akash 🔸
Bio
Participation6
I have a master's in Information Science. Before switching to the master's, 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 economic growth, abundant futures, 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
- My experiences "vibe coding" an application & the SF start up scene
Posts 2
Comments107
2026, the year vegan baking was solved!
On a more serious note:
- "At $24 for the equivalent of 45 egg whites ($0.53 each) it's more expensive than buying conventional ($0.21 each) or organic ($0.33) egg whites, but not massively so."
I would be interested in an econ person's take on how they predict the price to change over time. Intuitively, I feel that $0.53 is a promising number for a newly launched product, and if demand increases, the price would plummet and make it the de-facto choice for many products that contain egg whites?
- I hope they do a good job of marketing it, an increasing number of people are negatively primed towards cultivated products.
(Not a solution, but a general observation about people who engage in bashing EA.)
The "dot connectors" will always connect the dots, infer or invent nefarious motivations, and try to bucket you as they like. The problem is that you can't neatly map EAs onto the political spectrum -- yes, there are dominant trends, but the variance in views is sufficiently high that commentators have genuinely no clue where EAs belong. This makes sense because most major movements in history have been political ones, so when assessing EA, most people pull out their internal political philosophy detector and you end up with a mess like the chart below!
But EA is a moral philosophy movement, and the chain of thinking is genuinely different. Instead of thinking how to organize society and labor, EAs unanimously agree on beneficentrism and deal with questions like, "What morally matters? To what degree? Which interventions are most effective? How do you even assess what is most effective?" When you organize a movement around these set of questions, you end up with:
- Some people who want to automate software engineering, some who want to pause it entirely, and others who think we should defensively accelerate progress
- At least two frontier AI labs: let's not forget OpenAI received $30 million in philanthropic money during its inception!
- Some EAs who think that AI will be a big deal for {their cause area}, others who are skeptical of the whole AI bundle
- Some EAs passionately dislike AI writing, some are fine with methodical use of AI in writing, and some are even more liberal about it
- One particular EA who is the loudest voice combatting the data center water usage myth
- (At least) one person from the EA-sphere who has large holdings in AI infrastructure
- And conservative AI Safetyists like you and liberal long timeline accelerationists like me
I don't know what the best solution for combatting EA bashing is, but spreading the idea that EA is more politically and intellectually diverse than people think should help.
... other brain regions (accessory lobes) have shown to compensate these integrative processes in this taxon, which has not yet been demonstrated for Penaeidae. It's thus still a low rating for lack of data, not for proof of failing this criterion.
This reminds me of two things:
- I am forgetting the precise terms here, but for a while in the 1800s through most of the 1900s, researchers thought that birds weren't intelligent because they were essentially comparing human and avian brains 1:1, but later, others found that while birds lacked that specific component (neocortex?), some other regions of their brain were functionally similar and that birds were indeed smart rather than instinct-driven biological machines.
- I recall watching Dustin Crummett's presentation on insect sentience a while back, and when talking about lack of evidence of sentience in certain insects, he emphasized that the besides black soldier fly and honeybees, most insects aren't that well-studied.
Which sources of funding would you recommend for those interested in generalist EA community building? 2/3 examples are AIS-related for which there are overwhelming sums of funding available (and they are doing work that is better not done at CEA anyway).
I was beyond excited to read NEST's introductory announcement last month. Curious how they are funded, because I thought OP is no longer super interested in EA community building.