Henry Stanley 🔸
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Participation4
Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Posts 17
Comments217
This is wonderful – thank you so much for writing it.
Mutual dedication to one another’s ends seems like a thing commonly present in religious and ethnic communities. But it seems quite uncommon to the demographic of secular idealists, like me. Such idealists tend to form and join single-focus communities like effective altruism, which serve only a subset of our eudaemonic needs.
Agree about secular, single-purpose communities – but I'm not sure EA is quite the same.
I've found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; those principles provide a good set of shared values from which to build other things, like a sense of community, shared houses, group meals, playing music together and just supporting each other generally. Then again, I don't consider EA to be the core of my identity, so YMMV.
I feel like not many people really have "a job that can mostly be done from anywhere", and a lot hinges on that assumption here. If you're full time remote then sure, the case for being in a high COL area is weaker. But I suspect the majority of jobs have some expectation of being in the office at least sometimes.
If your organisation pays people less if they do the same work from a cheaper area, consider if you are creating weird incentives
If your org takes the view than collaborating in person is better than working fully remote (and plenty of orgs do take this view, and quite reasonably) then that org should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay people more if they're coming into the office. This is what we did when I was running a fintech startup. By extension you should be willing to take a lower salary if you're going to work remotely from a cheaper place.
I think your piece treats being in a high COL place as solely an EA move; in reality EA hubs are not picked from a random list and are attractive places in themselves. People want to be in e.g. London for lots of reasons (more connections, friends, fun things going on) and it being an EA hub is a nice side benefit. I was based in London for many years and wouldn't for example make the move out to a cheaper UK city, leaving behind friends and family and a large dating pool - there would need to be a strong draw to overcome the cost of doing that beyond just lower cost of living.
A fantastically inspiring story and a super interesting take - sounds like Wasoko was a lot of hard graft. Well done for sticking with it for 11 years. I also see you’ve pledged 70% of the proceeds with Founders Pledge; also extremely cool.
(Makes my B2B SaaS founding to give efforts seem much less Herculean in comparison!)
Great post!
we already had multiple strong studies showing that the availability of equivalent substitutes does not lead to major changes in meat consumption.
This feels like your weakest argument. So far there aren’t “equivalent substitutes” to meat - only plant based imitations - so it’s not clear what these studies are telling us. The RP study you link to explicitly says it’s an analysis of plant-based meats and not cultured meat.
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like it’s barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
Ferrous sulphate is also common but a bit nauseating and poorly absorbed in any case. Ferrous bisglycinate is also found branded as “gentle iron”.
For those very deficient in iron, an iron infusion will give you ~two years’ worth of iron in one go - and skips all the issues with oral bioavailability of iron. You will need to test your iron levels first to avoid iron overload.
I write a bit about iron supplementation in my guide to treating restless leg syndrome (RLS) for which iron deficiency is a common cause: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome