Hello!
Our favourite links this month:
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CEA is running a free, 4-day online bootcamp for accomplished professionals seeking to pivot into a high-impact career: identify high-impact career paths that match their skills, apply to opportunities, and build a network to accelerate their career change (deadline September 14th). Also, we’ve opened up our annual EA Forum survey, so if you ever visit the EA Forum, please consider filling it in. And we’ve announced a bunch of new EA Summits (as well as EAGx and EAG conferences).
— Toby, for the EA Newsletter Team
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Articles
Better futures
Much longtermist work has focused on avoiding catastrophe: extinction, misaligned AI, or astronomical suffering. A new six-part series from Will MacAskill and Forethought argues that we should care at least as much about what happens if we succeed.
The series explores why better futures are unlikely by default, and what we can do today to help them come into being.
It also introduces the idea of viatopia: a society capable of steering wisely toward near-optimal futures, even if it’s not clear what those look like yet.
Read the full series here, or respond to it on the EA Forum.
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Lewis Bollard on Dwarkesh
Lewis Bollard’s appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast has raised almost $2M for highly effective farm animal welfare charities, and counting. Based on Farmkind’s estimates (method here), that means around 4 million animals were helped. That’s on the back of just one episode. Donate here—and have your donation matched.
In the episode, Lewis Bollard argues that:
- The end of factory farming isn’t inevitable, since factory farming is tragically efficient.
- Proven reforms are available now, with in-ovo sexing, shifting to cage-free, and switching to high-welfare breeds, collectively affecting hundreds of millions of chickens.
- The biggest gains may come from expanding these reforms to low- and middle-income countries, where most farmed animals live, and targeting neglected species like fish and shrimp.
Bollard estimates that the entire global budget for farmed-animal advocacy is under $300M/year — for comparison, US donors give >$10 billion to climate change mitigation annually — and only a fraction of that goes to interventions backed by strong evidence. If we scaled up funding for the most effective interventions, we could avert billions of animal-years of severe suffering at comparatively low cost. You can read more from Lewis here.
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10,000 people have pledged 10% or more of their income to effective charities
In a major community milestone, 10,000 people have now pledged to give at least 10% of their income to highly effective charities through Giving What We Can's 10% pledge! Some of their pledgers have been pledged since 2009. Giving What We Can celebrated the event with a short video.
Since 2009, at least $315 million has been donated by pledgers. You can read more about the value of a 10% pledge, and where pledgers donate, here.
If you want to pledge yourself, you can do so here. If you’re not ready for a lifetime pledge (like me), you can take a trial pledge here.
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In other news
For more stories, try these email newsletters and podcasts.
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Resources
Links we share every time — they're just that good!
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Jobs
Boards and resources:
Selection of jobs
Centre for Effective Altruism
Open Philanthropy
- Editor (remote (U.S. preferred), USD $116,977, apply by August 27th)
80,000 Hours
- Various operations roles (London, Berkeley, or remote, depending on role; GBP £41–75k or USD $68–105k; apply by September 1st)
OpenAI
Observatorio de Riesgos Catastróficos Globales (ORCG)
Technology Strategy Roleplay
Suvita
Compassion in World Farming
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Announcements
There are too many announcements to put in one newsletter, so this section is a short, curated list. For more, check the EA opportunities board, and the opportunities tag on the EA Forum.
Conferences and Events
- As well as EAG NYC, there are 6 EAGx events and >7 EA Summit events still to come this year. You can read about them all here.
- In case you aren’t familiar:
- EAG = big events, run directly by CEA, for people with concrete plans to improve the world.
- EAGx = smaller than EAG, run by the community and assisted by CEA, often open to people newer to EA.
- EA Summit = smaller than an EAGx, great for newcomers.
- Fauna Connections 2025 will be held virtually on Thursday, September 18th. This symposium from Faunalytics features short talks and Q&As on research relevant to animal advocacy, plus breakout discussions and a panel with Faunalytics’ research team. Register for free.
Fellowships and Courses
- AIM’s Charity Entrepreneurship program is open for applicants! The program has spawned charities such as the Lead Elimination Project, the Shrimp Welfare Project, New Incentives, and many more. Apply and find out more here.
- Rosetta Commons Biosecurity Fellowship is a 12-month remote role at the intersection of computational biology and biosecurity. Fellows will engage with researchers and explore how AI-enabled protein design tools can be developed and governed responsibly. Learn more and apply here.
- Make your high-impact career pivot: Join a free 4-day online bootcamp to identify high-impact career paths that match your skills, apply to opportunities, and build a network to accelerate your career pivot. This runs September 20-21 & 27-28 (weekends) or October 6-9 (weekdays); apply by September 14th.
Funding and Prizes
- The Alignment Project is a new £15 million global fund from the UK government supporting interdisciplinary AI alignment research. Grants range from £50,000 to £1 million, with larger awards considered. Recipients can access compute credits (up to £5 million from AWS), expert support from the UK AI Safety Institute, and links to commercial funders. Apply here.
- Strategic Animal Funding Circle is accepting proposals for its Fall 2025 grant round. In past rounds, the Circle has collectively awarded around $500k to high-impact animal welfare projects. Priority goes to newer or smaller organisations. Apply here by August 25th.
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Organizational Updates
You can see updates from a wide range of organisations on the EA Forum.
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Timeless Classic
“Beware surprising and suspicious convergence” is a phrase that has crept into my vocabulary, even though I haven’t read the Forum post it comes from in years. With this post, Gregory Lewis names a persistent issue: even diehard effective altruists often allow their personal biases or existing commitments to affect their cause prioritisation. It’s a ‘surprising and suspicious convergence’ when your current strategy or pet interest just happens to be the most helpful way to address multiple, seemingly unrelated problems. Some examples from Gregory below:
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I hope you found this edition useful!
If you’ve taken action because of the Newsletter and haven’t taken our impact survey, please do — it helps us improve future editions.
Finally, if you have any feedback for us, positive or negative, let us know!
– Toby, for the Effective Altruism Newsletter Team |
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