New Year's Thread: What do you want to achieve this year?

I'm cheating a bit, because both of these are well on their way, but two big current goals:

1. Get Israel to iodize its salt!
2. Run an expert elicitation on Biorisk with RAND and publish it.
    

Related to EA, I'd like to:

• Give 10% again.
• Run a debate week with more votes and discussion than the animal welfare vs global health debate week.
• Write at least one non-work-related Forum post. 

Unrelated to EA, I'd like to:

• Get a maths tutor. I've tried to teach myself maths before (I haven't seriously studied maths since I was 16, and I think it makes a good chunk of human knowledge inaccessible to me, which is a bummer), but I've never made it a habit. I believe that if I pay for a weekly/ bi-weekly tutoring session I'll be forced to actually put the work in.
  • You can help me by commenting here in February to ask whether I've found a tutor yet...
• Write at least one short story. I enjoyed doing more fiction writing in 2024, especially this short story. I'd like to make sure I do more. 

A split between career capital, skills, experience and others:

Get into university (this is a working towards goal to start biomedical science in Sept 2025), dependant on alevel results (find out in August)

Podcast episodes (under the microscope) release at least 6 cell-ebrity episodes with biologists doing good and making an impact Do frequent (e.g. weekly) bio bite episodes

Write at least 10 blog posts or forum posts on biology and biorisk topics to grow skills in comms and literature

Get an internship at a lab for the summer (ideally to learn technical wet lab skills relevant to genetics, epidemiology, vaccines, infectious disease etc)

How others can help If anyone has any connections for wet lab internships in England or who may consider grant funding (eg charities, stipends) for 18 year old for this purpose Anyone working in the bioscience fields interested in being interviewed on the podcast Anyone who wants to collaborate on a paper especially in biosecurity who needs a less qualified but very ambitious and hard working individual to research or write parts of it

I gave input to the UN together with Cool Earth, Equal Right and Professor Robert Fletcher. During 2025 I will try to figure out what to do with that text (any suggestions are warmly welcome): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uAzSycfm190C1hnVDCnYTXK2d1tvw0WsbfE8RJYvw2U/edit?usp=drivesdk

I will also try to figure out how I can start a PhD in a meaningful research project. I am stuck in the southern Sweden because I have my family here, but at the university where I work as a lecturer in public health, there are not many research projects that feels right / impactful enough. The next best thing would be to collaborate more with EA people at other universities. I will also book meetings with some people from the EAG online conference, now that I have more time to spare.

Do the ol' career transition into AI safety. Probably governance/policy, but with a technical flavour.

(If you need stats, data science, report writing, or management consultancy skills - please hit me up!)

• Write 12 Forum posts (each for every month)
• Get As from all of my classes
• Find a cool summer internship
• Be done with my cause prio

Keep up the good habits and positive mental health I’ve been keeping up for some time

Happy New Year! 

Something I'd like to achieve this year: Transitioning from the private sector into a communications role, ideally in global priorities research, animal advocacy or global health. (I'm guessing comms is my best personal fit currently, given my career background is in writing, editing and content creation.)

Last autumn, I applied for a Communications Specialist role at a key research and implementation organisation in the EA community, and was shortlisted from 1,000+ applications to complete the skills assessment. While I didn’t make it to interview stage, the team emphasised they considered me a strong and competitive candidate, and said they'd be happy to see another application from me in the future. That definitely helped validate my decision to pursue this transition.

How others could help: 

• Share resources, organisations or roles in these cause areas that value – and need – strong communication skills.
• Offer advice on whether I should keep my focus broad across these causes or hone in on one (e.g., animal welfare). If you’ve faced a similar decision, I’d love to hear your perspective.
• Recommend specific people or networks I could connect with to learn more.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

1. Become conversational in Spanish so I can talk to my fianceé's family easily.
2. Work out ten times per month (3x/week with leeway)
3. Submit 12 short stories about transformative AI to publishers this year.
   
   More details here. Ongoing mission: get a literary agent for my novel!

Hi Toby 

My goal for the year remains the same as it has been for the last decade -To make the world a better place and when I say world, I mean the whole world, not just my world. 

Reducing my carbon footprint remains top of the list, closely followed by defeating the rise of fascists, racists, promoters of violence, champions of ignorance, prejudiced bigots etc etc. 

The first will be easy, the second almost impossible, but the real failure in life is not to try.

Regards 

Trev