Happy New Year!
This is a thread for posting:
Something you’d like to achieve this year (maybe you’re looking to get a job, complete a course, write 30 blogposts, or make your first donation).
How others can help you achieve it (perhaps you’d like someone to message you in three months to see if you’ve done it, give feedback on your plans, or point you to relevant resources).
Let’s start the year with a bit of accountability and collaboration.
A split between career capital, skills, experience and others:
Get into university (this is a working towards goal to start biomedical science in Sept 2025), dependant on alevel results (find out in August)
Podcast episodes (under the microscope) release at least 6 cell-ebrity episodes with biologists doing good and making an impact Do frequent (e.g. weekly) bio bite episodes
Write at least 10 blog posts or forum posts on biology and biorisk topics to grow skills in comms and literature
Get an internship at a lab for the summer (ideally to learn technical wet lab skills relevant to genetics, epidemiology, vaccines, infectious disease etc)
How others can help If anyone has any connections for wet lab internships in England or who may consider grant funding (eg charities, stipends) for 18 year old for this purpose Anyone working in the bioscience fields interested in being interviewed on the podcast Anyone who wants to collaborate on a paper especially in biosecurity who needs a less qualified but very ambitious and hard working individual to research or write parts of it
Awesome! Good luck on all of the above.
I’m guessing that you have, but have you listened to bio(un)ethical? It’s more on bioethics than on biorisk, but it might be interesting to you if you are thinking of making a podcast which aims to explain bio topics.
Do the ol’ career transition into AI safety. Probably governance/policy, but with a technical flavour.
(If you need stats, data science, report writing, or management consultancy skills—please hit me up!)
Write 12 Forum posts (each for every month)
Get As from all of my classes
Find a cool summer internship
Be done with my cause prio
Keep up the good habits and positive mental health I’ve been keeping up for some time
I gave input to the UN together with Cool Earth, Equal Right and Professor Robert Fletcher. During 2025 I will try to figure out what to do with that text (any suggestions are warmly welcome): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uAzSycfm190C1hnVDCnYTXK2d1tvw0WsbfE8RJYvw2U/edit?usp=drivesdk
I will also try to figure out how I can start a PhD in a meaningful research project. I am stuck in the southern Sweden because I have my family here, but at the university where I work as a lecturer in public health, there are not many research projects that feels right / impactful enough. The next best thing would be to collaborate more with EA people at other universities. I will also book meetings with some people from the EAG online conference, now that I have more time to spare.
Related to EA, I’d like to:
Give 10% again.
Run a debate week with more votes and discussion than the animal welfare vs global health debate week.
Write at least one non-work-related Forum post.
Unrelated to EA, I’d like to:
Get a maths tutor. I’ve tried to teach myself maths before (I haven’t seriously studied maths since I was 16, and I think it makes a good chunk of human knowledge inaccessible to me, which is a bummer), but I’ve never made it a habit. I believe that if I pay for a weekly/ bi-weekly tutoring session I’ll be forced to actually put the work in.
You can help me by commenting here in February to ask whether I’ve found a tutor yet...
Write at least one short story. I enjoyed doing more fiction writing in 2024, especially this short story. I’d like to make sure I do more.
Ooh + take B12 supplements (thanks Ozy)
I’m cheating a bit, because both of these are well on their way, but two big current goals:
Get Israel to iodize its salt!
Run an expert elicitation on Biorisk with RAND and publish it.