At the last EAG Bay Area, I gave a workshop on navigating a difficult job market, which I repeated days ago at EAG London. A few people have asked for my notes and slides, so I’ve decided to share them here.  This is the slide deck I used.   Below is a low-effort loose transcript, minus the interactive bits (you can see these on the slides in the form of reflection and discussion prompts with a timer). In my opinion, some interactive elements were rushed because I stubbornly wanted to pack too much into the session. If you’re going to re-use them, I recommend you allow for more time than I did if you can (and if you can’t, I empathise with the struggle of making difficult trade-offs due to time constraints).  One of the benefits of written communication over spoken communication is that you can be very precise and comprehensive. I’m sorry that those benefits are wasted on this post. Ideally, I’d have turned my speaker notes from the session into a more nuanced written post that would include a hundred extra points that I wanted to make and caveats that I wanted to add. Unfortunately, I’m a busy person, and I’ve come to accept that such a post will never exist. So I’m sharing this instead as a MVP that I believe can still be valuable –certainly more valuable than nothing!  Introduction 80,000 Hours’ whole thing is asking: Have you considered using your career to have an impact? As an advisor, I now speak with lots of people who have indeed considered it and very much want it – they don't need persuading. What they need is help navigating a tough job market. I want to use this session to spread some messages I keep repeating in these calls and create common knowledge about the job landscape.  But first, a couple of caveats: 1. Oh my, I wonder if volunteering to run this session was a terrible idea. Giving advice to one person is difficult; giving advice to many people simultaneously is impossible. You all have different skill sets, are at different points in

Authors: Joel McGuire (analysis, drafts) and Lily Ottinger (editing)  Formosa: Fulcrum of the Future? An invasion of Taiwan is uncomfortably likely and potentially catastrophic. We should research better ways to avoid it.   TLDR: I forecast that an invasion of Taiwan increases all the anthropogenic risks by ~1.5% (percentage points) of a catastrophe killing 10% or more of the population by 2100 (nuclear risk by 0.9%, AI + Biorisk by 0.6%). This would imply it constitutes a sizable share of the total catastrophic risk burden expected over the rest of this century by skilled and knowledgeable forecasters (8% of the total risk of 20% according to domain experts and 17% of the total risk of 9% according to superforecasters). I think this means that we should research ways to cost-effectively decrease the likelihood that China invades Taiwan. This could mean exploring the prospect of advocating that Taiwan increase its deterrence by investing in cheap but lethal weapons platforms like mines, first-person view drones, or signaling that mobilized reserves would resist an invasion. Disclaimer I read about and forecast on topics related to conflict as a hobby (4th out of 3,909 on the Metaculus Ukraine conflict forecasting competition, 73 out of 42,326 in general on Metaculus), but I claim no expertise on the topic. I probably spent something like ~40 hours on this over the course of a few months. Some of the numbers I use may be slightly outdated, but this is one of those things that if I kept fiddling with it I'd never publish it.  Acknowledgements: I heartily thank Lily Ottinger, Jeremy Garrison, Maggie Moss and my sister for providing valuable feedback on previous drafts. Part 0: Background The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) ended with the victorious communists establishing the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The defeated Kuomintang (KMT[1]) retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and formed the Republic of China (ROC). A dictatorship during the cold war, T

This is a transcript of my opening talk at EA Global: London 2025. In my talk, I challenge the misconception that EA is populated by “cold, uncaring, spreadsheet-obsessed robots” and explain how EA principles serve as tools for putting compassion into practice, translating our feelings about the world's problems into effective action. Key points:  * Most people involved in EA are here because of their feelings, not despite them. Many of us are driven by emotions like anger about neglected global health needs, sadness about animal suffering, or fear about AI risks. What distinguishes us as a community isn't that we don't feel; it's that we don't stop at feeling — we act. Two examples: * When USAID cuts threatened critical health programs, GiveWell mobilized $24 million in emergency funding within weeks. * People from the EA ecosystem spotted AI risks years ahead of the mainstream and pioneered funding for the field starting in 2015, helping transform AI safety from a fringe concern into a thriving research field. * We don't make spreadsheets because we lack care. We make them because we care deeply. In the face of tremendous suffering, prioritization helps us take decisive, thoughtful action instead of freezing or leaving impact on the table. * Surveys show that personal connections are the most common way that people first discover EA. When we share our own stories — explaining not just what we do but why it matters to us emotionally — we help others see that EA offers a concrete way to turn their compassion into meaningful impact. You can also watch my full talk on YouTube. ---------------------------------------- One year ago, I stood on this stage as the new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism to talk about the journey effective altruism is on. Among other key messages, my talk made this point: if we want to get to where we want to go, we need to be better at telling our own stories rather than leaving that to critics and commentators. Since