James Brobin
Bio
Hi! I'm a twenty three year old writer, researcher, and software engineer. I'm particularly interested in EA community building, public awareness raising, and how we navigate the transition to a post-AGI society.
I also know a bit about farm animal suffering, since I made a website about how to reduce the animal cruelty in one's diet. (boulderhumanefood.org)
How others can help me
I'm looking for opportunities that make use of writing, research, or software engineering, especially in the fields of EA community building, public communication, and AI safety. If you have any projects I find interesting, I may be able to help out for free.
I'm also looking for someone who can exchange feedback on writing with me.
How I can help others
If you want to discuss anything I've written on the forum, don't be afraid to reach out.
Also, I've done a lot of research on EA's presence on YouTube. If you are making YouTube videos or are hoping to do so, feel free to reach out for feedback or suggestions.
Posts 3
Comments33
I would like to be able to select multiple tags when searching the forum (such as "animal welfare" and "collections/resources"). I would also like to be able to get the top posts for different tags from different years. (For example, I would like to be able to find the top posts on "existential risks" from 2025.)
I would really like to see AI text banned from the forum. Many posters use AI tools to help organize, edit or generate parts of their writing. As a result of this, it's difficult to assess which ideas are originally from the author or merely generated by AI. Overall, I think that AI generated text tends to have a much lower quality because its tends be very vague, general, and repetitive. It also tends to use the exact same structures over and over again, which can be very boring to read. Lastly, by requiring posters to write out their own thoughts, it will create a higher barrier of entry to posting on the forum, which will improve the forum's content overall.
I haven't found anything about how much YouTube converts people to highly engaged EAs. I also haven't seen anything about what actually motivates people to be highly engaged in EA either. That said, I did just find this article from 80,000 Hours, which discusses how the organization moved away from ads and sponsorships but started to focus more on making their own videos. As such, it's probably not too unlikely we'll have a good answer from them in the near future.
"EA animal activism's current interventions neglect creating meaningful change over longer time horizons (10 - 20 years)."