Bio

Participation
1

I live in Sheffield where I work as an engineer on cool stuff to improve the world. Most of my time has been on a pandemic preparedness project, but looking to launch some super exciting animal welfare things. 

I recently restarted High Impact Engineers. Check out and engage with the new forum (pretty please)!

I run EA Sheffield. Come along to our next social if you're in the area! 

I organised EA North 2025 and might make it an annual thing. It was very cost-effective.

I have a PhD in computer science and an undergrad degree in physics. 

How others can help me

Engage with the High Impact Engineers discussion forum (name pending - please vote).

Talk to me about tech bottlenecks for studying and improving the welfare of animals (farmed and wild) at scale.

How I can help others

I am pretty good at research (reading papers, planning/doing/evaluating experiments, writing up results [yuk]). 

I am alright at coding (firmware and software for various applications). 

I also have what is left from an undergraduate degree worth of physics knowledge.

Comments
14

[Edit: This post had negative karma when I made this comment]

I'm sorry that your first post on the forum is getting a bit of a negative reaction. It's great to have you here and I hope this isn't super off-putting! 

If you are interested in some actual numbers on demographics, check out the EA Survey posts, like this one from 2024.

My thoughts on your questions:

I am curious on the communities thoughts on this lack of diversity.

I personally don't mind much. Almost any community will have demographic weirdness of some kind, and I don't inherently value diversity. I know others find it concerning, but I am not aware on survey data on this. You can definitely find quite a bit of writing on this topic if you search the forum.

if there are any initiatives being taken to improve diversity within the EA community

I am unsure what you mean by "improve". But most EAG events I have been to have meet-ups for various demographic groups. I have never attended these (despite "qualifying" for a few). But I know others really like organising and attending these. The most recent EAG London had meet-ups for the following: neurodiversity, people of colour, Christians, women and NB people, people from low and middle income countries, Jews, socioeconomic diversity, LGBTQ+.

(You may be getting downvoted for the line "This demographic has historically been disconnected from social impact". Perhaps consider elaborating why you think that.)

Here are the top picks sorted by protein per kcal and price (based on Feb 2024 prices).

This is why I make my own seitan.

sadly, KoRo no longer delivers to the UK

For (potential) vegans that are depressed at the sight of the protein/kcal table. Here's a screenshot of a similar table I put together last year (for myself - UK based). I like sharing this with gym bros that scoff at veganism for lean protein reasons. 

Beware that it has a small number of duplicates as I was also tracking prices from different suppliers to compare. 

Most of the things on this list have one or two ingredients if that's something you care about. 
 

Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.

Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.

Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they're excited to learn!

I'll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.

I'm open to collab suggestions! Did you have a particular idea in mind? 

Thanks! Some reasons I chose GitHub Discussions:

  • threads stay up and visible forever for free (Slack is almost $10 per user and month if you want to keep post history beyond 90 days)
  • there is an upvote feature making browsing more interesting because you can sort posts (once there is lots of content)
  • people can close discussions when their post is resolved which declutters the default main page (for simple question + answer posts)
  • no user management necessary
    • if I made a Slack joining link public I open the doors to bots - GitHub is natively pretty great at spam/bot prevention (at least so far)
    • if I made a Slack joining link private I would have to spend some of my time going through applications
  • anyone can easily check it out without having to set anything up
  • everything related to High Impact Engineers is on GitHub, making it easy to onboard new contributors/maintainers/admins which is great for a volunteer-run org
  • many engineers have a GitHub account already and are familiar with the interface

Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation. 

I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me! 

I personally am much more likely to take, keep, and wear a shirt with a large and/or unusual design. (Although as much as I like getting the shirts (and sometimes stickers), I would be even happier to see the cost of EAGs go down. I don't know how much time and money goes into merch, though.)

I set up a WhatsApp community for the North of England as part of this. I'll send you a link. If others are interested feel free to DM me.

(It currently looks like a retreat might be happening later this year.)

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