Please note: I'm no longer coordinating these chats. That said, if you want to chat to one of these people, I'd still encourage you to send them a message with context on you and why you want to chat.
...
People might underestimate how willing others are to give advice or soundboard ideas. I made a quick list of people who told me they’d be happy to chat - some have more availability than others.
If you’d like to speak to one of the people below, please book a call at this link and I’ll try to connect you.
If you can't find someone relevant to you below, message me and I'll try to match you with someone not on the list.
If you haven't booked a career coaching call with 80,000 hours, I also strongly recommend doing so!
Caveats
I’m writing this post as an experiment. If there’s lots of interest and it's a good use of everyone’s time, I might make this into a more developed product.
While it’s exciting that these people are willing to give their time, the supply is still quite limited - nothing here should be taken as an obligation on their part to talk to anyone in particular, nor a guarantee that they’ll still have free slots at any point in the future. But if you are interested, use the forms below to request a call.
Note: I picked people I happened to have spoken to recently: this is not a hand-picked, exclusive club. If you’re also happy to speak to people, then feel free to post a comment below following the same format (similar to the “Who’s hiring” thread).
People
Barry Grimes
Communications Manager at Happier Lives Institute and "In Depth EA" programme facilitator. LinkedIn.
Ask about:
- Global Health and Wellbeing
- Communications
Eirin Evjen
Operations associate at Forethought Foundation. Previously ran EA Norway. LinkedIn.
Ask about:
- Careers in operations
- Running an EA national group
Eli Rose
EA community-building grantmaking and projects at Open Phil. LinkedIn
Talk about:
- EA 101 questions
- In-depth questions about longtermist cause areas
Elika Somani
Deputy Head of Events at Atlas Fellowship, incoming Bioethics and Biosecurity Research Fellow at the National Institutes for Health, EA Programme Facilitator and Community Builder . LinkedIn
Chat about:
- EA 101 questions and being a welcoming face to the community :)
- Careers (or interest) in public health, disease control, and biosecurity
- Careers (or interest) in operations and events
- Community Building!!
There’s no dumb questions, I’m always happy to meet new people and talk about EA!
Evan Hubinger
Research Fellow at Machine Intelligence Research Institute. LinkedIn
Chat about:
- AI alignment careers
John Halstead
Research Fellow at the Forethought Foundation. Formerly Head of Applied Research at Founders Pledge and researcher at Centre for Effective Altruism, DPhil in political philosophy from Oxford. Linkedin.
Ask about:
- Careers in research
- Climate change
Sarah Cheng
Software engineer at Centre for Effective Altruism and Intro to EA facilitator. LinkedIn
Ask about:
- Basic questions in EA
- Software engineering careers
Seren Kell
Science and Technology Manager at Good Food Institute. LinkedIn
Ask about:
- Plant-based and cultivated meat science
- Biochemistry
- Europe’s sustainable protein research ecosystem
- Research funding
I'd be happy to chat with anybody about charity entrepreneurship in the longtermist space. You can book a time here on my year-long, location-independent EAG calendly
Also feel free to book a time there for any other topic. I want to replicate the serendipitous meetings of an EAG year-round and I'm endlessly extroverted, so love talking to new people.
Thanks Ben for setting this up!
If there was some kind of Global EA directory/ year round Swapcard, this project idea could be rolled into it quite easily.
Agree!
Thanks for putting this together!
The list of people on the google form and the list in this post don't match (e.g. Seren Kell is on the post but not on the form and vice versa for David Manheim and Zachary Robinson)
Thanks for pointing this out - I’ve updated this now.
Apologies to anyone who weren’t able to complete the form.
🤯
Cool! I’d love to join in! I’ve created a “conversation menu” (h/t to a friend for the idea!) on my profile. Here’s a copy-paste that I probably won’t update when I update the original on the profile.
I’m happy to do calls, give feedback, or go bouldering together, also virtually. You can book me on Calendly.
Some topics for potential calls:
Also note that I’m not necessarily expert in all of this stuff! I suck at Trackmania for example.
Thanks Denis. I am a fan of the variety of this list! :)
Whee! Thanks!
Hey!
Any chance you hear about problems that might be solved with software?
My top list contains:
Outside EA:
Seeing your post on impostor syndrome in hiring, I’m wondering whether you’re maybe well-positioned to start a think tank to solve hiring among altruists. How to invest our time seems to be about as big of a question as how to invest our money, so it may also warrant similarly much effort to optimize.
There has been a lot of research on the money side, but on the time side, there are only 80k and Probably Good. It seems to me that both give you good answers if you’re a particular type of person and wonder what, very broadly, you should do with your life. But they address questions such as efficient moral trade between orgs with different goals or optimal cooperation between orgs with similar goals only very superficially by comparison. Maybe that problem warrants a new dedicated think tank.
I don’t know if that’ll end up requiring software to solve though.
Thanks Ben, good idea.
Eli Kaufman
Independent consultant with background in operations. Helping organizations be effective by making the most of their systems. LinkedIn
Ask about:
Calendly
Awesome, thanks Eli.
1. Yeah something like this!
2. Great, thanks. I've added you to the google form but I think it will work better if other people who comment add their calendly so that people don't have to go through me.
This is a great idea! I don't currently have capacity for one-to-one calls, but I do hold monthly small group calls in an "office hours" format.
I'm a technical AI safety researcher at CHAI and PhD student at UC Berkeley, and I'm happy to talk about my research, others' research, graduate school, careers in AI safety, and other related topics. If you're interested, you can find out more about my research here, and sign up to join an upcoming call here.
A critical reading is that this seems that most of the people would motivate chatters to take careers steps which may advance some of the projects that they or others have in mind.
Is this the objective (definitely can be worthwhile), while other avenues should be found for discussing solutions to problems that these professionals focus on?
The two people who so far commented about being willing to chat seem interested in brainstorming solutions (and unstructured chatting) in addition to sharing more one-sided advice.
Before I noticed these comments I meant to suggest renaming the post to something like 'Not sure about your next career steps and getting bored? Book a chat with an EA professional!'. With the comments, the expectations in the chat should be covered by the topics list.
Hi Ben, I'm not clear what this refers to. Could this be clarified in the post?
"<topic> 101" generally means beginner or introductory questions, taken from some universities where a class like MATH101 would be the first and most basic mathematics class in a degree. So, "EA 101 questions" here means basic or introductory EA questions.
Thanks Jay! @Quinn, this is what I intended it to mean.