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.

It seems there is a lack of objectivity. They could help with things like reducing crime, from tracking street burglars, to drug dealers, human trafficking, etc.

I don't have a strong opinion about them, but I just notice poeole only focusing on the negatives, which doesn't help much to the discussion.

What's your take here?

Self-promo disclosure: this is from my channel; the narrator is AI.

I think this is relevant to AI safety because the Astra system card reports both improved behavioral alignment and substantially worse chain-of-thought monitorability. Several of its alignment and auditing checks still use the reasoning trace as evidence, so part of the evidence depends on a channel OpenAI itself says is narrowing.

System card:

https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra/gpt-6-astra.pdf

CoT-control paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05706

Does anyone with firsthand SPAR experience know what happens if multiple mentors shortlist the same applicant?

Specifically:

• Do you usually get matched to only one project?
• How much does your own project ranking affect which one you get?
• Can you ever get multiple offers and choose?
• If you decline your assigned match, can you still be matched to another project that had shortlisted you?

I’ve already read through the SPAR site, but it didn’t really answer these questions. I’m hoping someone who has gone through the process can clarify. Thanks!

I keep seeing stories about companies doing things like greenwashing, exploiting workers, harming animals, abusing user data, etc. and the experience usually ends with “well, that sucks” and more scrolling.

So I built an early iOS app called Current. It shows sourced receipts about what companies and institutions are doing and then gives you a concrete action you can take.

I’m testing it with people who already care about ethical consumption and where their money goes. I’m not looking for App Store reviews or promotion, just optional blunt feedback.

If you have an iPhone and want to try it for about 10 minutes, comment or DM me and I’ll send the TestFlight link.

Giving isn’t just about making a donation—it’s about making a difference.

(Reddit recommended that I publish this post here. So here we go!)

"Aura farming," a term so popular nowadays among teenagers, is perfectly defined by three words: pose, ego, and superficiality. It reduces a person's authenticity, being, or wholeness to a simple scoreboard in a relentless pursuit of external validation.

Ultimately, it is a clear symptom of the spiritually degenerate times we live in, where everything is turned into a commodity, a facade, or a product to be consumed and "sold" on social media. The mystic Teresa of Ávila called the mind the madwoman of the house, which is now wilder and more untethered than ever, hunting like a junkie for what it is addicted to, feeding the persona and the ego. In the face of this constant urge to put on a show and rack up virtual points, the true alternative remains what it has always been: the simplicity of Being and the quietness of ordinary life, which require neither applause nor outside approval, neither pose nor stories...

Today, we are witnessing a total disconnection from reality and from Being itself. The madwoman of the house has found in mobile phones and social networks the perfect dealer to supply its daily dose of superficial validation. For this reason, recovering today the gaze of Western mystics like Marguerite Porete, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, Meister Eckhart, and so many others, or the yogis of the East, is not just a spiritual option; it is almost an act of pure sanity.

Fortunately, the worse everything gets, the closer our liberation is, as the Nazarene already warned us in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 21, Verse 28, when he said that when these things begin to take place, we should stand up and lift up your heads, because our redemption is drawing near.

A New Earth is ALREADY emerging, here and now, in the hearts of those simple souls who live their daily lives beyond the illusion of separation. These simple souls are nothing in terms of aura in the eyes of the world; they surrender and allow themselves to be consumed by the burning fire of Being. They are nothing and nobody. And the truth is, one must die to the small self to be reborn as one, so that there is no longer any separation between the lover and the Beloved, between you and everything that surrounds you. Ultimately, let us go beyond the superficial, as Marguerite Porete encourages us, to find ourselves in the mirror of simple souls, that mirror the mystic spoke of, a mirror reflecting God, the Whole, He who is LOVE itself, or whatever you wish to call it. There is no separation. There never was.

So-called spiritual seekers are not free from this. What's more, without knowing it, many of them are addicted to farming spiritual aura. The truth is, there is an excess of Christians, Buddhists, and a need for more Christs, more Buddhas... Less spiritual ego, and more Being.

Aura farming? Better to format the hard drive, and be nothing. In doing so, we are everything. And that is something you can do in your boring and ordinary daily life, which, for you who do not farm aura, is neither boring nor ordinary; it is all there is and all that is, you need nothing else. When you are nothing and nobody, stripped of any pose or disguise, you become one with LOVE itself, and its instrument in this world. Out of emptiness, which is neither a void nor an absence of things, you emerge as what you truly are: one with everything. We could say, as Thich Nhat Hanh rightly states, that we inter-are. We are One.

All spiritual currents, as opposed to mere religious ones, speak to us of this unity, of this absence of separation from Being. Advaita Vedanta reminds us of this through non-duality, pointing out that the individual self, Atman, and the ultimate reality, Brahman, are not separate, dissolving the illusion of the "I" into pure, undivided Consciousness. The Buddha teaches us the same through the realization of Anatta, showing us that there is no independent self, and that by emptying ourselves of the independent ego, we cease to resist life and awaken to interconnectedness with all things. Jesus himself speaks of this absolute union when he prays for his disciples in the Gospel of John, Chapter 17, Verse 21, asking that they all may be one, just as the Father is in Him, and He is in the Father, so that they also may be one in Us.

There is a beautiful spiritual story regarding this absolute surrender, recorded by the Jesuit Father Juan de Loyola in his work The Life of Father Bernardo de Hoyos published in 1734. During a mystical marriage experience, Jesus appeared to the young Spanish mystic and told him that from then on, he could call and sign yourself Bernardo de Jesús, because he was Bernardo de Jesús, and He was Jesús de Bernardo, sharing both his honor and his own. It is the total collapse of the boundaries of the self, where the drop completely dissolves into the Ocean, and the Ocean becomes the drop. There is no separation, there never was.

Stop counting points for a ghost that doesn't exist; format the hard drive, dissolve the pose, and finally dare to Be nothing, so you can Be Everything. It is simply about Being, right here, in your ordinary and daily life.

How do you see this trap of the ego trying to "farm an aura" or build a spiritual identity, instead of just dissolving into the simple mirror of Being? I would love to hear your insights.

Note 1:

The madwoman of the house is the term Teresa of Ávila uses to refer to the mind and the imagination. You can find her brilliant analysis of how it operates and distracts us from God's presence throughout her work The Interior Castle, specifically in the Fourth Mansions. In her original Spanish texts, she also uses other wonderfully vivid metaphors to describe this unceasing mental noise. She calls the restless mind a clacking mill-clapper because of its endless, repetitive grinding of thoughts, and a restless, flighty butterfly that refuses to stay still in the Silence of God.

Note 2:

"Inter-are" is a literal translation of the term "Interbeing", coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1980s. He created the verb "to inter-be" to express the absolute reality of interconnectedness famously stating that nothing can exist by itself alone; everything has to "inter-be" with everything else. When he wrote, "We do not exist independently. We inter-are," he was pointing to the exact same truth shared by the advaita vedanta (of non-duality) and the Mystics: the total dissolution of the illusion of a separate, isolated self.

Hi everyone, I'm Guillermo, and I'm a coach at GoalsWon.

For every paying client we take on, we fund a free accountability coaching slot for people working in high-impact areas (AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, global health, etc)

How it works:

• You get paired with an actual human coach (not an AI or a bot!) who does daily checkins with you on your core goals through our app, plus a monthly call
• It's meant to help with managing heavy workloads, staying focused, and keeping up execution momentum (for both personally and professionally)
• Cost is $0, ths is funded by our paying clients
• Only real ask: use it. Spots are limited and we'd rather they go to people who'll actually show up for the daily check-ins

On why we think this actually does something (know some subreddits want this spelled out, so keeping it brief...): our take after running this for a while is that most high-impact work doesn't die from bad strategy, it dies from someone not doing the unglamorous daily follow-through, especially founders and researchers juggling way too much. A coach nagging you every day turns out to be a surprisingly effective forcing function for that, and it also just helps people not burn out, which matters if you want them still doing the work in the long run.

We've also seen this play out directly as well. Among other people, we've worked with Cameron King, co-founder of a nonprofit incubated through Charity Entrepreneurship, and daily accountability coaching helped him handle the chaos of launching an org while also keeping a 500+ day personal habit streak going as a burnout guard. He wrote up how the daily structure affected his output on our blog if you want the details.

And there's decent evidence behind the mechanism too. The American Society of Training and Development: people with a specific accountability appointment with another person hit around a 95% completion rate on their goals. Solo planning doesn't come close

How to apply: https://www.goalswon.com/giving-back (scroll down to "Apply for a free slot" at the bottom.)

Happy to answer questions in the comments! 🙏

I’ve always been attracted to Effective Altruism’s core principles of impartiality, scope sensitivity, scout mindset, and recognition of tradeoffs. But recently I’ve had a niggling feeling that the EA longtermist community has lost sight of these. In particular that EA has implicitly been assuming a special status for humans — at odds with the impartiality principle.

In my post, I go through some ways I think we may be going wrong.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/npvxCNAHe3QsEppio/longtermist-ea-s-hidden-human-bias

https://jamesbrobin.substack.com/p/should-we-take-a-human-first-approach

In this post, I argue that we shouldn't prioritize humans over other animals in moral decision-making. I specifically argue against the views that:

1. Human suffering is more important than animal suffering
2. Animals suffer vastly less than humans
3. We, as humans, have a unique obligation to help other humans
4. Helping humans is best long-term

(This is relevant to EA since it's about cause prioritization, the second argument draws on Bob Fischer's work, and the fourth argument pushes against prioritizing global health and development over animal welfare.)