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TLDR: Graduating Stanford economics Ph.D. primarily interested in research or grantmaking work to improve the long-term future or animal welfare.
Skills & background: My job-market details, primarily aimed at economics academia, are on my website. I am an applied microeconomist (meaning empirical work and applied theory), with my research largely falling in political economy (econ + poli sci), public economics (econ of policy impacts), and behavioral/experimental economics.
I have been involved in effective altruism for 10+ years, including having been a Senior Programme Associate at Longview Philanthropy in 2022, Vice Board Chair at Animal Charity Evaluators (board member 2020-present), Global Priorities Fellow with the Global Priorities Institute and the Forethought Foundation (2019-2020), and a Senior Research Analyst at Innovations for Poverty Action and the Northwestern Global Poverty Research Lab (RA 2014-2018).
Some examples of my work:
Persistence in Policy: Evidence from Close Votes
- This is my economics "job market paper."
AGI Catastrophe and Takeover: Some Reference Class-Based Priors (Forum post)
- This won a Second Prize in the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest
Does suffering dominate enjoyment in the animal kingdom? An update to welfare biology
I also organized an Economics of Animal Welfare session at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics.
Location/remote: Flexible. I am currently in the Bay Area but would be happy with other U.S. metropolitan areas and open to the UK as well. I'm happy to be remote but prefer to have somewhere to work around other people.
Availability & type of work: I am looking for a full-time job after I graduate in June 2023. I can potentially start part-time as early as March. I plan to take some time off sometime in the next year.
I will probably decide as to my next step within a month or two.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn: LinkedIn; CV
Email/contact: [email protected]
Other notes: The problem area I am most interested in working on is what can be done to improve the long-term future, if anything, beyond extinction risk. My ideal job would probably involve a mix of research and making things happen.
TLDR. Feel free to check my posts, and see if we can collaborate to contribute to a better world.
Skills & background. I have posted about AI risk skepticism, biorisk skepticism, cause prioritisation, climate risk skepticism, cluelessness, cost-effectiveness analyses, criticism of effective altruist causes, criticism of longtermism and existential risk studies, criticism of work in effective altruism, crucial considerations, distribution of cost-effectiveness, estimation of existential risk, existential risk, Fermi estimates, forecasting, impact assessment, indirect long-term effects, meat-eater problem, nuclear risk skepticism, red teaming, supervolcanoes risk skepticism, and transparency[1]. See my posts for details.
Location/remote. I live in Lisbon, Portugal, and am willing to relocate or work remotely.
Availability & type of work. I can start in 1 month, and am interested in part-time volunteering, and part-time or full-time paid roles.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn. You are welcome to check my Europass profile (as it stood on 31 January 2024).
Email/contact. Feel free to send me a direct message on the Forum, or message me via LinkedIn.
Other notes. I typically ask for a salary of 20 $/h, which is roughly equal to 2 times the global real GDP per capita. However, I also have to think the work is more cost-effective than writing EA Forum posts, which I guess is where I am spending my time at the margin.
Questions:
I have listed these topics alphabetically.
Hi Vasco! Since you asked- yes I really appreciate your posts. I think link-posting is underused, and you provide a really great example of it. Your original work, like this one, is great as well. Keep posting!
Thanks for the feedback, Toby!
PS: I personally think this short comment I am writing now should not be upvoted nor downvoted.
Are you interested in within-climate cruxes?
Thanks for asking, Johannes!
I would be curious to know more about the cruxes you have in mind, but I guess I would not have much interest. I suppose your cruxes within climate are about prioritising across interventios with the intention of decreasing emissions, whereas I mainly wonder about whether decreasing CO2eq emissions is good/bad at the margin. My best guess is that it is good, but it is not that resilient.
I have argued that more global warming might be good, but I no longer endorse the premises of my analysis. It relied on minimising the existential risk from climate change and the food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (e.g. nuclear winter), but I would now say these pose astronomically low extinction risk. As a result, I think it makes more sense to analyse my question about emissions in terms of figuring out the optimum emissions trajectory to improve nearterm welfare or boost nearterm economic growth, as proxied by e.g. global disease burden until and real GDP in 2050. However, I assume I would not add much value here. Those types of questions are much less neglected than the ones I was trying to answer in my original post, and my sense is that there is already scepticism about current climate policies being optimal from these perspective. For example:
I do not know whether the differences across areas would be smaller if one compared just top interventions, but a priori I would expect the CCC to provide similarly representative intervention across the various areas they considered.
That's why I specified "inside-climate", yes those considerations you mention are out of scope for stuff I can fund.
This is an aside, but I would not trust CCC on climate.
I see; sorry for the misunderstanding. I was thinking that figuring out whether marginal emissions are good/bad would still be "within climate", whereas comparing climate interventions with ones in other areas would be "outside climate".
I would be curious to know why. I know there are concerns around the founder, but would be keen to know about specific criticism of CCC's cost-benefit analyses of climate interventions.
I noticed that your 'AI risk scepticism' link didn't work well (maybe it was meant to be a forum tag?)
Thanks! Corrected. It was indeed supposed to be an EA Forum tag.