Jeffray_Behr
Bio
My approach to improving the world is to:
- live sparingly so I can maximize my donations to highly effective charities (based on EA-related organizations' recommendations such as GiveWell, Founders Pledge, and Animal Charity Evaluators)
- pursue an as impactful as possible career based on my personal skills and experiences (I am currently working for New School Foods, a startup which is developing whole muscle plant-based fish at price parity)
- live a vegan and environmentally-conscious lifestyle (to reduce animal suffering and mitigate climate change)
- promote the EA philosophy (I co-led the Effective Altruism Waterloo group in university and have since facilitated 5 cohorts of the EA Virtual program, plus initiated a podcast episode on the topic of effective altruism run by the University of Waterloo Engineers Without Borders chapter)
- learn more about about effective altruism sub-areas through reading EA-related books and articles as well as listening to EA-related podcasts
- write about EA (I have made 2 posts on the EA forum)
- volunteer at EA-related organizations (I am currently a volunteer for ALLFED)
- use my spare time to help others pursue a career in alternative proteins (I created a career guide and podcast series for this)
Posts 3
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I joined the SHIPs (https://www.notion.so/SHIPs-Student-led-High-Impact-Projects-035514f7b8594205b16e3e3a9cf6e736) program and came up with a few project ideas that I think are worth pursuing, but I don't have the background to do them effectively. The following are some of my ideas that I encourage others to consider working on:
Default Advocacy: Advocating (via sending emails and/or calling) to people of influence to set the altruistic option as the default (to take advantage of the default effect since people are less likely to opt in/out of something if it requires effort). Examples of this could include have all citizens be organ donors by default, have vegetarian/vegan meals the default option provided, installing energy efficient equipment as the default in buildings, etc.
Influence Celebrities to Donate Effectively: The goal of this project is to convince celebrities and other wealthy and/or highly influential people to donate to effective charities. Since they have a vast amount of wealth, the scale of possible donations is quite large. In addition, their influence my inspire their followers to also give more effectively, thereby magnifying the impact of this project. There currently exists High Impact Athletes (https://highimpactathletes.org/athletes), but there is definitely more room to grow this concept to other celebrities such as movie/TV stars, musical artists, business moguls, politicians, etc.
Impact of Switching Protein Subsidies: Research the pros and cons of the US government switching its subsidies from conventional meat agriculture to alternative protein agriculture. Create a detailed report highlighting these benefits (and drawbacks). Ideally, this report could be given to a politician as the basis for a policy/bill to switch subsidies from conventional meat agriculture to alternative protein agriculture.
Other projects ideas from the SHIPs program can be found below: https://airtable.com/shrEGsUnvXNnL8k8V/tblTdppN872IArKIR https://airtable.com/shrCXtRpCW1HxxafC/tblugqOktQp7zzxrm
As someone who discovered EA while studying mechanical engineering, I have thought about this a lot. My initial plan was to work in renewable energy technologies, but I shifted towards working on plant-based meat technologies and developing more efficient processing equipment. Also, I have been able to use my background in mechanical engineering to help ALLFED as a volunteer by researching how various resilient food technologies could scale up in the event of a global catastrophe. I also recommend anyone interested in learning about the intersection of EA and engineering to check out High Impact Engineer's resources page: https://www.highimpactengineers.org/resources