Hello!
Our favourite links this month include:
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EA Global New York City (10th–12th October) is closing its applications on September 28th. Apply now. Also, the Effective Altruism Forum is hosting an essay competition. To enter, write an essay in response to a chapter or theme from the newly published Essays on Longtermism book, and post it on the Forum. You could win up to $1000 if our judges (including Will MacAskill and the editors of the book) are impressed with your argument and originality.
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If you value this newsletter, consider forwarding it to a friend. They can sign up with this link,
— Toby, for the Effective Altruism Newsletter
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Articles
Farm animal welfare at TED
Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at Open Philanthropy, gave the first-ever mainstage TED talk on factory farming. He focused on three tragic practices: gestation crates for pregnant pigs, battery cages for egg-laying hens, and the slaughter of male chicks. Instead of asking his audience to go vegan, he asked them to talk about factory farming. Why?
Bollard writes: “as society-wide solutions, I think [going vegan, or eating pasture-raised meat] have largely failed. That’s through no fault of their advocates. Almost all efforts at permanent consumer boycotts — whether of blood diamonds, sweatshop clothing, or palm oil — have met a similar fate.”
Most people (Bollard cites an 88% figure from a US survey in his talk) think that gestation crates and battery cages are unacceptable. But we don’t talk about it. Perhaps because most people don’t support it, and taking that fact seriously would mean becoming vegan, donating or advocating, we mostly avoid even thinking about it. That’s why, when speaking to a very broad audience, Bollard attempted to make factory farming a more mainstream topic of discussion.
Specifically, he asked the audience to: “Tell the corporations you buy from, the politicians you vote for, that you expect them to adopt basic, common-sense policies to end the worst practices. And tell everyone what you’ve learned about factory farming.”
If you’re in the UK and want to take him up on this, consider taking part in the mass lobby day. Lewis wrote up some other next steps here.
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SB 53: another crack at regulating AI
On September 29th last year, California Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1047, the first piece of AI safety legislation in the state, and one which, if successful, would have had an international impact. Now, SB 53, a less transformative but overall similar bill, is on its way through the California Senate.
Though most of you readers aren’t in California, the leading AI companies are. How California chooses to regulate its AI companies affects all of us. SB 53 would require the leading AI companies to publish safety policies, and then to follow them (currently, this is voluntary). It would expand whistleblower protections, allowing staff and external contractors to report safety breaches.
If the bill passes, would it protect us from existential risks? Celia Ford of Transformer thinks it “likely isn’t strong enough”. On the other hand, this would be a start, allowing some semblance of oversight over AI systems and companies that are only getting more powerful.
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Click the image for the featured article, or here for the source.
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Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla — featured person
I’m experimenting with featuring a person each month, alongside the news. As always, you can give feedback here.
Until 2018, Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla worked in finance.
“At first, the financial rewards made me not care about many other things,” Andrés recalls in an interview. “But over time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was just making rich people richer. It didn’t feel like my calling.”
After a year of disappointing volunteering at NGOs and searching for opportunities, Andrés’ wife sent him a link to Ambitious Impact’s charity entrepreneurship programme (which, incidentally, is open again now).
Andrés read introductory effective altruism texts and found that "It was a really exciting new way of looking at how to proactively improve the world." He was accepted into the charity entrepreneurship programme and, to his surprise, ended up founding the Shrimp Welfare Project with co-founder Aaron Boddy.
“When I first read about the concept of shrimp welfare, I thought that effective altruists had taken their logical conclusions to a crazy extreme.” He said, “But there were half a trillion shrimp out there, there was some evidence that they could experience suffering, and there were zero people working on this.”
Nowadays, the Shrimp Welfare Project estimates it helps 4 billion shrimp annually.
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In other news
- Scott Alexander reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, a new book that makes an emphatic case against pursuing further AI research.
- Rethink Priorities researchers lay out the case for fruit flies feeling pain.
- Andy Masley argues that ChatGPT’s environmental impact is overwhelmingly overstated in a series of Substack posts. Worth a look if you’ve passively accepted (as I had) the claim that personal AI use is environmentally harmful.
- An Astral Codex Ten satire of AI progress sceptics singlehandedly restored my belief in the possibility of good fictional philosophical dialogues.
- A history of the Serum Institute, the Indian vaccine manufacturer that quietly became the world’s largest — not by inventing new vaccines, but by making existing ones cheap, fast and in bulk.
- The Global Fund, a massive organisation which fights AIDs, Malaria, and Tuberculosis, will be focusing its funding on the poorest countries in the wake of the foreign aid cuts in the US.
- Not timely, but I missed it when it was released: Ada, a series of short animations about the benefits and risks of emerging technologies, is out on TEDEd.
- Two new 80,000 Hours podcasts:
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
The Animal Law Foundation
BlueDot Impact
Lead Exposure Elimination Project
Open Philanthropy
SecureBio
- Head of Partnerships (Cambridge, MA / Washington, DC, USD $150K–$175K)
- Head of Laboratory Science (Boston, MA, USD $150K–$180K)
- Genomic Biosecurity Scientist (Cambridge, MA, USD $110K–140K)
- Head of Biosecurity Response (Cambridge, MA or Washington, DC, USD $130K–170K)
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Announcements
Events and conferences
Fellowships and courses
- In 2026, Ambitious Impact is running three rounds of its Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Two rounds will continue to focus on farmed animals and global health. The third will be a special edition focused on opportunities to improve the effectiveness of the philanthropic sector. The Impactful Philanthropy Round will take place in June–July 2026. Apply before October 5th.
- High Impact Professionals is accepting applications for its free 6-week online Impact Accelerator Program, helping mid-career and senior professionals not yet in high-impact roles build action plans and networks for impactful careers. The program runs October 27th–December 7th, and applications close September 21st.
Prizes and funding
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Organizational Updates
You can see updates from a wide range of organizations on the EA Forum.
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Timeless Classic
With the publication of Essays on Longtermism, it’s a great time to share Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s paper ‘The Case for Strong Longtermism’. Now a published chapter, various working versions of this paper have been bouncing around for years.
The argument is a detailed, well-honed case for “strong longtermism: the view that impact on the far future is the most important feature of our actions today”. The strong longtermist claim (whether interpreted as axiological — a claim about what is valuable — or deontic — a claim about what we should do) has been provoking to many. Like Peter Singer’s drowning child argument, if true, it may ask us to drastically change how we act and what we value. For anyone looking to do the best they can with their lives, it’s a philosophical idea worth grappling with. (And, perhaps, responding to as part of our essay competition.)
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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 |
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