Effective Altruism Blogs to Follow

I thought it might be useful to organise the EA-related blogs I have discovered and enjoyed so far, roughly arranged by topic. I will revisit this and add to it when I have more to add. Some are in fact not remotely EA related but seem to fit in with the vibe and are likely to appeal to EA types, at least to my own lights. I hope someone finds this useful, and discovers at least one blog or writer they didn’t know about. Please email me if you have more suggestions.

General EA

• Brian Tomasik - Reducing Suffering
  • Scrupulous and encyclopedic resource mostly about animals and ethics. The phrase ‘welfare biology’ summarises nicely. Founder of the Foundational Research Institute.
• Nate Soares - Minding Our Way
  • Executive director of MIRI. A recent series on this blog about ‘replacing guilt’ was recently recommended to me, and I found it super useful.
• Tobias Baumann - S-Risks
• Julia Wise - Giving Gladly
  • President of Giving What We Can. Gives away about half her income. Writes about all aspects of effective altruism.
• Luke Muehlhauser
  • Animal consciousness, superintelligence, movie reviews, and jazz.
• Incremental Updates
• The Unit of Caring
• Ozy Frantz - Thing of Things

Institutions

• 80,000 Hours
  • Accompanies superb podcast. Some episodes are nearly four hours long, but it totally works.
• GiveWell
• Charity Entrepreneurship
• Giving What We Can
• Vox - Future Perfect

Animal Advocacy

• BCTS
• Animal Charity Evaluators

Philosophy

• Eric Schwitzgebel - The Splintered Mind
  • Eric is a philosopher, mostly of mind, at U. C. Berkeley. He writes about sci-fi, some very empirically-oriented philosophy, and some experimental philosophy. Particularly well-known for his (skeptical) views about introspection, and some research about whether philosophers of ethics are especially ethical (no, it turns out).
• The X-Phi Blog
  • Experimental philosophy has a shaky reputation among philosophers, but if you’re into it you’re into it. Schwitzgebel is a contributing writer.
• Maria Popova - Brain Pickings
  • Lumped in with philosophy blogs but so much more. Not EA-oriented either, but I have to include it because it’s amazing.
• Richard Chappell - Philosophy, et cetera

Economics

• Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok - Marginal Revolution
  • Trivia: Tyler became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion at the age of 15.
• Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias
  • Known for writing about prediction markets, signaling, brain emulation, weird social science. Co-wrote The Elephant in the Brain. Lots of guest posts too.
• Vitalik Buterin - vitalik.ca
  • Prodigious creator of Ethereum, and it turns out a very prolific thinker about all things ‘cypherpunk’. Involved with RadicalxChange.
• Brian Caplan - author at Econlib.org
  • Behavioural and public economics. Author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education and most recently Open Borders.
• Haseeb Qureshi - haseebq.com
  • Former poker pro turned cryptocurrency evangelist and effective altruist. The link above is specifically for his posts about EA, but all sorts of interesting things to say.
• Andrew Kortina - kortina.nyc
  • Founder of Fin and Venmo. Bit of a sammelsurium.
• Diane Coyle - The Enlightened Economist
  • Big tech, GDP, book reviews. Prolific and thoughtful.

AI

• Richard Ngo - Thinking Complete
• DeepMind Safety Research
• OpenAI
  • Asides from anything else, this is just a really pretty site.
• Paul Christiano - AI Alignment
• AI Impacts

Rationality

• Rob Bensinger - Nothing is Mere
• Julia Galef - Julia Galef
• Pablo Stafforini - Pablo’s Miscellany
• Scott Alexander - Slate Star Codex
• Duncan Sabien
• Paul Christiano - The Sideways View

Productivity

• James Clear
  • Productivity guru, author of the excellent Atomic Habits. His website also contains links to recommended articles by other authors.
• Cal Newport
  • Computer scientist. Prolific author and blogger. Origin of ‘deep work’, ‘digital minimalism’, and other buzzwords.

Forums

• Effective Altruism Forum
  • Exactly what it says on the tin.
• LessWrong
  • Not EA-oriented, but closely intersects. Home to ‘rationality’ types. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his ilk.
• Hacker News
  • Even less EA-oriented. But full of like-minded nerds and fun ideas.
• Metaculus
  • Somewhat pushing what counts as a ‘forum’. A massive reputation-based prediction aggregator. Superforecasting explains what this kind of thing is about.

Physics and Maths

• Sean Carroll - Preposterous Universe
• Scott Aaronson - Shtetl-Optimized
  • (Quantum) computing. A very good explainer.
• Daniel Lowengrub - Learning by Example

Health

• Greg Lewis

Tech / Business

• Paul Graham
  • Computer scientist and VC. Worked on Lisp (God’s programming language of choice), and cofounded Y Combinator and Hacker News. Has since spent much time and energy imparting his wisdom unto the world.
• Sam Altman
  • Former president of Y Combinator and current CEO of OpenAI (that’s some CV). Blog is mostly startup advice and tech stuff.
• Patrick Collison
  • Not quite a blog, but lots of interesting and frequently updated info to plunder. Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and now into long-termism and lots of other things. Board member of the Long Now foundation. Keeps his own list of interesting people to follow here.
• Nabeel Qureshi
  • Tech entrepreneur and blogger.

Miscellaneous

• Kevin Kelly - kk.org
  • Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine and general polymath / fascinating human. Two of his many and diverse projects stand out for special consideration:
    • True Films
      • An enormous bank of documentary recommendations and reviews.
    • Cool Tools
      • Endless interviews with interesting people about the tools they use.
• Gwern
  • Eclectic mashup of self-experimentation, cryptocurrency, statistics, psychology, fiction, and more.
• Katja Grace – Meteuphoric
  • Katja runs AI Impacts and writes about many many things in a characteristically and consistently illuminating way, often through a game-theoryish lens.
• RadicalxChange
  • Brainchild of Glen Weyl and Eric Posner: a movement based around ideas in their recent book.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
  • Barely relevant, but fun. Created by Zach Weinersmith who recently illustrated a book written by Bryan Caplan: Open Borders.

Again, please let me know if you think this can be added to.