My name is Edo, I'm one of the co-organisers of EA Israel. I'm also helping out in moderation for the forum, feel free to reach out if I can help with anything.
I have studied mathematics, worked as an mathematical researcher in the IDF and was in training and leadership roles. After that I started a PhD in CS, where I helped to start a research center with the goal of advancing Biological research using general mathematical abstractions. After about 6 months I have decided to leave the center and the PhD program.
Currently, I'm mostly thinking about improving the scientific ecosystem and particularly how one can prioritize better within basic science.
Generally, I'm very excited about improving prioritisation within EA and how we conduct our research around it and EA causes in general. I'm also very interested in better coordination and initiative support within the EA community. Well, I'm pretty excited about the EA community and basically everything else that has to do with doing the most good.
My Virtue Ethic brain parts really appreciates honesty and openness, curiosity and self-improvement, caring and supporting, productivity and goal-orientedness, cooperating as the default option and fixing broken systems.
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What's BLUF?
Not sure what mathematically interests you, but you should probably check out Vanessa Kosoy's learning-theoretic research agenda (she is hiring mathematicians!). Also, the Topos Institute are doing many interesting things in AI safety and other things (I'm personally particularly interested in their compositionality/modeling work, which seems very cool to me).
A couple of unasked-for pieces of advice that may be relevant (would be for my past self who was sort of in a similar position):
- Sadly, many times we should expect tradeoffs between impact and interest, where to actually implement innovations requires doing hard manual work. Especially in academic fields, where the impactful uninteresting work is more neglected.
- Our interests change quite a bit over time, and it's usually hard to predict how it might change. That said, for many people they find stuff more interesting the more competence they feel at it and the more they care about the problem they try to solve or about the product they intend to deliver.
I think this is a great idea! Not for me at this time, but I'd be interested in reading such a post.
Also, if you could use some inspiration for the format, I've done a collaborative note-taking group with a random person on the internet on the book "How to Take Smart Notes": https://roamresearch.com/#/app/roamexample4muli/page/u1M-bz2nZ
We basically agreed to read 1 chapter a week (not always successfully) and write main notes from it, while reading and responding to each other. It was fun and gave us plenty of room to engage with it more deeply. (In the end we had a zoom call for the first time, which was pretty cool).
Roam is definitely not needed, and gdoc would work as well, but it was a nice meta gimmick ;)
Several years ago I took this type of argument very seriously. Specifically, I thought that our expected lifespan might be practically infinite (given a small chance of "immortality"). My conclusion was that I should keep more careful care of my brain's health, while caring somewhat less about other physical issues, because I expect medicine to more easily solve other problems and that if there would be cause for prioritization among sick people I'd probably expect there to be an advantage to people with good neurological health. That mostly changed my diet to avoid refined carbs and helped motivate me to do more exercise - I wasn't convinced about anything else.
In recent years I noticed that my thinking about this changed. First, I care a lot less about my personal preservation as I've started feeling more compassion toward others in a similar amount to my future self, and have taken more seriously thought experiments and buddhist-like ideas around the self as an illusion. Secondly, my self-care priorities were about more immediate mental health issues.
did you ever search the forum for negative indicators of whether someone is unfit?
Related: Cochrane's series of papers on waste in science and Global Priorities Project's investigation into the cost-effectiveness of medical research
I think I'm missing a lot of context😊
Could you (or someone else) explain to me the core thesis of this post?
+1 to the norm of not publishing private correspondence without permission
Strong upvote, because I love this idea of delegating personal prioritization!