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Publisher
EA Forum Team
Category
society & culture · society & culture · technology
“Too many people in EA underprice the cost of a bad reputation” by GraceAdams🔸
Summary: Good work helps build a good reputation, but it's not the only factor. Reputation also requires making your work legible, building relationships with stakeholders, and communicating with them consistently over time. I think many people in EA systematically underestimate what a bad reputation costs, largely because those costs are invisible. You can see the people who stick around. You can't see the people who decided not to work with you. I close with some practical suggestions for weighing reputation in decisions.
Notes on writing: This is more of a hot-take, quickly written, with some Claude assistance in shaping it into a full post, but heavily edited and reviewed by me. This was spurred by Manifund's recent announcement but is something I generally have been wanting to write. I've written this in my personal capacity, and it's informed by working 5 years in senior roles at EA orgs.
Good work is necessary, not sufficient
Reputation is everything. It's a cliché for a reason.
Doing good work is one of the main ways to build a good reputation, and there's an implicit belief I've noticed in many people in EA that it's the only thing that should matter. If the [...]
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Outline:
(01:08) Good work is necessary, not sufficient
(01:58) What a good reputation actually buys you
(02:36) The invisible costs of a bad reputation
(03:24) Being weird about this doesn't scale
(04:40) The people we lose
(05:27) What to do about it
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First published:
September 13th, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopnEjSSb5fouNJBn/too-many-people-in-ea-underprice-the-cost-of-a-bad (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopnEjSSb5fouNJBn/too-many-people-in-ea-underprice-the-cost-of-a-bad?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Source+URL+in+episode+description&utm_campaign=ai_narration)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO (https://type3.audio/?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Narrated+by+TYPE+III+AUDIO&utm_term=ea_forum&utm_campaign=ai_narration).
16 Sept 2026
“EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy” by Bruce Friedrich 🔸
I want to start by noting that I am enthusiastic about everything that the EA animal welfare movement has accomplished. I am enthusiastically supportive of all of the campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm incredibly proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.
There are two central arguments that I hear in EA circles and that I think are worthy of reconsideration:
1) These efforts have been tried and failed. Let's move on.
2) Everyone agrees with us on factory farming, so let's focus there and stop talking about whether eating meat is unethical; that's where we meet overwhelming pushback.
I don't agree with either of these statements, and I believe that some of the influx of money we’re expecting for animals should be spent on animal liberation and diet change advocacy.
Here are some thoughts and questions that I think support my point-of-view. I look forward to hearing what others think.
1) The [...]
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First published:
September 12th, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imoynWhpY5AqxcaDG/ea-should-invest-in-animal-liberation-and-diet-change (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imoynWhpY5AqxcaDG/ea-should-invest-in-animal-liberation-and-diet-change?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Source+URL+in+episode+description&utm_campaign=ai_narration)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO (https://type3.audio/?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Narrated+by+TYPE+III+AUDIO&utm_term=ea_forum&utm_campaign=ai_narration).
14 Sept 2026
“Do AI safety talent programmes work? Nobody has run the study that would tell us.” by Laura Thomas-Walters
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least 70 million dollars has gone into AI safety talent programmes so far, but we still can’t really say much about their impact. Notably, Kairos has just raised 50 million dollars on a self-described "shallow retrospective" that looked at "around 80 people". I decided to do a deep dive into how AI Safety Talent programmes self-evaluate their impact.
Disclaimer, these programmes are small, fast, and generally run by people with no evaluation training and no slack. The oldest one was only established in 2018 (AI Safety Camp, as far as I can tell). Most last less than 6 months. When timelines are genuinely short and urgent, then time spent evaluating is time that could be spent building. I am not criticising any individual programme.
Having said that, there are retrospective evaluation designs that could be run cheaply without slowing anything down. And a field that funds talent pipelines at this scale without knowing whether they work is not moving [...]
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Outline:
(00:34) Background
(01:52) The audit
(04:52) Thoughts on the counterfactual impact of talent programmes
(08:37) Proposed design
(12:04) Conclusion
The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
September 7th, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5yBGo4fnqm2zKMKj/do-ai-safety-talent-programmes-work-nobody-has-run-the-study (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S5yBGo4fnqm2zKMKj/do-ai-safety-talent-programmes-work-nobody-has-run-the-study?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Source+URL+in+episode+description&utm_campaign=ai_narration)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO (https://type3.audio/?utm_source=TYPE_III_AUDIO&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_content=Narrated+by+TYPE+III+AUDIO&utm_term=ea_forum&utm_campaign=ai_narration).
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