Hi everyone, I'm Roland. I've worked in econometrics and experimentation for tech and consumer companies for many years and have been lurking on EA for the past couple. I'm a bit of a polymath, with a couple graduate degrees in computational physics and business administration. I'd like to engage more with people who are interested in working on effective and novel solutions to problems like extreme poverty and health. I am action-oriented and interested particularly in exploring low-friction, big-if-true POC solutions that can be trialed in these domains. I love meeting new people so feel free to say hi :)
Growing European philanthropic giving to Africa is a ~$10B opportunity, levers are 1) cultural and 2) regulatory hurdles; possibly de-risking via US partner foundations
Leveraging existing vaccination networks in Northern Nigeria for add-on interventions like cash+ for extreme poverty alleviation goals
Micro-work opportunities for AI model training in languages like Hausa (labeling, conversation, voice-to-text), perhaps combined with Starlink hubs or mobile distribution networks
Carbon-saving behavioral shifts like Japan's cool-biz strategy, similar impacts in the US and middle east could produce similar sized effects in a relatively short time, comparable to the past decade of residential/commercial decarbonization work in manually replacing air conditioners to heat pumps.
Multiple other national public policy interventions that were shown to have positive effects but were never rolled out or scaled internationally.
Ideation and origination competitions at the university level to use as inputs and training for automated AI/agent-based reasoning and opportunity sizing
Hello everyone, I am Nii Simmonds, Founder and Executive Director of the Diaspora Country Index, known as DCI. At DCI, we assess how prepared countries in the Global South are to engage with their diaspora. As Western donor support declines due to shifting geopolitics and the rise of populist agendas, sustainable economic development has become more urgent for the Global South, and we offer the research, analysis, and frameworks needed to support national development. Our approach is grounded in evidence-based research that evaluates how effectively nations are building bonds of trust with their professional diaspora communities.
That element of trust is essential to being engagement-ready. Without it, a country would not be able to mobilize its diaspora, as Ethiopia has done to help finance a hydroelectric dam — to advance industrialization, digital transformation, and AI development.
I look forward to sharing our work with you and to learning from all of you as we move forward.
Yes, a lot of us are working in this area. Unlike others, we focus on evidence-based research to give countries and their stakeholders data needed to make strategic decisions.
Hi everyone, my name is Jacob. I am very passionate about using my career to maximize my impact on helping the world. I am particularly interested in a career in ending factory farming or AI safety / existential risk reduction. Before I enter the labor market, I would like to pursue a grad degree. I am considering the following options: the PhD in economics, the MPA (master's in public administration), the MBA, or the JD.
Do folks have thoughts on which of these four options is best or most needed for very high impact work in ending factory farming or AI safety / existential risk reduction?
I think it depends on your views, mostly on AI. A lot of AI folks are in a sprint right now to get things done before AI becomes too powerful to affect. If that's your view, then likely further education won't be the best shout, since adding two - six years to the start of your professional life before you get stuck in might mean missing the boat.
However, if that isn't your view, and you have reason not to be as concerned about AI, then I'd guess the answer would depend a lot on your cause prioritisation, and what you're best at. Sorry I can't be more specific, I'm not a career advisor :)
Hi everyone, my name is Serena, and I am currently working as a consultant Technical Adviser in a capacity-building organisation in the Pacific, as well as writing for the EA NZ organisation. Previously I spent 7-8 years in government roles - strategic writing, research, and analysis - and left to see if I could find work which better aligned with my values and goals. I'm interested in pursuing different avenues of work as part of that quest, but writing, research, and team leadership are all strengths and interests of mine (as a generalist).
I'm interested in building up my EA connections - I first read up on EA principles and literature about 15 years ago and have aligned my giving to effective causes since then, but I am newer to the Forum and some of the philosophies within the EA umbrella. Looking forward to learning more.
Hey everyone, my name is Diego and I'm a freelance web developer based in Italy.
After years of working for a couple of companies with dubious goals I got fed up and decided that I want to change my career and do something good for the world. With my software engineering background I'm obviously drawn to the AI safety topic (but I won't shy away from other causes like animal welfare for example).
Since by trade I make websites and apps and I don't have formal training or experience in the AI space (bar a couple of chat bots integrations), I'm now on a quest to learn how this field works and how can I best apply my skills to safeguard our future from potentially catastrophic AI development.
I've been doing a lot of reading in the past month, and I'm looking for connections that can guide me in this process. Should anyone be in need of advice regarding web development don't hesitate to drop a message, I'll be glad to help!
As for my hobbies I'm into martial arts, role playing games, and music (I play the electric bass).
Looking forward to connect with like minded people and do some good :)
I came across EA while applying to an org funded by GiveWell. Their rigor and transparency drew me in. It felt refreshing to come across something that cares deeply while still being careful about maximum impact.
I've been a teacher with Teach for India, and I've worked in various program management roles across non-profits and startups. What draws me to EA is the overlap between a business's cost-effectiveness and a non-profit's drive for impact.
I currently run an e-commerce store solo. But impact is what's pulling me back toward full-time work that feels worth doing. This forum is a chance to meet orgs and people working in the areas I'm curious about: global health, and AI safety.
Hello everyone. My name is Vitaly, and I am an independent researcher based in Israel.
For more than a year, I have been building an experimental AI system called Garmon. The project explores whether an AI system can form behavior from its internal state before language is generated, rather than allowing language itself to become the source of decisions.
So far, I have completed controlled tests of state-dependent behavior and long continuous pre-language runs, including a 12-hour run in which the language model and memory were not allowed to act as decision-makers.
My current focus is memory continuity: how a long-running AI system can preserve one causal history over time and distinguish its own completed experience from information that was merely stored or inserted. There are still several difficult questions here that I am working through.
I would be glad to connect with people interested in AI safety, agent memory, state continuity, provenance, or long-running AI systems. I am especially open to criticism, research references, practical suggestions, and conversations with people working on related problems.
My name is Amy and I am new to EA although not new to social impact work. My degrees fall more along the lines of liberal arts & sciences (international studies, social service administration) and I don’t have a quant or tech-heavy background, although I have learned quite a bit through my work. I have mostly worked in “Monitoring & Evaluation” (M&E) in the US and abroad for a wide variety of programming from economic development to public health and othera for non-profits and local governments. Have also done some independent consulting on the side. I’ve built data systems from nothing, trained folks with low technological literacy to use data collection tools, done community surveying myself, analyzed our data against performance metrics, and created reports and other artifacts for decision making (which often went ignore or unread). The thing is, most M&E work is not very rigorous at all and worse, when implementation folks get bad results they often reject them outright. I’ve worked for a lot of different types of organizations seeking out a place where evidence is really what is driving funding decisions and thus I find myself here. The problem is I really don’t have the experience doing the kind of calculations or even using the language that is used in EA spaces. Advice on how to get started? Global health & development is most interesting to me and probably what I have the most experience in. I had Claude write me a program to learn fermi estimates recently as a starting point but would appreciate any advice
My top advice on getting started is to pick a post from the EA Forum's digest every week (or from the featured homepage), and read it. You'll pick up the lingo pretty quick. An optional extra bit of homework is to leave a comment either continuing the analysis or asking a thoughtful question.
Hi Emily, I would love to connect on this topic since I've been working on clean energy development (mainly solar) in a Sub-Saharan Africa context for the past seven years. Obviously the bottlenecks and barriers to clean energy are quite different in places like Malawi or Sierra Leone than in the US, but the opportunities are significant for improving human well-being, a core focus for EA. I am particularly interested in the role energy (clean or not) plays in enabling other global health and development interventions, for example vaccine rollout.
What is clean energy by your definition? I believe solar can be in the gray zone especially solar farm developments in LMIC countries, because for an example, here in North Macedonia, the regulations get bypassed by one council vote and there are solar parks on arable land. To make things worse, these solar farms don't manage the land under them properly, aka it's naked soil, no top-soil cover such as perennial grasses, so there is a net-negative effect on the environment when you consider that soil is irreplaceable in the long term.
I see that you are based and working just the US, in your US centric case I guess tumbleweeds might be the worst opponent, along with dust piling up on the panels.
For question number 4, I believe implementing solar in LMIC countries could prove most beneficial, transition them off of fossil fuels, and possibly build dams. Our yet to be constructed biggest dam would be Cebren Galishte, which would have an annual output of 1-1.2 TWh or around 20% of our annual electricity usage.
Hello everyone! I'm Alex, I found my way here through recommendations from contacts involved in AI safety.
I started thinking about how to have a more concrete impact while finishing my comp sci PhD (quantum cryptography and adversarial scenarios), so I pivoted to medicine. Stayed close to those "red team" roots by getting as much exposure as possible to CBRN-related fields, including nuclear medicine, Ebola preparedness, and got deployed in intensive care at peak-COVID.
I'm currently a postdoc scientist at Yale on AI+immunobiology, and interested in AI/bio safety as a long-term career.
On the less serious side, I do martial arts, rock climbing and strongman, and design board games as a hobby.
Has the forum team considered making a settings option to hide vote counts? The option to hide agree/disagree and reaction counts are something I would also appreciate.
I stayed away from this forum for over a year because of it being structured like Reddit, and have also heard concerns about vote counts anywhere influencing bias, as well as issues with like and dislike buttons in general. This post on LessWrong makes a more ambitious case for this, though I'm not campaigning here for any change affecting all users.
I understand the voting system is a necessary evil for maintaining the quality of what's read on the forum, and do think that users here are more responsible about vote count vs. agree count, as well as voicing why one personally disagrees with something, than is commonplace on Reddit. I just think it would be great for us not interested in rating and numbers in discourse to be able to opt out of seeing and indeed being influenced by them.
I do appreciate the removal of the downvote button on the front and user pages as well as the options already here for hiding usernames. Thank you for reading and considering all this! 👍
I couldn't get the free Claude to make one that works, and don't really care about this enough to pursue it further, at least for now. Thank you for the suggestion, though! 😁
Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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Hi everyone, I'm Roland. I've worked in econometrics and experimentation for tech and consumer companies for many years and have been lurking on EA for the past couple. I'm a bit of a polymath, with a couple graduate degrees in computational physics and business administration. I'd like to engage more with people who are interested in working on effective and novel solutions to problems like extreme poverty and health. I am action-oriented and interested particularly in exploring low-friction, big-if-true POC solutions that can be trialed in these domains. I love meeting new people so feel free to say hi :)
Hi Roland, what are some of the big-if-true ideas you considered?
Hi Alex, Thanks for your comment. Here are a few: