All of Joseph's Comments + Replies

MATS is hiring for two roles on the program team. MATS will have more than a dozen employees at EAG San Francisco 2026, so feel free to come talk to use if you are interested in joining the team.

• Program Systems Associate: Build and maintain MATS' internal infrastructure, including databases, data collection forms, and integrations. Refactor legacy systems and collaborate across teams to improve infrastructure and establish best practices. Create ambitious, shared infrastructure for the AI safety talent ecosystem. Requires strong database design skills and

I've seen so many scenarios in which EA folks reinvent wheels that are already very well-established in the broader professional world, or in which people rely on networks of EAs for advice rather than asking a subject matter expert. I've mostly seen this in relation to hiring because that is an area that I've seen internal processes for a few different EA organizations.

More broadly and more informally I've seen people failed to train new managers and fail to adopt project management practices (or to even be aware that they exist). One person mentioned to ... (read more)

I'm curious how easy or hard it is to set up some drop shipping. A few items (t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, caps) with a few choices of designs might be feasible, much like the Shrimp Welfare Project Shop, or the DFTBA shop.

A semi-regular reminder that anybody who wants to join EA (or EA adjacent) online book clubs, I'm your guy.

Copying from a previous post:

I run some online book clubs, some of which are explicitly EA and some of which are EA-adjacent: one on China as it relates to EA, one on professional development for EAs, and one on animal rights/welfare/advocacy. I don't like self-promoting, but I figure I should post this at least once on the EA Forum so that people can find it if they search for "book club" or "reading group." Details, including links for joining each

Glad to see another reader here! You've got the core books. Previous posts on the EA Forum have explored similar things, specifically this infographic/poster, and this scraping of Goodreads. I'd broadly recommend skimming through the 'books' tag to see what else you turn up.

Would you be willing/able to share a bit more detail or context about this? I'm somewhat interested, but there isn't enough information here for me to feel comfortable to step forward and raise my hand.

If you want, I'd be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I've been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.

I read the book a while back and I enjoyed it. It was kind of fun to get some juicy details about bad things inside Facebook. My main takeaway was something along the lines of "a fish rots from the head." Leaders of an organization set priorities, direction, culture (to a great extent), and this books served as sort of a case study of leadership that has a fairly narrow focus. Poor social skills and poor common sense, entitlement, and the general idea that you get everything you want all stood out to me. The levels of sycophancy and self-interest were a bi... (read more)

show me your role models who have directly improved the world

This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/respect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who aren't famous or well-known. They aren't necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/running the Against Malaria Foundation, but we don't know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.

But here... (read more)

the suggested role models are all thinkers rather than doers

At least some of the people listed are either doers, or are a sort of combination of thinkers and doers. I'm do view these people mostly as thinkers, but I also have a sort of bias in that I didn't know about Hans Rosling in the 80s or about Paul Farmers work in the 90s. These people have done much more than simply give talks and write blog posts; they have also done things to directly improve the world.

Some of the people on the list

• Changed their careers in order to generate more donations for the

I've enjoyed reading your writing over the past few years, and I'll miss you. Good luck with whatever you will be focusing on!

What do you have in mind when you're thinking of those who are not "able to donate"?

I was thinking about people who don't have any income, or who have significant uncertainty/stability in their futures, or who have large financial burdens/commitments.

More broadly, if you want to read more of my thoughts on this topic, I've made a few comments over the years about living in high cost of living areas, about general feelings of financial insecurity/instability, and about not pledging to donate. Those might provide a bit more insight into my throught and persp... (read more)

this allows them to accumulate moral status and recognition more easily than those of us without such advantages.

This feels very salient to me. I've seen EA job applications ask about how much money I donate, and that feels like evaluating people on outcomes rather than on inputs. I've definitly noticed the status/recognition given to people that are able to donate.

Conversely, I've definitly chosen to not pursue opportunities that advertise low payment; those have felt vaguely similar to the culture of unpaid (or poorly paid) internships in publishing: often only people who have other sources of money or similar safety nets are able to pursue them.

I may benefit from taking an online training bootcamp, is there something specific I should look out for, something in the project bit?

The appropriate advice would depend on what your career goals are.

• If you don't have any technical or computer programming skills and you want to start learning, I would find some intro-level courses on HTML, CSS, SQL, and Python. There are also good playlists on YouTube that are suitable for beginners, such as Sentdex or thenewboston. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is also very popular.
• If you want to learn more about

I'm having trouble joining the book club that you host; could you please help me?

I don't think I can help you, because I don't know what sort of a problem or difficulty you are encountering. 😂 This is the link to the Google Doc, which has all of the information: descriptions, links and instructions on how to join, links to lists of books, etc.

where I need experience to get opportunities, but need opportunities to gain experience

This is a very real issue, and it is a bit of a catch-22. The core of the advice is really to start with little steps.

You need to have experience with projects, employers, or volunteer opportunities. These needs to be good enough that you can describe them on a resume or in a cover letter and they sound decently impressive. They also need to give you stories that you can use to answer questions like "what is the most logistically complex event or project you've been invo... (read more)

To a certain extent, I think that local/city groups might fit this description. The EA communities in NYC, DC, and Chicago each have their own Slack workspace, and they also do in-person events. For people not in big cities, EA Anywhere's Slack workspace offers a discussion space. None of those are perfect substitutes for the EA Forum, but my vague impression is that each of them is less AI-focused than the EA Forum. There is also an EA Discord, but I haven't interacted with that much so I can't speak to it's style or quality.

As far as events go, there is ... (read more)

A bit of nice discussion/exploration about longtermism over on the AskPhilosophy subreddit. The short summary might be something like 'don't conflate longtermism with caring about future generations.' Since the EA forum seems to be mostly focused on things other than helping people understand philosophy, I thought it might be nice to share some stuff focused on that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1ktiqm8/i_dont_get_the_controversy_with_longtermism 

Tentatively and naively, I think this is accurate.

I'm wondering if there would be any way to target/access this population? If this campaigns existed, what action would it take? Some groups of people are relatively easy to access/target due to physical location or habits (college-aged people often congregate at/around college, vegan people often frequent specific websites or stores, etc.).

I imagine that someone much more knowledgeable about advertising/marketing than I am would have better ideas. All I can come up with off the top of my head is targeted social media advertisements: people who work at one of these several companies and who have recently searched for one of these few terms, etc.

Not obvious at all, and useful/helpful to share and remind us all of. 🙂

In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don't have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.

I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a "Bayesian" sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods... (read more)

Some notes about the graphs:

• These are from a project I did several months ago using data from the Common Data Set, from College Scorecard, from their Form 990 tax filings, and some data from the college's websites.
• The selection of the non-Harvard schools is fairly arbitrary. For that particular project I just wanted to select a few different types of schools (small liberal arts, more technical focused, etc.) rather than comparing Harvard to other 'hyper elite' schools.
• I left the endowment graph non-logarithmic just to illustrate the ludicrous difference. Yes, I know it is bad design practice and that it obscures the numbers for the non-Harvard schools.

I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.

On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand,... (read more)

(My comment is maybe quibbling a bit too much and being too nit-picky. In general I strongly agree that most people in most situations would benefit from spending less time staring at their phones.)

I think of this less as 'using smartphones causes worse life outcomes,' and more as 'mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit^[1], and similar apps cause worse life outcomes.' I use my phone lots for years: flashcards on Anki to learn languages, listening to on Libby, or sometimes even reading books or articles. People can use the... (read more)

Can't people just buy VWCE/VWRP/IWDA?

Sometimes people can just buy those funds. I'm guessing that people in relatively wealthy/developed economies have the best options (and people living in their home country tend to have better options than people working internationally, since many finance/investment/banking things are restricted by citizenship). Most major European countries probably have services like Interactive Brokers or Vanguard or similar options (although I haven't looked into the details of it). And I assume that things generally are improving ... (read more)

I am also an American who has occasionally given informal investment advice to non-Americans. I agree with the broad strokes of what is written above, and I want to add a note regarding how hard it can be for people who aren't Americans or who don't have access to the types of investment tools:

If you don't have some sort of employer matching, if you don't have some sort of tax sheltered/preferential account available to you, and if you don't have a way to access American stocks, it can be really hard to invest. Many countries don't have something like Vang... (read more)

From 1973 to 2013, a portfolio like this returned

Anytime someone picks a seemingly pointless and random date range like that they are biasing the results. Bonds had record possibly never to be repeated again returns in 1970s and stopping at 2013 ignores the tail end of this incredibly bull run we are in right now. Pretty sure if someone looked at 1990 to 2020 or 1920 to 2020 this overly complex portfolio wouldn't compare as well.

2013 cuts off before US shot forward past international. Conversely, international might shoot ahead next time. I think internati... (read more)

I've noticed that a lot of the research papers related to artificial intelligence that I see folks citing are not peer reviewed. They tend to be research papers posted to arXiv, papers produced by a company/organization, or otherwise papers that haven't been reviewed and published in respected/mainstream academic journals.

Is this a concern? I know that there are plenty of problems with the system of academic publishing, but are non-peer reviewed papers fine?

Reasons my gut feeling might be wrong here:

• many I'm overly focusing with a sort of status quo bias,

What countries/populations punch below their weight in EA when it comes to producing talent?

Fuzzy ideas, off the top of my head, regarding talent in the EA ecosystem:

• It is pretty clear that England produces more EA talent than we would expect from population and wealth. Part of this is probably due to excellent educational institutions, part of it is probably due to a sort of path dependency/founder effects, and part is probably due to bias in selection effects.
• China and India have enormous populations (as do Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to a lesser

Thanks, Mo. In retrospect, I suppose I should have copied over the tests to make them easier for people to see. Thanks for doing that!

Yes, I literally mean that I've observed in-person social situations in which people don't welcome a new person to join a conversational group, or are otherwise not gracious/welcoming/considerate of someone. None of these were horrendous/egregious violations of etiquette, but they were noticeable in that they excluded a person. I can't speak to what extent this was an intentional act or an act of simple unawareness and not noticing, but I would guess it is more the latter.

And I should clarify that I don't mean "people in EA" to imply "all of EA, in general... (read more)

To the extent that people here care about being better people, this seems somewhat relevant: The Bluetooth Test and other keyholes to the soul, written by Adam Mastroianni. It consists of a few reflections on ways to be a better person, presented in the form of 'tests.' Each test is a situation that you probably have been in, or have observed others in. I've definitly observed people in EA fail in some of these (the Circle of Hell Test comes to mind most prominently, but that is probably moderated by an individual's own confidence and social skill). I view... (read more)

I could potentially see some sort of codetermination model working, in which some members of a board of directors (or some other board) are elected. I think this model comes from unions and labor rights. But the tricky aspect would be figuring out who gets to vote. I recall seeing some discussion about the difficulty of voting in the past: only donors? only people who are EAs? How do we draw the dividing line between who is and isn't an EA? Hopefully some people smarter and more widely read than me have good ideas, because that seems quite... tricky.

I'd like to suggest a little bit more clarity here. The phrases you use refer to some knowledge that isn't explicitly stated here. "in light of a recently announced startup" and "three people at the same org" make sense to someone who already knows the context of what you are writing about, but it is confusing to a reader who doesn't have the same background knowledge that you do.

You are definitly not the only person who has too much to read. My want to read list grows much faster than my ability to read: books, internet blog posts, academic papers, YouTube lectures... I read lots and I still can't keep up! I found it helpful to keep a list (a spreadsheet, actually), and then I can prioritize things a bit better. But you definitly don't have to read everything to "be a part of the club." I also remind myself that it is a marathon, not a sprint.

I enjoyed this. This provided a glimpse into a world that is very different from what I've encountered previously, and I'm really glad that you chose to share it. I do think that there is some truth to what you mention about skill-building. I especially appreciate that you were candid about the perks and costs; a globe-trotting lifestyle can certainly have an appeal, but transience and lack of stability/community is something that is discussed less often.

The snippet about finding "socialising a lot more enjoyable in a headspace where I don't need to prove ... (read more)

A few thoughts. First, it is a really cute story, and I'm glad you shared it. It feels very Japanese.

Second, marketing and tourism aren't often considered as major areas for economic development and growth (at least not in the popular press books I've read or the EA circles I've been in), but this is a simple little case study to demonstrate that having a mascot (or anything else that people like, from fancy buildings to locations tied to things people like) can drive economic activity. But it is also hard to predict in advance what will be a hit. I bet th... (read more)

I'm wondering if the idea of the Thucydides Trap could be considered an info hazard. The idea is that a rising power/country/nation naturally tends to cause military conflict with an established power/country/nation. Graham Allison popularized the idea. If he had chosen to not popularize the term, would fewer people hold the perspective that violent conflict is inevitable between the US and China. Is this somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Hard to state with any confidence, but considering how widespread the idea is (among foreign policy folks in the USA ... (read more)

As a single data point: seconded. I've explicitly been asked by interviewers (in a job interview) why I left a "higher title job" for a "lower title job," with the implication that it needed some special justification. I suspect there have also been multiple times in which someone looking at my resume saw that transition, made an assumption about it, and choose to reject me. (although this probably happens with non-EA jobs more often than EA jobs, as the "lower title role" was with a well-known EA organization)

I think you get the prize for the first April Fools post of 2025! Here is a cookie: 🍪

Could you describe a bit more what you mean here by "standoffishness?" Is it just that people aren't very friendly and welcoming in a social sense?

For a crowd of people that often doesn't take time off because there is more work to do, or thinks of triage in terms of deaths averted, it can be nice to see people have fun and be silly. I'm mentally preparing myself to see a dozen or more April's fools posts with wordplay, teasing, and snark from various people.

If anybody wants to have serious discussions on the EA Forum, I recommend postponing for a few days.

Sure. What I want to do is get input to figure out if there are any ideas in the draft (or versions of those ideas) that are worth sharing, which I would then make into a post. Some of the ideas in the draft are probably just ramblings or otherwise not really worth sharing

I actually have a draft of an EA Forum post that I've been sitting on for a while about this. So far I'm labelling the idea as something like "privileging the fortunate." If anyone reading this would like to poke around my Google Doc and give me feedback, please let me know. I'd be very happy to have some help in transforming a rough collection of ideas into an EA Forum post.

Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.

• One critique of the United States's drug policy is that it doesn't halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
• When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small ca

I also want to give a shout out to the EA Anywhere community for those of us that don't have neighborhoods. EA Anywhere's Slack workspace isn't as nice as living within walking distance of friends or getting together for lunch, but it is a really nice little community for those of us that would otherwise require a bus, two flights, and a train to meet in-person.

An additional upside: people from a variety of countries and cultures are there. If I recall correctly, the people who founded and ran EA Anywhere were from three very different countries.

Tantra and yin/yang are definitly not things I expected to read about on the EA Forum today, but bravo for managing to adapt the ideas and build bridges across cultural differences. This is a lovely example of tailoring communication to the intended audience. I think that a lot of us interested in and involved in effective altruism could learn from this.

I love seeing this kind of initiative, and it is great that the skills you have allow you to contribute in such a clear way.