akash 🔸
Bio
Participation6
I recently graduated with a master's in Information Science. Before making a degree switch, I was a Ph.D. student in Planetary Science where I used optimization models to physically characterize asteroids (including potentially hazardous ones).
Historically, my most time-intensive EA involvement has been organizing Tucson Effective Altruism — the EA university group at the University of Arizona. If you are a movement builder, let's get in touch!
I am broadly interested in capital generation, catastrophic risk reduction, and earning-to-give for animal welfare. Always happy to chat about anything EA!
How others can help me
Career-related:
- I am looking for co-founders who are eager to dive into for-profit entrepreneurship. Please message me here or on LinkedIn, and we can chat and see if we would be a good match!
Other:
- If you are an EA University group organizer, I would be interested in learning about post-introductory fellowship activities you run.
- Chatting about different visions of avant-garde EA!
How I can help others
- I can share my experience running an EA group at a US public university.
- I can share the reasons I chose to attend graduate school, information about the application process, the state of academia, and whether EAs should consider this an option.
- I consider myself decently well-versed with core EA ideas, and I'm happy to chat with newer EAs and point them to the right resources/people.
- I can give people insights into my career planning process, key decisions I have taken and why (like switching out of my Ph.D.), and plans I have for the future.
- My experience upskilling in AI Safety. Specifically, I am happy to chat about paper replications, projects, and courses (such as ARENA) that I pursued independently.
Posts 2
Comments92
but its very possible that many fish that we kill after catching (yes with a bad death) have net positive lives.
Doesn't this imply that even a theoretical painless death of a fish is really really bad because your taking away all the good moments trillions of fish could have experienced? You could argue that the utility experienced by those who consume the fish is higher, but it probably doesn't compare to the utility those unimaginably large amount of creatures could have experienced had they continued their natural lives.
(I agree with the more important point that non-adversarial messaging matters and these sorts of comparisons are practically useless.)
- "Problem is that rarely in the world of public engagement, media and comms does everything go right."
- "But if you’re going to go ahead, be VERY sure you’re doing it right."
Doesn't statement 1 imply that statement 2 is an impossibly high standard to reach?
There are clearly mistakes here which could have been avoided, but it is really hard to predict the counterfactual; it is possible that even if those steps were taken, the level of infighting or the amount of clickbait journalism would have been about the same. Maybe not, but who knows!
I was annoyed with all the clickbait-y articles and my fellow EAs are far too deferential and being against diet change is currently the trendy view within the movement. At the same time, I think it would be healthy for the broader animal movement to build a stronger culture of cooperation and that involves a higher degree of charitability and a lower bar of what's acceptable when trying something new.
Posting this here for a wider reach: I'm looking for roommates in SF! Interested in leases that begin in January.
Right now, I know three others who are interested and we have a low-key signal group chat. If you are interested, direct message me here or on one my linked socials and we will hop on a 15-minute call to determine if we would be a good match!
+1 to this, I would be disappointed if EAG merch was super generic. The sweatshirt from EAG Bay (which I do not have) had a fantastic design, and I liked the birds on the EAG NYC t-shirt.
But I am also someone who has a bright teal colored backpack with pink straps and my laptop has 50,000 stickers so ...
It's OK to eat honey
I am quite uncertain because I am unsure to what extend a consumption boycott affects production; however, I lean slightly on the disagree side because boycotting animal-based foods is important for:
- Establishing pro-animal cultural norms
- Incentivizing plant-based products (like Honee) that already face an uphill climb towards mass adoption
I just emailed him, close to zero chance he will see it but if he does 🤞