Interpreting this writeup: I lead the Open Philanthropy Project's work on technical AI safety research. In our MIRI grant writeup last year, we said that we had strong reservations about MIRI’s research, and that we hoped to write more about MIRI's research in the future. This writeup explains my current... Read More

We've just launched the Effective Altruism Grants program to help people put promising ideas into practice. I'm hoping that the program will enable some people to transition onto higher-impact paths that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to pursue. Here I'm going to list some applications I'd personally like to... Read More

All of the advice on getting into AI safety research that I've seen recommends studying computer science and mathematics: for example, the 80,000 hours AI safety syllabus  provides a computer science-focused reading list, and mentions that " Ideally your undergraduate degree would be mathematics and computer science ". There are... Read More

The following is my considered evaluation of the Foundational Research Institute, circa July 2017. I discuss its goal, where I foresee things going wrong with how it defines suffering, and what it could do to avoid these problems. TL;DR version : functionalism ("consciousness is the sum-total of the functional properties... Read More

I'm announcing a new project from the Centre for Effective Altruism: Effective Altruism Grants . Effective Altruism Grants aims to provide grants of up to £100,000 (~$130,000) to help individuals work on promising projects. We hope to fund a wide range of effective projects that will directly or indirectly contribute to... Read More

In late 2014, I ate  lunch with an EA who prefers to remain anonymous. I had originally been of the opinion that, should humans survive, the future is likely to be bad. He convinced me to change my mind about this. I haven’t seen this argument written up anywhere and... Read More

Over the last several years, the EA Forum has been run on a volunteer-led basis. Given how much the EA community has grown, the volunteers who have been running the Forum have decided to transition primary responsibility for the  EA Forum to the Centre for Effective Altruism. In practice, this... Read More

The Centre for Effective Altruism is publishing a new feature on effectivealtruism.org: an EA Involvement Guide. Hosted under the "Get Involved" tab of the website, this guide exists to help people locate and learn about the many, diffuse resources the community has to offer and decide which opportunities are best suited to... Read More

By  Finn Whittington, Catherine Low, David Allis effectivealtruismnz@gmail.com Introduction The Effective Altruism NZ Charitable Trust initiated a book giveaway programme in September 2016, providing copies of William MacAskill’s book ‘Doing Good Better’ for free, with the intention that the recipient reads and shares the book and its ideas. The underlying... Read More

There is a good and widely accepted approach to assessing testable projects - roughly what GiveWell does.  It is much less clear how EA research organisations should assess projects, interventions and organisations with very uncertain non-testable impact, such as policy work or academic research. There are some disparate materials on... Read More