Aaron Gertler 🔸

You should write about your giving

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 22 Mar 2026 18:49 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: aarongertler’s Shortform

  Maybe “naive” isn’t the right language—I mean it mostly in the sense of “it’s a bad idea to commit crimes in the service of charity” rather than “the expected value was negative”.

  If Mario cared sufficiently little about being imprisoned, damaging a masterpiece, or generating opposition to famine relief writ large, I could see the theft as a positive-EV move from his perspective. But on the “benefit” side of the tradeoff, I’m skeptical that there was even a remote possibility of the Belgian government putting up ~$17 million to ransom the painting, especially on the deadline he set. (Claude notes that governments have a strong incentive not to set a precedent by making public ransom payments.)

  That said, when I did some more reading on the case, I saw this:

  “According to the Dutch art historian and Vermeer expert Albert Blankert, Roymans’ demands were “alarmingly well received” by the Dutch public. Petitions were circulated urging authorities to rescind the warrant for his arrest and there were spontaneous initiatives in favor of the refugees from East Pakistan. A wave of sympathy spread across the country, and slogans in favor of Royman’s cause were seen chalked on bridges and walls.”

  So it may have been a surprisingly effective publicity stunt, if the public’s reactions were really so positive! (That’s not something I’d expect in the modern world.)

  But I continue to think it’s generally misguided to steal money so you can give it away,* for reasons including “I wouldn’t want someone to steal my money for their own favorite charity” and “if your cause is known for support from thieves, you should expect people to turn against it”.

  *But if you can steal bread to feed your starving child, why not someone else’s children? As the guy who played Javert in my high school’s production of Les Mis, I can’t help thinking about Jean Valjean here. But I’m not inclined to spend the time I’d need to work through the relevant arguments and counterarguments.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 21 Mar 2026 20:48 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: aarongertler’s Shortform

  TIL: In 1971, Mario Pierre Roymans stole a Vermeer painting and tried to ransom it for a donation to starving Bengali refugees. It’s an interesting example of naive altruistic utilitarianism before EA — inspired by the same famine that led Peter Singer to write “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”.

  (Roymans was apprehended and spent six months in prison; no ransom was paid. )

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 3 Mar 2026 1:50 UTC

  21 points

  6 ∶ 0

  on: Why isn’t anti-fas­cism a big­ger topic at EAG events (or on this fo­rum)?

  Excellent post!

  I appreciated the steelmanning, the clear action item, and the discussion of how EA’s strengths could overlap with the need in this area. A lot of posts asking “why doesn’t EA do X?” conclude that EA must be defective in some way for not making X a primary cause area; this post shows a refreshing understanding of community dynamics and makes a modest ask (making something a “normal problem” — good phrasing).

  I was glad to hear about the Democracy Unconference, and I hope that people/​groups with fewer legal concerns than CEA will continue to work on strategy in this space. It’s tough for a movement built around elite persuasion and donations to work with nigh-unpersuadable elites in an environment where the wrong donation could disqualify you from a civil service job. But EA is capable of being flexible; we’ve found many different ways to create change over the last 15 years. Just on priors, I think there’s room for creative action by the smart, motivated people in our tent.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 3 Feb 2026 9:54 UTC

  10 points

  5 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: to­bytrem’s Quick takes

  As the person who led the development of that policy (for whatever that’s worth), I think the Forum team should be willing to make an exception in this case and allow looser restrictions around political discussion, at least as a test. As Nick noted, the current era isn’t so far from qualifying under the kind of exception already mentioned in that post.

  (The “Destroy Human Civilization Party” may not exist, but if the world’s leading aid funder and AI powerhouse is led by a group whose goals include drastically curtailing global aid and accelerating AI progress with explicit disregard for safety, that’s getting into natural EA territory—even without taking democratic backsliding into account.)

I donate be­cause I love humanity

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 18 Nov 2025 22:48 UTC

  6 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Open Philan­thropy Is Now Coeffi­cient Giving

  The core point of the post is, in fact, true! (And all the other points, to the best of my knowledge.)

Open Philan­thropy Is Now Coeffi­cient Giving

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 14 Oct 2025 3:52 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Strug­gling to Tran­si­tion into an EA-Aligned Job — Seek­ing Advice

  I’ll make the same offer Joseph did; I’d be happy to talk to you in depth about this post, review a resume, and try to be otherwise helpful. I’ve run some hiring processes, failed some applications, and had a lot of conversations with people in similar positions (thanks to this post).

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 15 Sep 2025 3:40 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Up­com­ing EA con­fer­ences in 2025

  Do you have any updates on whether the Los Angeles summit is happening?

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 9 Sep 2025 20:41 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: High-im­pact & ur­gent fund­ing op­por­tu­nity—Ro­dent fer­til­ity control

  I didn’t see any mention of Loretta Mayer’s work here. She is testing what seems to be a viable product in several major cities (here’s some NYT coverage). Do you see this work as having a different purpose/​target market?

  (I only skimmed the post — sorry if I missed an obvious reference!)

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 9 Sep 2025 19:39 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sam’s Hot(?) Takes on EA Com­mu­nity Building

  I didn’t read the full post, but the gist of it aligns with what I did as an organizer (started Yale EA):

  • I ran another organization (and joined many others) before founding YEA, which gave me some experience with logistics/​keeping a group on task. I also talked to a few other new organizers to share ideas and observations (though we were all newbies at that point).

  • The most important aspect of the group was that we had fun and became friends. The times I remember aren’t the quixotic “EA” activities (which were pretty shambolic, since there were no intro courses back then), but the lunch conversations and movie nights and hard personal things we dealt with together. College is a very crowded time, but people returned to meetings and went to parties because they liked the nerdy, good-natured group we had formed.

    • I never even met the person who became the leader for several years after I left — turns out (IIRC) that they attended one party we held and liked the atmosphere so much that they decided to join the year after. If we hadn’t been hosting parties with very light theming, the group may not have lasted through the 2010s.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 9 Sep 2025 19:32 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: Charles_Guth­mann’s Shortform

  Low-effort comment!

  There are many stories I enjoy despite plot holes because the setting/​characters/​prose delight me so much that it’s fun to imagine what hidden factors could justify the plot holes — I can trust an author so much that I assume they’ll explain things later (or that there’s a hidden explanation they created for me to discover myself).

  Recent examples include Sousou no Frieren (lots of symbolism and emotion to obscure thin worldbuilding, I feel so many feelings that I barely think about the plot) and Moonfall (written like a fable from the perspective of someone who doesn’t fully understand the world, so that I can imagine any plot holes may be due to something they don’t see).

  This isn’t rational, but not all fiction is meant to be rational. And in some sense, isn’t all fiction “wireheading”? Even reading rationalfic is an escape of sorts, into a world unlike our own, one that is more interesting and fun to think about (on average).

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 9 Sep 2025 19:18 UTC

  19 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Camille’s comment on: Camille’s Quick takes

  I can speak only for myself, but I treat linkposts like any other post unless the poster provides additional context.

  I’ve linkposted many things I thought were flawed in some respect, but still worth sharing and contemplating; if someone disagreed, I’d want them to downvote me for my poor judgment.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 17 Jun 2025 7:30 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: The Op­po­site of Loneli­ness Fel­low­ship: $5000 to “make a differ­ence”

  All true! I’ll add a note to the post.

The Op­po­site of Loneli­ness Fel­low­ship: $5000 to “make a differ­ence”

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 20 May 2025 11:20 UTC

  22 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Andres Jimenez Zorrilla 🔸’s comment on: The Daily Show did a seg­ment on EA and Shrimp Welfare Project

  Forgive me if you’ve written about this elsewhere, but how did the collaboration come to pass? Did the Daily Show just reach out to you? Was SWP pitched to them by someone?

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 9 May 2025 21:07 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Pogden’s comment on: E2G help available

  Outstanding! If you end up deciding to try for a nuclear job, I wish you the best of luck.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 4 May 2025 4:07 UTC

  15 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: E2G help available

  If you’re open to disclosing this, how many people reached out to you about the position? I’m curious about the Forum’s overall level of appetite for ETG-oriented posts like this, which I think could be written for many other jobs too!

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 20 Dec 2024 22:01 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AGB 🔸’s comment on: AMA: 10 years of Earn­ing To Give

  Thanks!

  ETFs do sound like a big win. I suppose someone could look at them as “finance solving a problem that finance created” (if the “problem” is e.g. expensive mutual funds). But even the mutual funds may be better than the “state of nature” (people buying individual stocks based on personal preference?). And expensive funds being outpaced by cheaper, better products sounds like finance working the way any competitive market should.