Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
There sort of is -- I've seen some EAs use the light bulb emoji 💡 on Twitter (I assume this comes from the EA logo) -- but it's not widely used, and it's unclear to me whether it means "identifies as an EA" or "is a practicing EA" (i.e. donates a substantial percentage of their income to EA causes and/or does direct work on those causes).
I'm unsure whether I want there to be an easy way to "identify as EA", since identities do seem to make people worse at thinking clearly. I've thought/written about this (in the context of a neoliberal identity too, as it happens), and my conclusion was basically that a strong EA identity would be okay so long as the centerpiece of the identity continues to be a question ("How can we do the most good?") as opposed to any particular answer. I'm not sure how realistic that is, though.