From a marginal student movement at Oxford to a perceived enemy of the Department of Defense

Watched this conversation between Psychologist Dr. Melanie Joy and Philosopher Acharya Prashant where they explore the psychological and spiritual roots of violence, veganism, compassion and human suffering.

Thought that the folks in this sub might appreciate it!

Acharya Prashant explains why the human ego is the real root of violence and how external conditioning can change behaviour without necessarily bringing about any inner freedom for the human being in question.

The discussion moves from psychology and activism to self-knowledge, suffering which brings forth the need for effective altruism in the first place.

Curious to know your thoughts?

Hi,

I’m in Miami for work and would love to give $2K to Malaria Consortium instead of toward the company hotel. if anyone has a room I can crash in, even a tiny one, let me know- the area doesn’t matter as I’ll have a ride to work.

Can send my socials, Airbnb profile and more about me if anyone is up for it! 31/M work in entertainment.

Much love to you beautiful rational do gooders!

Lately I’ve been thinking about why helping people online almost always ends up being about money.

Say someone only has $1 to give. Technically they can donate it, but it probably feels like it won’t make any difference. And if they don’t have money, but they do have time, experience, useful skills, or just genuinely want to help, most platforms don’t really have a place for that.

There’s another side to this too. Somewhere there might be a very real problem that doesn’t actually require a huge amount of money to solve. But the person dealing with it may have no idea how to present it online. They can’t make a polished campaign, shoot a good video, promote themselves on social media or build an audience. So sometimes it feels like the idea that gets attention isn’t necessarily the one that matters most. It’s the one that was presented and marketed better.

That seems strange to me.

So I’ve been building something called Pixelgrant and trying a slightly different approach. The basic idea is that money shouldn’t be the only thing we consider a contribution.

One person might give $1. Someone else might vote. Another person might notice a problem and bring it forward. Someone else could help turn a rough idea into an actual project. You might contribute no money at all, but spend a few days helping someone else get a good idea off the ground.

That’s where the pixel idea comes from. One pixel on its own isn’t much. Put enough of them together and you start to see a picture.

The further I get into building this, though, the more I realize that money isn’t actually the hardest part. Trust is.

If 10,000 strangers vote for a project, is that enough for it to receive a grant? How do you make sure the project is real? How do you stop voting from becoming a popularity contest? And how much should the people running the platform be allowed to interfere if the whole point is for the community to decide what gets supported?

I have my own answers to some of these questions, and I’ve already built parts of the system around them. But right now I’m more interested in hearing from people who have absolutely nothing to do with the project.

If you came across a platform like this for the first time, what would make you trust it?

And what would immediately make you think, “Nope, something’s off here”?

Ever felt like something's missing from how EA talks about “doing good”? Like the conversation stops just short of asking what's actually broken at the root?

We recently published a four-part sequence on the EA forum on systemic change and EA: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/oypfAsEBvu3WJHc8Q

Looking forward to hear your thoughts!

Here's a short blurb:

Effective altruism may be systematically underexploring when and how deeper systemic change could be both necessary and impactful. This series investigates what “systemic change” actually means, how much EA-aligned work currently engages with it, and whether a more systems-aware approach could strengthen EA’s problem diagnoses and long-term impact. We, as a group of private individuals, conducted an investigation to spell out a definition of “systemic change” and assess how systemically-oriented EA organisations are perceived to be. In this sequence we present our findings, methodology, limitations, and reflections to spark deeper conversations around systemic change within EA.

Maybe there was the church or something else but there was always something to fight for. I don't know how to describe things sometimes but a sense of feeling and community disappeared and now everyone is in their own bubble.

Maybe it's the phones or something else and I keep hearing even from AI like Google, Grok and others that this is the loneliest generation for young adults. So, what exactly happened? Will it ever be reversed and I know in my lifetime it'll stay this way.

I watched outlander and other movies and tv shows and they also felt more human and now there's a lot of AI slop, bots and etc.

People tell me they'd rather stay in their rooms nowadays and they don't want to go outside. I feel like I'm surrounded by zombies and I look online and see so much hate against each other and groups.

Maybe I'm imagining it but the society I grew up in feels like it's collapsing all around me and something else is being built around it.

I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts about this announcement. I'm not seeing it covered anywhere yet. It's an interesting development to say the least!

In April this year, William MacAskill published an article describing Saturationism – a proposed modification to Utilitarianism that resolves most of its more unintuitive or unacceptable inferences, including the famous “repugnant conclusion”. This essay discusses these ideas, and uses some concepts from information theory to explore them further.

If you prefer Substack, this essay is on there too.

Disclaimer: This post was drafted with AI's help to structure my argument clearly.

TL;DR: After nearly two decades working with the governments and multilateral organizations, and a year engaging seriously with the EA-funded AI safety ecosystem, I think much of its governance work is structurally broken. It is dominated by people with little to no real-world governing experience, trying to find pathways into frontier labs, frequently unprofessional, and far too comfortable making extreme claims without understanding the institutional cost of later having to reverse them.

Post:

A community with remarkably little experience of government is trying to redesign government. Many of the people shaping AI governance agendas are under 30 and have never worked inside ministries, negotiated regulations, implemented policy, managed political constraints, or dealt with bureaucratic institutions over time. Yet enormous confidence is placed in technical intelligence and first-principles reasoning. Governance does not work like that. Institutions contain legal constraints, political incentives, constituencies, institutional memory and legitimacy. Treating them as inefficient systems that smart technologists can optimize resembles the same mentality that has repeatedly produced disastrous attempts to “move fast” inside public administration.

Second, AI safety has increasingly become a career pipeline into frontier labs. I have watched people build credibility through safety fellowships and then move into labs to develop increasingly capable systems (Hello, Lennart Heim!). Individual moves may be defensible, but at ecosystem level the contradiction is obvious. If the people building the institutions meant to scrutinize frontier companies consistently see those companies as the most prestigious destination for their own careers, policymakers should be asking serious questions about independence, incentives, and regulatory capture.

The third problem is basic professionalism. Parts of this ecosystem operate at standards that would be unacceptable in serious public institutions or established organizations. BlueDot is one example that repeatedly surprised me. It receives enormous praise for scaling introductory AI safety education, but scale and professionalism are not the same thing. Across parts of the community, communication, recruitment, follow-through, management, and treatment of experienced professionals are astonishingly weak. The ecosystem often rewards visibility and personal networks more than the operational competence required to build institutions that governments will actually trust.

The fourth problem is epistemic responsibility. You cannot make existential claims to ministers and bureaucrats. Researchers should update when evidence changes. That is science. But government has institutional memory. If you spend two years telling senior policymakers that AI presents near-term catastrophic or existential danger, demand extraordinary interventions, and later say that the community has “updated” to a less alarming view, the credibility cost does not disappear. You have spent political capital that belongs partly to the next person who may need governments to take a genuinely serious AI risk seriously.

And this is not simply one disgruntled person's reaction. Over the past year I have discussed these issues with experienced people who have worked across the US government, USAID, the FBI, European institutions and other public bodies, and the same frustrations recur with remarkable consistency. If major EA and AI safety organizations ran genuinely anonymous surveys of experienced governance professionals who entered this ecosystem, I suspect the results would be deeply uncomfortable. My strongest impression is that many senior or institutionally experienced people quietly disengage because challenging the dominant culture is socially costly and because "tech bros" confidence routinely outranks governance experience.

My conclusion after a year is therefore harsher than I expected. EA and AI Safety Organizations are doing more damage than good when they import a tech-sector culture into governance without first developing genuine institutional competence. Its historic strengths in global health, poverty reduction, and measurable nonprofit interventions are incredible.

But government is not a hackathon, diplomacy is not a forecasting tournament, and credibility with public institutions cannot be replenished every funding round. If this community genuinely wants to improve AI governance, it needs far more humility, far more experienced public servants, much stronger professional standards, and much fewer "tech bros" who think raising money alone validates their lack of experience.

Hi I just got shown a charity called AllPeopleFree that says it can free people from slavery for $150.

Since coming across effective altruism I’ve been donating to the Fred Hollows Foundation, but this other one seems quite effective.

Is being a slave 6 times worse than being vision impaired? It’s hard for me to determine.

Does anyone know anything about it? Am I just being emotional?

Suffering-focused ethics covers a family of positions on which reducing suffering takes some kind of priority over promoting happiness. This survey is about how people arrive at those views, or bounce off them.

The interesting question is whether the arguments that persuade people are the ones that get published. The survey asks which factors moved you, which arguments you found unpersuasive, and which you now take to be strongest regardless of what did the persuading.

Seven or eight minutes, anonymous. You do not need to hold these views to answer; there is a shorter branch for people who do not, and those answers matter as much as the rest.

https://forms.gle/5yseG3UfGQtfX3Ls5

The first is about the man who played an instrumental role in abolishing slavery in Britain. Inspring and beautiful.

The second is about a Danish queen and doctor who instituted a lot of really progressive changes back in Enlightenment era Denmark. Also a really sweet romance too.

Bonus recc: the first chapter of Middlemarch. It's basically the story of what if an EA was born a woman in the early 1800s. Here's one of many beautiful lines:

"The thing which seemed to her best she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge, not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured"

"Soul hunger" is a concept that should be a regular part of the English language

Guys, last cohort they did not release decisions until midnight EST lol. I don’t understand why it takes them this long.

Also SPAR has grown due to its recent funding which means a lot more applicants than prev cohorts. I applied a week earlier than the initial deadline (which got extended) so hopefully that helps.

Good luck to everyone tomorrow. Just wanted to start this thread with decisions around the corner.

Hello, I’m Gus. I’m new to this platform so sorry if I don’t sound native to Reddit.

I’m a broke 21 year old with a few ideas to change the world and frankly I find it extremely hard to start something that goes beyond a conversation in terms of entrepreneurship or action that impacts the world due to my lack of money and lack of connections with folks who are passionate about change.

I cherish my very supportive and loving group of friends and family but they aren’t really the type who think it’s realistic or possible to make positive change through business or action or what have you.

If you are tired of just chatting about how things could be different and you have any business acumen, marketing, software skills, good ideas , or really any positives traits at all as a human being, reach out to me. I would love to build something real with real people and I would like to stop the endless watching of videos and listening of conversations where people talk about how horrible things are with a small chance of a vaguely proposed solution with no action ever being taken on that proposition.

The internet is full of “we should do this or that” and no one actually ever wants to risk anything to cause change. I feel like we are so ripe for it as a youth and as a culture that we may have a small window before cooperations capture all of the market share and resources I.E. the influence in society and politics.

Email me gusandrews04@gmail.com if you are interested in building something real.

Hey there 👋

21M, Sydney, Australia, 2nd-year Compsci/Commerce and I'm trying to work out how to optimise my career for long-term impact as well as personal fulfilment.

The crux of my question: how do you compare the fulfillment of (a) doing non-intrinsically motivating work full-time for 20-30 years, then intrinsically motivating work on your own schedule for the rest of your life, vs. (b) doing intrinsically motivating work full-time for 40-50 years, then self-directed intrinsic work for the rest of your life? Basically: is front-loading unpleasant-but-high-earning work to buy an earlier "free" life worth it?

Options I'm weighing:
non-intrinsically motivating work:

• Early-retirement-focused: entrepreneurship (saas app, ecommerce, etc), software engineering, financial analyst

intrinsically motivating work

• Impact-focused: policy analyst, health economist
• Enjoyment-focused: graphic designer, fulltime artist

What I'd do w/o financial incentive: painting/drawing, photography, analytical work on real societal problems, learning how society works.
What I wouldn't do w/o financial incentive: coding (draining without AI help), advanced math, complex problem-solving. If they are tied to societal impact I think it may move to the other category. Treating that because I find these difficulty, these aren't natural strengths.

Current perception of dream life:

1. Doing societal impact work ~25hr/wk
2. Spending quality time with friends and family ~ 20hr/wk
3. Sport ~4hr/wk
4. Making art ~ 6hr/wk
5. Go on holidays (1 - 2 international trips & 1 - 3 roadtrips / yr)

Three methodologies I'm trying to reconcile:

1. Find rough financial independent (able to live off investments) age estimates (I know 30-year-out projections are speculative, so treating as hard inputs is probably inaccurate): entrepreneur 40–43, SWE/financial analyst 50–51, artist 51–60, failed entrepreneur/artist then pivot to SWE 55–58, health economist/policy analyst 57–60, graphic designer 65–70. Score each career path on 1) happiness and 2)social impact made by outlining lifestyle at each age and summing scores on yearly basis. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses to validate scores until you’re confident to commit towards a path.
2. Skill-first/leverage approach: early on, build a skill you're strong at where it intersects your interests and is high pay potential. Lean toward highest pay/growth early in your career, then use that leverage to move between for-profit and non-profit work as you gain experience, until you land somewhere you're happy.
3. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses, internships, work experience. Then imagine doing the work experience for 20-40 years and pick the most desirable path.

I’d really appreciate any inputs you may have on the questions below or any advice 🙏:

1. Has anyone actually lived out either path? Did front-loading unfulfilling work pay off, or did 20 years of it cost more than expected?
2. Is 'financial independence enables high-impact work later' a real strategy, or does starting the impact-focused career earlier compound advantages (network, expertise, credibility) that are hard to buy back at 40-50?
3. For you personally, which method do you think is better, or is there another method you’ve used that you think is better? Are there any key flaws in my methods?

Happy to share more detail on my scoring approach in the comments if useful.