Open thread: 2026 Q3 (July - September)

Hi everyone, my name is Andrew Youn. I am co-founder of One Acre Fund and Prevail Fund. One Acre Fund is an NGO serving farmers in Africa. About half of the world’s $1-a-day poor are African farmers, and our goal is to help them earn more income. We provide farm services to about 6 million families currently. As part of this work, I lived in rural parts of East Africa for more than ten years.

Prevail Fund is a younger org that raises funding for and launches “mega projects” with narrow goals. Our only fund so far supports 25 education orgs in Africa and South Asia that work through government public school systems to advance foundational literacy and numeracy, have evidence, and good cost-effectiveness. We are also working on two new funds this year.

I have long felt aligned with many principles of the EA movement, and along with everyone else was inspired by Singer and other ethicists early on. One thing I appreciate is the meritocracy of ideas in the EA community, and I have learned a lot over the years from various posts and members. I plan to do some writing around two themes: Big Goal projects, and hopefully some stuff about on-the-ground field realities - which I personally think are both relevant and under-addressed in the world today. First post soon hopefully, if I can gather up the courage? I appreciated the guidance for writers to not make things perfect. I’m good at that!

Hi everyone, my name is Jacob. I am very passionate about using my career to maximize my impact on helping the world. I am particularly interested in a career in ending factory farming or AI safety / existential risk reduction. Before I enter the labor market, I would like to pursue a grad degree. I am considering the following options: the PhD in economics, the MPA (master's in public administration), the MBA, or the JD. 

Do folks have thoughts on which of these four options is best or most needed for very high impact work in ending factory farming or AI safety / existential risk reduction? 

Hi everyone, my name is Serena, and I am currently working as a consultant Technical Adviser in a capacity-building organisation in the Pacific, as well as writing for the EA NZ organisation. Previously I spent 7-8 years in government roles - strategic writing, research, and analysis - and left to see if I could find work which better aligned with my values and goals. I'm interested in pursuing different avenues of work as part of that quest, but writing, research, and team leadership are all strengths and interests of mine (as a generalist). 

I'm interested in building up my EA connections - I first read up on EA principles and literature about 15 years ago and have aligned my giving to effective causes since then, but I am newer to the Forum and some of the philosophies within the EA umbrella. Looking forward to learning more. 

Hey everyone, my name is Diego and I'm a freelance web developer based in Italy.

After years of working for a couple of companies with dubious goals I got fed up and decided that I want to change my career and do something good for the world. With my software engineering background I'm obviously drawn to the AI safety topic (but I won't shy away from other causes like animal welfare for example).

Since by trade I make websites and apps and I don't have formal training or experience in the AI space (bar a couple of chat bots integrations), I'm now on a quest to learn how this field works and how can I best apply my skills to safeguard our future from potentially catastrophic AI development.

I've been doing a lot of reading in the past month, and I'm looking for connections that can guide me in this process. Should anyone be in need of advice regarding web development don't hesitate to drop a message, I'll be glad to help!

As for my hobbies I'm into martial arts, role playing games, and music (I play the electric bass).

Looking forward to connect with like minded people and do some good :)

Hi everyone, my name is Emily and I'm the CEO and cofounder of PermitPal focused on transforming the way that clean energy gets built. 

I've been involved with effective altruism for the past 10 years but haven't been very active on the forum. 

I'd love to connect with people thinking about questions like:

• How can AI be used to meaningfully accelerate clean energy deployment?
• Which bottlenecks to building clean energy are most neglected and tractable?
• How can we improve state capacity for permitting and infrastructure delivery?
• Where are the biggest opportunities to increase clean energy supply over the coming decades?

Hello, I wrote a couple of weeks ago and introduced myself here but something went awry with my account yesterday and it was deleted! So I am re-introducing myself today.

I am Georgina (George).  I spent almost 2 decades working in UK government in foreign policy and national security roles.  I am skilled in building relationships and delivering results on high-priority, high-risk policy and operational matters in the global arena. I have expertise in strategic policy, intelligence, risk management and fostering cross-sector collaboration. 

Now an independent challenge consultant, I enable organisations and individuals to think more critically, make better decisions and build cultures where fresh perspectives thrive. Using globally recognised frameworks and tools, I facilitate the discipline of pausing, questioning and reframing — helping clients test assumptions, recognise bias, identify hidden threats and surface missed opportunities. Alongside this, I work to embed the behavioural culture needed for challenge thinking to take root and drive real change. I hold qualifications in War Gaming (King's College London), Futures and Foresight (UK Government) and am a qualified Red Teaming Coach via the ICF. 

Although my career has, I believe, always been values-based, I am now able to navigate who I work with and where I add value. I want to direct that as much as possible towards areas of positive global change, ensuring that the best ideas for world improvements have the best support behind them, to give them the best chance to succeed. 

I am looking forward to attending EAGx Berlin this year and starting to engage with the community. 

Hi everyone, I'm Roland.  I've worked in econometrics and experimentation for tech and consumer companies for many years and have been lurking on EA for the past couple.  I'm a bit of a polymath, with a couple graduate degrees in computational physics and business administration.  I'd like to engage more with people who are interested in working on effective and novel solutions to problems like extreme poverty, AI safety, and health.  I am action-oriented and interested particularly in exploring low-friction, big-if-true POC solutions that can be trialed in these domains.  I love meeting new people so feel free to say hi :)

Hi everyone, I'm Subham, from Bangalore, India.

I came across EA while applying to an org funded by GiveWell. Their rigor and transparency drew me in. It felt refreshing to come across something that cares deeply while still being careful about maximum impact.

I've been a teacher with Teach for India, and I've worked in various program management roles across non-profits and startups. What draws me to EA is the overlap between a business's cost-effectiveness and a non-profit's drive for impact.

I currently run an e-commerce store solo. But impact is what's pulling me back toward full-time work that feels worth doing. This forum is a chance to meet orgs and people working in the areas I'm curious about: global health, and AI safety.

Hi everyone, 

My name is Amy and I am new to EA although not new to social impact work. My degrees fall more along the lines of liberal arts & sciences (international studies, social service administration) and I don’t have a quant or tech-heavy background, although I have learned quite a bit through my work. I have mostly worked in “Monitoring & Evaluation” (M&E)  in the US and abroad for a wide variety of programming from economic development to public health and othera for non-profits and local governments. Have also done some independent consulting on the side. I’ve built data systems from nothing, trained folks with low technological literacy to use data collection tools, done community surveying myself, analyzed our data against performance metrics, and created reports and other artifacts for decision making (which often went ignore or unread). The thing is, most M&E work is not very rigorous at all and worse, when implementation folks get bad results they often reject them outright. I’ve worked for a lot of different types of organizations seeking out a place where evidence is really what is driving funding decisions and thus I find myself here. The problem is I really don’t have the experience doing the kind of calculations or even using the language that is used in EA spaces. Advice on how to get started? Global health & development is most interesting to me and probably what I have the most experience in. I had Claude write me a program to learn fermi estimates recently as a starting point but would appreciate any advice 

Hello everyone. My name is Vitaly, and I am an independent researcher based in Israel.

For more than a year, I have been building an experimental AI system called Garmon. The project explores whether an AI system can form behavior from its internal state before language is generated, rather than allowing language itself to become the source of decisions.

So far, I have completed controlled tests of state-dependent behavior and long continuous pre-language runs, including a 12-hour run in which the language model and memory were not allowed to act as decision-makers.

My current focus is memory continuity: how a long-running AI system can preserve one causal history over time and distinguish its own completed experience from information that was merely stored or inserted. There are still several difficult questions here that I am working through.

I would be glad to connect with people interested in AI safety, agent memory, state continuity, provenance, or long-running AI systems. I am especially open to criticism, research references, practical suggestions, and conversations with people working on related problems.

Hello everyone! I'm Alex, I found my way here through recommendations from contacts involved in AI safety. 

I started thinking about how to have a more concrete impact while finishing my comp sci PhD (quantum cryptography and adversarial scenarios), so I pivoted to medicine. Stayed close to those "red team" roots by getting as much exposure as possible to CBRN-related fields, including nuclear medicine, Ebola preparedness, and got deployed in intensive care at peak-COVID.

I'm currently a postdoc scientist at Yale on AI+immunobiology, and interested in AI/bio safety as a long-term career. 

On the less serious side, I do martial arts, rock climbing and strongman, and design board games as a hobby.

Happy to connect with anyone sharing interests!

Hi everyone — I’m new to participating actively on the Forum, although I’ve been exploring EA ideas for a while.

Lately I’ve become particularly interested in AI safety, but from a somewhat different angle than the usual agent-alignment framing. I’ve been exploring whether ideas from evolutionary biology and complex systems might offer a useful perspective.

One question I keep coming back to is:

What happens when a subsystem becomes much more capable than the larger system it is embedded in?

Evolution seems to have repeatedly faced versions of this problem. Cells became parts of multicellular organisms; individual organisms became parts of social systems; and formerly independent components became increasingly integrated into higher-level systems. Sometimes this integration works remarkably well, while other times lower-level optimization can conflict with the health of the larger system — cancer being an obvious biological example.

This makes me wonder whether AI alignment might eventually need to consider something broader than aligning individual AI systems with human preferences. Perhaps we also need to think about multilevel or relational alignment: how increasingly capable AI systems interact with organizations, societies, civilization, and ultimately the ecological systems that sustain them.

I’m especially interested in questions around human agency, collective intelligence, evolutionary transitions, and whether human-AI systems could constitute a genuinely new level of organization.

I'm still very much exploring this rather than claiming to have a developed theory. If anyone knows of existing work that connects major evolutionary transitions, complex systems, collective intelligence, and AI alignment, I'd love to hear about it. I'm particularly interested in places where someone has already developed this idea beyond the analogy stage.

Hey there great people. My name is Calvin. I'm a cybersecurity specialist doing risk and compliance work for a federal agency here in the DC area. Mostly NIST/RMF frameworks and security control assessments. 

My pull towards EA stemmed from Damon Cassidy's YouTube videos. He put 80,000 Hours & EA onto my radar. I'm originally from the United States Virgin Islands, after college I worked at a local non profit serving underprivileged youth in DC. I was furloughed from that job and decided  to make a professional shift into Cybersecurity. I've always wanted to make sure the work I do actually adds up to something beyond a paycheck. I've been eying AI governance and policy work lately, partly because that is where my job skills seem most transferable to something bigger. 

I'm still figuring out where I actually land as it pertains to prioritization. I'm here to read and ask questions and figure out what sticks and makes sense. I also started a motorcycle youtube page (CalN9Na)  if anyone needs a quick break. 

Glad to find my self here!

Hello everyone, I am Nii Simmonds, Founder and Executive Director of the Diaspora Country Index, known as DCI. At DCI, we assess how prepared countries in the Global South are to engage with their diaspora. As Western donor support declines due to shifting geopolitics and the rise of populist agendas, sustainable economic development has become more urgent for the Global South, and we offer the research, analysis, and frameworks needed to support national development. Our approach is grounded in evidence-based research that evaluates how effectively nations are building bonds of trust with their professional diaspora communities.

That element of trust is essential to being engagement-ready. Without it, a country would not be able to mobilize its diaspora, as Ethiopia has done to help finance a hydroelectric dam — to advance industrialization, digital transformation, and AI development.

I look forward to sharing our work with you and to learning from all of you as we move forward.

I like the polls that Jasmine Brazilek posts.  It's fun seeing what other people think.

Has the forum team considered making a settings option to hide vote counts? The option to hide agree/disagree and reaction counts are something I would also appreciate.

I stayed away from this forum for over a year because of it being structured like Reddit, and have also heard concerns about vote counts anywhere influencing bias, as well as issues with like and dislike buttons in general. This post on LessWrong makes a more ambitious case for this, though I'm not campaigning here for any change affecting all users.

I understand the voting system is a necessary evil for maintaining the quality of what's read on the forum, and do think that users here are more responsible about vote count vs. agree count, as well as voicing why one personally disagrees with something, than is commonplace on Reddit. I just think it would be great for us not interested in rating and numbers in discourse to be able to opt out of seeing and indeed being influenced by them.

I do appreciate the removal of the downvote button on the front and user pages as well as the options already here for hiding usernames. Thank you for reading and considering all this! 👍