project for those with some familiarity with biological publications and programming. Even without what ORCID or TAXID stood for before reading this post, I managed to construct a barebones demo in 30 minutes using ChatGPT and the Europe PMC API (which has an option to search by ORCID ID, though some quick manual searches suggest it isn’t comprehensive). I think in under 30 hours you could build a decently useful product by adding features like:
Querying PubMed too alongside Europe PMC to get better publication coverage
Searching publications by author name (since PubMed doesn’t offer filtering by ORCID ID) and filtering out clear false positives using simple heuristics like author affiliation and publication area
Creating more fine-grained criteria for identifying organisms in publication abstracts and texts
I will message the post authors and offer to do this myself, but if you already have background in biological sciences and are looking for a cool upskilling project, you would probably be a better fit than me for this.
For those wanting a quick encapsulation of Nietzsche’s morality, I recommend Arjun’s other post on the topic. It’s both unusually succinct and well-written.
Oh, sorry. I’ll expand the abbreviation in the original comment. It’s ‘Community Building resources’.
Thanks for putting numbers to my argument! I was expecting a greater proportion of left-leaning individuals among the college educated, so this was a useful update.
I’m so extremely glad you wrote this! I recently wrapped up a year-long biosecurity project that started with an absolute barebones product demo on a reply to this post from Tessa Alexanian.
I wasn’t planning to work on biosecurity, but at each step of the way it surprised me how, for one of the areas most emphasized by biosecurity prioritization reports (customer screening of DNA orders), at most a handful of people were making it their priority to make progress on it, and many of them on top of a bunch of other demanding high-impact work.
With Hanna we were able to meet a bunch of important people and get their advice simply because they were so excited that someone was actually working on it.
And even if I might not stick to biosec longer-term (AI enablement at non-technical EA orgs feels currently even more neglected!), it was a wondrous learning experience to be in a fast-moving space with clear priorities. In the span of a year I got to see many other people join the space, and learned a lot about strategy and picking angles of attack from seeing times when they quickly got traction on something we had been chewing at for months.
If you like doing stuff and seeing progress and moving fast I heartily recommend sending an email to Ayushmaan or me (alejoacelas@gmail.com) and we can help you figure out how to get started.