I am writing this to reflect on my experience interning with the Fish Welfare Initiative, and to provide my thoughts on why more students looking to build EA experience should do something similar.
Back in October, I cold-emailed the Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) with my resume and a short cover letter expressing interest in an unpaid in-person internship in the summer of 2025. I figured I had a better chance of getting an internship by building my own door than competing with hundreds of others to squeeze through an existing door, and the opportunity to travel to India carried strong appeal. Haven, the Executive Director of FWI, set up a call with me that mostly consisted of him listing all the challenges of living in rural India — 110° F temperatures, electricity outages, lack of entertainment… When I didn’t seem deterred, he offered me an internship.
I stayed with FWI for one month. By rotating through the different teams, I completed a wide range of tasks:
* Made ~20 visits to fish farms
* Wrote a recommendation on next steps for FWI’s stunning project
* Conducted data analysis in Python on the efficacy of the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture’s corrective actions
* Received training in water quality testing methods
* Created charts in Tableau for a webinar presentation
* Brainstormed and implemented office improvements
I wasn’t able to drive myself around in India, so I rode on the back of a coworker’s motorbike to commute. FWI provided me with my own bedroom in a company-owned flat. Sometimes Haven and I would cook together at the residence, talking for hours over a chopping board and our metal plates about war, family, or effective altruism. Other times I would eat at restaurants or street food booths with my Indian coworkers. Excluding flights, I spent less than $100 USD in total. I covered all costs, including international transportation, through the Summer in South Asia Fellowship, which provides funding for University of Michigan under
I don't think there's a perfect answer, but as a heuristic I defer to the logical positivists - if you can't even in principle find direct evidence for or against the statement by observing the physical world and you can't mathematically prove it, and on top of that it sounds like a statement about behaviour or action, then you're probably in normland.
I'm not sure how to interpret 'real' there. If you mean 'real' as opposed to something like a hologram, I'd say the sentence is underdefined. If you mean it as synonymous for a proposition about physical state, such that 'there are two oranges in front of me' would be approximately equivalent to 'the two oranges in front of me are real' , then I think you're asking about any proposition about physical state.
In which case I don't think there's much reason to call them 'normative', no statement can be proven by physical observation, so that would make basically all parseable statements normative, which would make the term useless. Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that it is.