My jobs are associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of Canterbury, energy efficiency research and policy consultant, and volunteer director at ALLFED. From a selfish perspective, I really like that I do a variety of tasks and get to use my strengths of interdisciplinary understanding, creative problem-solving and reality checking. Researching a new field means that papers are much less incremental (and therefore more interesting to me), though it is challenging finding journals and funding for a lot of it. New Zealand has a mild climate, so it’s great for outdoor activities year-round, and it’s relatively safe in relation to mundane risks and global catastrophes. I’m also fortunate to live in a place with a thriving EA presence. From an altruistic perspective, I can focus my research on resilience to global catastrophes, have access to student support, and can afford to donate half my income. Though I don’t think it’s my primary altruistic impact, it has been rewarding to contribute to small projects that have saved over a power plant’s worth of energy. I’d estimate that there are only a few thousand jobs that I could plausibly get that I would overall prefer more, giving a percentile for job preference of ~99.9999%. I’m incredibly grateful for this.
My jobs are associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of Canterbury, energy efficiency research and policy consultant, and volunteer director at ALLFED. From a selfish perspective, I really like that I do a variety of tasks and get to use my strengths of interdisciplinary understanding, creative problem-solving and reality checking. Researching a new field means that papers are much less incremental (and therefore more interesting to me), though it is challenging finding journals and funding for a lot of it. New Zealand has a mild climate, so it’s great for outdoor activities year-round, and it’s relatively safe in relation to mundane risks and global catastrophes. I’m also fortunate to live in a place with a thriving EA presence. From an altruistic perspective, I can focus my research on resilience to global catastrophes, have access to student support, and can afford to donate half my income. Though I don’t think it’s my primary altruistic impact, it has been rewarding to contribute to small projects that have saved over a power plant’s worth of energy. I’d estimate that there are only a few thousand jobs that I could plausibly get that I would overall prefer more, giving a percentile for job preference of ~99.9999%. I’m incredibly grateful for this.