The EA Interview Series celebrates the amazing efforts of people in our community. We hope this reminds us of our wonderful achievements thus far and provides newcomers with a personal understanding of our community.

In this interview we want to highlight the work of John Salvatier, a researcher at AI Impacts who helped build Seattle EA and previously earned to give as a software developer at Amazon. Seattle EA was featured in a Seattle Times article about “the philanthropic generation gap” and its effects on arts funding as millennials take a more effectiveness-driven approach. John has presented at various EA meetups on “Why Effective Altruists should care about dressing well.”

John is a great example of how individuals can do good through multiple avenues depending on their skills and interests. If you know a lot about a particular topic, like fashion, you can help others in the community benefit from the key insights in that field. If you’re earning to give, but feel there’s an unusually promising opportunity to do direct good, like working for a nonprofit that focuses on ensuring humanity will benefit from artificial intelligence, then a career switch is possible.

It’s great to speak with you today, John. First, tell us how you got involved with effective altruism and the rationalist community, which I know led you into it.

I’ve been involved in LessWrong for awhile. In college I got really interested in economics blogs and through that got linked to the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky while he was working on the sequences. I got hooked pretty fast. Eventually someone posted about the New York group; I was excited that there was a community aspect to it. I tried to get a friend to host a LessWrong meetup, which he eventually did. I took over hosting it and did that for several years, but that ended up feeling boring after awhile because LessWrong didn’t have a purpose. I had goals, but people didn’t agree on why we were meeting. So I mostly dropped it for two years, only hosting sporadic events.

Then one day I was driving back from Portland with Eric Rogstad and we had a discussion about effective altruism. He had been following people on Facebook, and I hadn’t really been doing that. He suggested hosting an EA meetup, but I didn’t think I would be that interested so I dropp

...

Nicole_Ross

Nicole_Ross's Posts

Nicole_Ross's Comments