Ulrik Horn
Bio
Participation4
I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and am also doing work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts about my decision that climate change was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
How others can help me
Lately, and in consultation with 80k hours and some “EA veterans”, I have concluded that I should consider instead working directly on EA priority causes. Thus, I am determined to keep seeking opportunities for entrepreneurship within EA, especially considering if I could contribute to launching new projects. Therefore, if you have a project where you think I could contribute, please do not hesitate to reach out (even if I am engaged in a current project - my time might be better used getting another project up and running and handing over the reins of my current project to a successor)!
How I can help others
I can share my experience working at the intersection of people and technology in deploying infrastructure/a new technology/wind energy globally. I can also share my experience in coming from "industry" and doing EA entrepreneurship/direct work. Or anything else you think I can help with.
I am also concerned about the "Diversity and Inclusion" aspects of EA and would be keen to contribute to make EA a place where even more people from all walks of life feel safe and at home. Please DM me if you think there is any way I can help. Currently, I expect to have ~5 hrs/month to contribute to this (a number that will grow as my kids become older and more independent).
Posts 8
Comments317
Topic contributions1
First of all I would be careful about seeking to refute all criticisms - I think we should a priory be agnostic whether it is true or not. We can then after carefully investigating the criticism see if there is work to do for us, or if we should seek to refute it. Something else would be in stark opposition to the very principles we might seek to defend. To that end, another source of criticism which for some reason often is not cast as that is the community health surveys - this is insiders' largest problems with the ideas and more frequently various aspects of the community. To quote the latest such survey with excellent and careful analysis:
- Reasons for dissatisfaction with EA:
- A number of factors were cited a similar number of times by respondents as Very important reasons for dissatisfaction, among those who provided a reason: Cause prioritization (22%), Leadership (20%), Justice, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity (JEID, 19%), Scandals (18%) and excessive Focus on AI / x-risk / longtermism (16%).
- Including mentions of Important (12%) and Slightly important (7%) factors, JEID was the most commonly mentioned factor overall.
I should maybe have made it clearer that I am speaking to a large part from my own experience. That said I have done lay reading of psychology and combined with quite consistent observations of multiple kids I feel quite sure about some claims (like the need to develop skill in when to deceit/how to build trust). Other claims I feel less certain about, like that they are more equipped than adults to not be trusted. I should probably have made it clearer how certain I was about each of the claims and what, if any, research or observations underpinned each of my claims. Thanks for holding me accountable on my epistemics! I also recognize after reading your comment that there is a lot of diversity in kids and perhaps there are kids that suffer a great deal from not being trusted, and kids that might not actually choose to engage much in deceitful behavior. And perhaps it reflects on my own failing as a parent haha!
I think there is a lot going on. For one, kids are equipped to deceive but are not equipped to learn when to deceive. So to learn how deceit/trust works in social settings they have to experiment on their parents - you often catch your kids silently raiding the candy cupboard in the kitchen. So that kind of makes you skeptical of them. Then I think there is a cultural thing where it is ok not to trust your kids that much. This I feel less sure about the validity of, but I think it is a thing. If your boss would have as little trust in you as the average parent has in their child, I think it would feel terrible (I am not insinuating anything about the author here, this is just general observations of young families). I think there is more to it too (including language as Kirsten pointed out) and kids seem to cope well even though they often do not get much trust - maybe kids are emotionally equipped to deal with not being trusted that much - they are pretty happy go lucky. And I am sure there are many more aspects I am missing, like the parents being exhausted, etc.
Perhaps, if you can get people around you to help you, I think that is helpful. If you can get your kids into not just sticking to their opinions, but themselves helping you create experiments to get at the truth, that could help. If they just said "mom, try this before we continue arguing" right out of the gate perhaps you would have realized it was true. I try to tell this to people close to me "please help me understand when I am wrong - I am often convinced by experiments or good comparisons". A recent lesson from my own life was when someone said they were tired of cleaning up after me. We then figured out that the person who cleaned up after me felt as annoyed cleaning 1 of my things as 10 of their own. This immediately changed my behavior (for me I care less about whose things I clean than how long time it takes me in total so their perspective was completely alien to me - I could not guess that someone could feel that way). Basically, just give people around you (family, colleagues) a recipe that is easy to follow on how to convince you.
"shared understanding of some of the biggest challenges facing our community"
I am currently doing work on civilian shelters from bio. It is a lot about air filtration, particle migration through cracks and other things that are quite related to mechanical engineering. PPE is another aspect where understanding fluid dynamics and how to create products around that is important. There are probably other things I have not yet thought of.
Start exploring worst-case climate scenarios. Their likelihood and what might be done to quickly prevent them if in e.g. 2070 we see ourselves in a worse situation and need to fix it in e.g. 5 years (make estimates of funding available). Also explore how different regions might respond to such extreme scenarios. Basically a break the glass plan in case things go really badly.
I think this is super important - criticism of those with the most power is likely to be worthwhile. Like in all politics power can "buy" and create "opinion". Then, if epistemics is something we value, we have to be super careful of the contribution money makes to truth. Just look at the people in climate change - nowadays nearly anyone can frame their pet project as a climate change intervention and they get funded, as long as they go along with the party line. And in climate change there are huge economic incentives - it is not a false claim by conservatives that many "green" investors stand to gain enormously from a change to the cleantech they invested in. If there is one thing history should have taught us it is that power corrupts and I see no robust immune system in EA against this. At the same time we have to be charitable - there are of course significant chances those with power in the movement both have pure intentions of doing good and are able to resist any influence from personal gains they stand to make from nudging the movement in certain directions.