The following is a tidy, oversimplified version of what happened.
I learned about Bentham and Mill in A-level history class (aged 17) and I think read a Peter Singer book. I was very left-wing at the time but I remember being really frustrated that all the other altruistically-minded kids in my class supported standard leftist policies for ideological reasons even when they harmed disadvantaged people. This influenced me to study philosophy at undergrad level, where I defended utilitarianism.
Unfortunately EA hadn’t been invented at the time so I spent the first year after graduation working in warehouses and call centers, followed by about nine years of direct development work in low-income countries. I got frustrated by the inefficiency of most development orgs and decided to switch fields into either law (‘earning to give’ before I’d heard of the concept) or public health (to do direct work with more quantifiable impacts).
Around the same time I was searching online for information about charity evaluation and came across GiveWell, then the Singer TED Talk and the wider EA community. This may have influenced me to choose public health, though there were other factors (e.g. the 2008 financial crash made it even harder than usual to pursue a lucrative law career). I spent 18 months in Australia doing whatever work I could find – mostly farm labouring – to pay for my master’s course.
During the course I became more involved in EA, and got interested in health economics, especially methods for cost-effectiveness analysis. But I couldn’t get a job or PhD in health economics with a general public health background, so to save up for a second master’s I spent two more years doing mostly sub-minimum wage temp jobs, or saving dole money when I couldn’t find work (though I also got a bit of contract work with GiveWell towards the end of this period). Halfway through that course I ran out of money and had some health issues, so I took a leave of absence, during which time I worked on the 2019 Global Happiness Policy Report (Chapter 3), then got the Rethink job.
My reasons for continuing to work in EA are some mixture of those given by my colleagues.
The following is a tidy, oversimplified version of what happened.
I learned about Bentham and Mill in A-level history class (aged 17) and I think read a Peter Singer book. I was very left-wing at the time but I remember being really frustrated that all the other altruistically-minded kids in my class supported standard leftist policies for ideological reasons even when they harmed disadvantaged people. This influenced me to study philosophy at undergrad level, where I defended utilitarianism.
Unfortunately EA hadn’t been invented at the time so I spent the first year after graduation working in warehouses and call centers, followed by about nine years of direct development work in low-income countries. I got frustrated by the inefficiency of most development orgs and decided to switch fields into either law (‘earning to give’ before I’d heard of the concept) or public health (to do direct work with more quantifiable impacts).
Around the same time I was searching online for information about charity evaluation and came across GiveWell, then the Singer TED Talk and the wider EA community. This may have influenced me to choose public health, though there were other factors (e.g. the 2008 financial crash made it even harder than usual to pursue a lucrative law career). I spent 18 months in Australia doing whatever work I could find – mostly farm labouring – to pay for my master’s course.
During the course I became more involved in EA, and got interested in health economics, especially methods for cost-effectiveness analysis. But I couldn’t get a job or PhD in health economics with a general public health background, so to save up for a second master’s I spent two more years doing mostly sub-minimum wage temp jobs, or saving dole money when I couldn’t find work (though I also got a bit of contract work with GiveWell towards the end of this period). Halfway through that course I ran out of money and had some health issues, so I took a leave of absence, during which time I worked on the 2019 Global Happiness Policy Report (Chapter 3), then got the Rethink job.
My reasons for continuing to work in EA are some mixture of those given by my colleagues.