I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I've interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear, a newish longtermist EA org.
I'm now doing research thanks to an EA funds grant, trying to answer hard, important EA-relevant questions. My first big project (in addition to everything listed here) was helping to generate this team Red Teaming post.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
Note: inspired by the FTX+Bostrom fiascos and associated discourse. May (hopefully) develop into longform by explicitly connecting this taxonomy to those recent events (but my base rate of completing actual posts cautions humility)
Or fails to induce
A few Forum meta things you might find useful or interesting:
A resource that might be useful: https://tinyapps.org/
There's a ton there, but one anecdote from yesterday: referred me to this $5 IOS desktop app which (among other more reasonable uses) made me this full quality, fully intra-linked >3600 page PDF of (almost) every file/site linked to by every file/site linked to from Tomasik's homepage (works best with old-timey simpler sites like that)
Nice! (admit I've only just skimmed and looked at the eye-catching graphics and tables 🙃). A couple small potential improvements to those things:
Thank you - fixed!
A monitor will only benefit you if you act on its readings by a) buying a purifier, b) avoiding areas with pollution. If you install the monitor at home you don't really have the option to avoid it so a) is the only viable path to impact I see.
Eh it's gonna depend on the particulars of each living situation but I think there are a bunch of dials/levers the monitor can cause you to adjust:
Usual/common
Potentially also:
More important than "tweak each dial 2%" though, is that I think during some small but non-trivial proportion of user-hours (5-10%?), the user would discover that their working environment is bad enough to warrant a more dramatic change than "crack a window and turn on a fan," which they wouldn't make without direct immediate feedback from a monitor. I'm not certain though of course, and certainly could be wrong about this!
I don't want to make too strong a claim here; my current guess is basically "C02 doesn't (at normalish levels) decrease intelligence per se; it makes you tired and lazy" (so playing a fun and low executive function game less affected perhaps?) On the other hand I recently learned that it's anxiogenic, which intuitively points in the opposite direction of arousal so I really don't know...
On the other other hand, compare air quality at large to, say, "temperature while studying," where the outcome variable measured is final grade. Would I really get worse grades if it was always 75° instead of 65°? I'm not sure, but even null result RCT for air conditioning affect on academic performance or math problems completed in a minute wouldn't convince me that temperature has no causal effect on cognition-intensive tasks; ceteris paribus is ~impossible to achieve!
Last week I complained about not being able to see all the top shortform posts in one list. Thanks to Lorenzo for pointing me to the next best option:
...the closest I found is https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?sortedBy=topAdjusted&timeframe=yearly&filter=all, you can see the inflation-adjusted top posts and shortforms by year.
It wasn't too hard to put together a text doc with (at least some of each of) all 1470ish shortform posts, which you can view or download here.
I was starting to feel like the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie's eternally-doomed protagonist (it'll look presentable if I just do this one more thing), so I'm cutting myself off here to see whether it might be worth me (or someone else) making it better.
Oh yeah and, if you haven't done so already, I highly recommend going through the top Shortform posts for each of the last four years here
Late but thanks on both, and commented there!
At risk of jeopardizing EA's hard-won reputation of relentless internal criticism:
Even setting aside its object-level impact-relevant criteria (truth, importance, etc), this is just enormously impressive both in terms of magnitude and quality. The post itself gives us readers an anchor on which to latch critiques, questions, and comments, so it's easy to forget that each step or decision in the whole methodology had to be chosen from an enormous space of possibilities. And this looks— at least on a first red—like very many consecutive well-made steps and decisions