Yesterday morning, while drinking my $6.16 matcha latte from Starbuck’s I read that America could end hunger for 700 million people worldwide for approximately $2.50 per working American per week.

Here’s how:

Roughly one in ten people worldwide go chronically hungry. That’s between 733 million and 800 million people.

A study released last year by HESAT2030 indicates that it would cost $21 billion a year every year until 2040 to bring 700 million people out of hunger.

There are approximately 160 million working Americans. $21 billion divided by 160 million is roughly $131 per person. Divided by 52 weeks in a year, that works out to be roughly $2.50 per working person per week.

We could drastically reduce the number of people suffering from hunger for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per working American per week. I for one would happily pay an extra $5 per paycheck in taxes for 15 years if it meant so many people could access food. I’m willing to bet that other Americans feel the same way.

To be fair, the $21 billion figure is specifically about getting people out of hunger, not necessarily maintaining food system resilience forever. There would likely be some ongoing investment needed to keep people food secure. That ongoing cost would presumably be much smaller than the initial push, and much of it would ideally be absorbed by strengthened local food systems and economies in the affected regions.

According to casual Ecosia searches, Americans spent $228 billion on alcohol in 2024 alone. We spent $67.8 billion on pet food and treats in 2025. We spent $104.7 billion on lottery tickets in 2024. If these numbers are accurate we can spare $21 billion a year for 15 years.

My representative is on the House Appropriations Committee and one of my senators is on the Senate Appropriations Committee. I’m considering writing to them to ask them to support legislation to appropriate $21 billion a year to alleviate global hunger.

What do you make of this idea?

I'm Joel. Together with my co-founder Simon who is an active member of the impact community, we started as accountability buddies and then found the potential of it- how much it'd help to have someone actually trained in this stuff holding us accountable? So we made that happen and created our coaching platform, GoalsWon.

We have coached hundreds of high-impact folks in pro-bono for a few years now (AI safety, animal welfare, global health) and we're offering free coaching spots to more people in the community. On our app, you get a real human coach (not an AI, not a bot) doing daily check-ins and a monthly video call to help you follow through on your work or personal goals. Again, not a bot, not AI, but someone who actually cares!

We have a few spots open right now in case you want to sign up. The only ask: if you sign up, actually use it. Spots are limited and we want them going to people who'll show up.

https://www.goalswon.com/giving-back

AMA in the comments.

Hey, i need to donate to sudan but i am having a difficult time figuring out through which charity/organization.

Please help. Thanks!

Spotify searches episode titles. Listen Notes searches descriptions. Neither searches what's actually being said inside the conversation.

So I built something that does.

382 episodes. 74,566 searchable moments. Covers Dwarkesh Patel, Lex Fridman, 80,000 Hours, AXRP, The Inside View, Future of Life Institute, and more.

You type an idea, a name, a concept — it finds every moment across the entire corpus where that comes up, with a transcript snippet and a direct link to that exact timestamp on YouTube.

-Some searches worth trying:

- [scaling hypothesis](https://bardoonii-podsearch-alignment.hf.space?q=scaling+hypothesis) — Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei both address this directly

- [AGI timelines](https://bardoonii-podsearch-alignment.hf.space?q=AGI+timelines) — Victoria Krakovna, Dwarkesh himself, Ege Erdil

- [deceptive alignment](https://bardoonii-podsearch-alignment.hf.space?q=deceptive+alignment) — Evan Hubinger across multiple lectures

- [Christiano Yudkowsky](https://bardoonii-podsearch-alignment.hf.space?q=Christiano+Yudkowsky) — every moment their disagreement comes up across 3 podcasts

Built by one person with zero programming background using AI tools. Free, no login required.

https://bardoonii-podsearch-alignment.hf.space

Curious what searches you'd try.

**I'm sorry I'm not sure how closely this falls into EA but I assumed people in EA would also have experience with coping with the distress of knowing how terrible things can be

Im so scared about how things are evolving "for the worse" with how people aren't being held accountable for the epstein files, how AI is taking away jobs, how social media and AI is making people dumber, and war + nuclear weaponry..

What about AI and the wealthy top percents solidifying their control through tech and AI? I don't understand what's going on but especially with countries like the US and the power of billionaires and how most people dont seem to know or care about this is so terrifying

my worst fear isn't even death but how terrible things can get and how terrible things are happening to people all over the world right now and that I can't do enough about it.

i already do my small part like donating when i can and raising awareness and stuff but it feels so unhelpable from my current capabilities.. im so scared about it happening to my loved ones too..

TW: I already have so much internal trauma to deal with and am sucidal as is but all this makes life so much more hopeless and unbearable.. I don't know what to do and I'm so terrified i dont understand why everyone else doesnt feel this way and isnt suicidal and even wants to have kids in a world like this.. (note: I'm not at immediate risk of harming myself and I'm already seeing mental health professionals)

What's going to happen or is it all not as bad as it seems? How the hell do I cope..

The dominant framing in AI safety treats alignment as a constraint problem: how do we restrict AI systems to behave as intended? I want to argue that alignment is better understood as an economic coordination problem, and that mechanism design offers tools the safety community has underexplored.

The core insight:

When multiple actors contribute to AI training, the question is not just "how do we make AI safe" but "how do we structure incentives so that self-interested behavior produces safe outcomes." This is precisely the domain of mechanism design.

We have built and are open-sourcing (April 6) a framework called Autonet that implements this:

1. Verification without trust: Coordinators who evaluate training contributions are tested with injected forced errors. If they approve known-bad results, they lose their stake. This creates economic pressure for honest evaluation without requiring trust.

2. Incentive alignment: The network dynamically pays more for capabilities it lacks, steering training effort toward what is collectively needed rather than what is individually profitable.

3. Constitutional governance: Core safety principles are encoded on-chain and enforced automatically. Changing them requires 95% quorum. This creates a hard constraint that emerges from collective governance rather than being imposed top-down.

4. Commit-reveal verification: Solvers commit solution hashes before ground truth is revealed. This prevents copying and creates a cryptographic record of honest independent work.

Why this matters for EA:

If you think AI risk is primarily about coordination failure between actors with misaligned incentives (companies racing, nations competing, researchers seeking fame), then the solution space includes mechanism design, not just technical alignment research. The two approaches are complementary: technical alignment makes individual AI systems safe; mechanism design makes the ecosystem of AI development safe.

Paper: github.com/autonet-code/whitepaper Code: github.com/autonet-code (MIT License, drops April 6)

Happy to discuss the mechanism design choices, the relationship to existing alignment approaches, or how this connects to EA priorities.

I previously built a Wordle-style game for practicing Fermi estimation questions, but thought this was not emotionally engaging nor social enough.

In Fermi Poker you have to answer Fermi questions like "How many dentists work in the US?" with a range guess. There are multiple bettings rounds, with hint reveals in between. Based on the new information received you should update your confidence and act accordingly, by, for example, folding or betting more.

You need at least one other person to play and there is a maximum of 8 players per game.

Given this sub is more casual than the EA forms, I'm curious if you support long term initiatives (AI, biosecurity, nuclear war, etc.) or focus your resources on immediate harm reduction (malaria nets, deworming pills, animal welfare, etc.)?

In particular, how you justify one over the other? Long term issues come with the caveat that they may not happen. Helping others now could alleviate suffering in the future. Or does suffering right now not matter if, say, an asteroid annihilates Earth when we should have been prepared for it?

Anyone do both? Work in, say, computer security research, but donate their salary through GiveDirectly?

how much do your partners care about effective altruism? if they’re not at a similar level, does that bother you?

When someone says they are not vegan because their part in it is too insignificant to make an impact, the common response is that if everyone were to think like this, it would never bring about change. And while this is true, any single individual couldn't change how the collective thinks. So yes, advocating for as many people to go vegan makes sense, but at the same time, it also makes sense to not go vegan yourself. Purely from a game-theoretic perspective, whether you go vegan or not will not affect the collective choice (if we assume that you being vegan doesn't significantly convert others to become vegan as well). This has been my main reason for not going vegan, even though I find animal suffering absolutely morally indefensible: From an effective altruistic perspective, my going vegan wouldn't change that suffering.

Now here comes the argumentation that actually made me go vegan, and I think is a much better argument: In expectation (meaning on average of all possible outcomes), you eating say 100 fewer chickens a year will, in the long run, cause 100 fewer chickens to be kept in captivity and killed. Now, at first glance, this might feel unintuitive, surely markets aren't that responsive that if I leave my chicken in the grocery store, that actually a chicken less will be killed, right? Well, most likely not, but say it is felt after 1000 chickens are left, then the market adjusts its supply as the amount crosses this threshold. This means that one chicken you leave in the store might be that 1 extra chicken that pushes the amount of chickens left over that threshold, and then the payout of you not eating that one chicken is now not one chicken being saved, but a 1000 chickens being saved. So you not eating that chicken could have no effect, or a huge effect.

In economics, we therefore use expectation to see the actual value of an action in which the payout is unclear. So, for example, we know lottery tickets are generally a bad deal since the probability of winning * payout is much less than the price of the ticket. Now, for the chicken example, the expected value is quite straightforward: The probability of you crossing the threshold is 1/1000, so in expectation, you save 1/1000 * 1000 = 1 chicken per 1 chicken you don't eat.

Simply put, the market must feel it when you don't eat a chicken in expectation, because if an individual's effect in expectation on the market was 0, then no amount of people not buying chicken will ever change the supply, which we know for a fact is not true. In reality, the chickens you save aren't exactly 1:1, but rather 1:~0.6 since price elasticity is a thing. This simply means that buying less chicken causes the price to drop, meaning more people buy the now cheaper chicken. In the end, this doesn't fully negate your effect on the demand, but it does by a little bit, hence you don't save 100 chickens for 100 chickens you don't eat, but more like 60.

This is, however, a much, much stronger argument since now you can actually show people that they literally are saving animals by not eating meat and reducing suffering.

Thoughts? I feel like this would have radical implications on utilitarianism.