I’m director of learning for a French ed tech startup focused on evidence-based learning.
I believe I found out about effective altruism proper from Vox around 2015. Had also gone down the existential risk rabbit hole around 2013-2014 while a student but did not make the connection between those issues at the time.
I recall EA arguments influencing my career decision in 2016 as I had just left my previous company and was considering many opinions—to this day, I am thankful for being introduced to a framework that helped me reason through my choice at the right time.
I had never engaged with the intellectual community up until now. What ultimately brought me back to EA was my news and social media consumption. The zeitgeist of the past five or so years appears to have been largely driven by negative passions—anger, terror and despair—passions I myself have indulged in far too often. Rather than rein in or redirect those energies towards the common good, many of the most influential (often highly educated) people in our societies ended up amplifying them.
With every fleeting sentiment turned into a wild conceptual exaggeration, I started wondering—is there anything better on the menu? Reading articles, listening to podcasts such as 80K Hours, I have realized the EA community can help turn the tide.
As much as I agree with the basic principles of EA, I have found the most hope in its general disposition - purposeful, constructive, and prosocial ; based in reality, curious, and open to new evidence. To strive to be of use; to engage with the world as it is to that end; whatever the affliction, this must be what the cure looks like.
General areas of interest include:
Scaling effective instruction—My main area of professional training. While there is much warranted skepticism within the EA community when it comes to spending resources on education, there is also growing evidence that some ways of teaching are more effective than others, and that scaling them works. The potential societal returns of such an approach (especially in lower-income countries) may therefore be underestimated. One often neglected aspect of this debate I have observed in my work is that the space not taken up by effective instruction tends to create a vacuum for methods that are both inherently appealing to funders and counterproductive (anything from a focus on learning styles to pure constructivism, where infants are being expected to “create” knowledge when it would be much faster to just share it with them).
Improving decision making—With a particular focus on key decision makers. I see much promise in improving elite education (turning credentialism into a quest for usefulness), optimizing democratic incentives , and stage directing “the room where it happens” (from EU summits to White Hour “war rooms”, it is striking how many influential decisions are made in bad meetings, with poor structure / access to relevant data).
Cause exploration—Not only on which areas to pursue but also on how to pursue them. For instance, we are far from being able to tell whether a given course of action is likely to increase or decrease the chance of great power conflict.
Hi everyone!
I’m director of learning for a French ed tech startup focused on evidence-based learning.
I believe I found out about effective altruism proper from Vox around 2015. Had also gone down the existential risk rabbit hole around 2013-2014 while a student but did not make the connection between those issues at the time.
I recall EA arguments influencing my career decision in 2016 as I had just left my previous company and was considering many opinions—to this day, I am thankful for being introduced to a framework that helped me reason through my choice at the right time.
I had never engaged with the intellectual community up until now. What ultimately brought me back to EA was my news and social media consumption. The zeitgeist of the past five or so years appears to have been largely driven by negative passions—anger, terror and despair—passions I myself have indulged in far too often. Rather than rein in or redirect those energies towards the common good, many of the most influential (often highly educated) people in our societies ended up amplifying them.
With every fleeting sentiment turned into a wild conceptual exaggeration, I started wondering—is there anything better on the menu? Reading articles, listening to podcasts such as 80K Hours, I have realized the EA community can help turn the tide.
As much as I agree with the basic principles of EA, I have found the most hope in its general disposition - purposeful, constructive, and prosocial ; based in reality, curious, and open to new evidence. To strive to be of use; to engage with the world as it is to that end; whatever the affliction, this must be what the cure looks like.
General areas of interest include:
Scaling effective instruction—My main area of professional training. While there is much warranted skepticism within the EA community when it comes to spending resources on education, there is also growing evidence that some ways of teaching are more effective than others, and that scaling them works. The potential societal returns of such an approach (especially in lower-income countries) may therefore be underestimated. One often neglected aspect of this debate I have observed in my work is that the space not taken up by effective instruction tends to create a vacuum for methods that are both inherently appealing to funders and counterproductive (anything from a focus on learning styles to pure constructivism, where infants are being expected to “create” knowledge when it would be much faster to just share it with them).
Improving decision making—With a particular focus on key decision makers. I see much promise in improving elite education (turning credentialism into a quest for usefulness), optimizing democratic incentives , and stage directing “the room where it happens” (from EU summits to White Hour “war rooms”, it is striking how many influential decisions are made in bad meetings, with poor structure / access to relevant data).
Cause exploration—Not only on which areas to pursue but also on how to pursue them. For instance, we are far from being able to tell whether a given course of action is likely to increase or decrease the chance of great power conflict.
Hope I can help in some way!