Aaron Gertler 🔸

• 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

  5 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.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 12 Dec 2024 19:23 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: AMA: 10 years of Earn­ing To Give

  This isn’t about your giving per se, but have your views on the moral valence of financial trading changed in any notable ways since you spoke about this on the 80K podcast?

  (I have no reason to think your views have changed, but was reading a socialist/​anti-finance critique of EA yesterday and thought of your podcast.)

  The episode page lacks a transcript, but does include this summary: “There are arguments both that quant trading is socially useful, and that it is socially harmful. Having investigated these, Alex thinks that it is highly likely to be beneficial for the world.”

  In that section (starts around 43:00), you talk about market-making, selling goods “across time” in the way other businesses sell them across space, and generally helping sellers “communicate” by adjusting prices in sensible ways. At the same time, you acknowledge that market-making might be less useful than in the past and that more finance people on the margin might not provide much extra social value (since markets are so fast/​advanced/​liquid at this point).

Tech­ni­cal Re­port on Mir­ror Bac­te­ria: Fea­si­bil­ity and Risks

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 1 Dec 2024 3:44 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ad­vi­sors for Smaller Ma­jor Donors?

  I used to work as a part-time advisor and ops person for a family foundation (no actual staff) that gave away ~$500k annually; they’ve worked with several other people since then.

  Much of my advisory time was spent researching and evaluating fairly small grants (workable for someone in the $20k-100k range), since the foundation’s “experimental/​non-GiveWell” budget was a small fraction of the total. I think I could have done this work for a group of 10-20 clients of that size at a time if I’d been a full-time advisor.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 25 Sep 2024 4:16 UTC

  17 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Lead Ex­po­sure Ac­tion Fund

  As a starting point, you can see the Fund’s current goals here, and the grants made so far here.

We can pro­tect mil­lions of kids from a global kil­ler — with­out billions of dol­lars (Wash­ing­ton Post)

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 22 Jun 2024 2:06 UTC

  70 points

  13 ∶ 1

  on: Why I’m leaving

  Again, I’m aware that concrete, impactful projects and people still exist within EA. But in the public sphere accessible to me, their influence and visibility are increasingly diminishing, while indirect high-impact approaches via highly speculative expected value calculations become more prominent and dominant.

  This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.

  But I think it’s possible to counteract by curating one’s own “public sphere” instead.

  For example, you could follow all of your favorite charities and altruistic projects on Twitter. This might be a good starting point. For inspiration, you could also check the follow lists of places like Open Phil (my employer; we follow a ton of our grantees) or CEA’s “official EA” account. Throw in Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper while you’re at it; Future Perfect publishes content across many cause areas. And finally, at the risk of sounding biased, I’ll note that Alexander Berger has one of the best EA-flavored research feeds I know of.

  If you mostly follow concrete, visibly impactful projects, Twitter will start throwing more of those your way. I assume you’ll start seeing development economists and YIMBYs working on local policy — at least, that’s what happened to me. And maybe some of those people have blogs you want to follow, or respond when you comment on their stuff, and suddenly you find yourself floating peacefully among a bunch of adjacent-to-EA communities focused on things that excite you.

  The Forum also lets you filter by topic pretty aggressively, hiding or highlighting whatever tags you want. You just have to click “Customize feed” at the top of the homepage...

  

  ...and follow these instructions. (You might be familiar with this, but many Forum users aren’t, so I figured I’d mention it.)

  Of course, it’s not essential for anyone to follow a bunch of “EA content” — your plan of donating to and supporting projects you like is a good one. But if you previously enjoyed reading the Forum, and find it annoying as of late, it may be possible to restore (or improve upon!) your earlier experience and end up with a lot of stuff to read.

  What links here?

  • Treat fu­ture you like a differ­ent per­son—in­vest in your motivation by Alex Dial (14 Dec 2024 15:28 UTC; 98 points)

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 13 Jun 2024 11:08 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bella’s comment on: My first EAG: a mix of feelings

  I’d have benefited from that kind of nudge myself! I was aware of 80K for years but never even considered coaching.

• Aaron Gertler 🔸 30 May 2024 10:40 UTC

  0 points

  0 ∶ 2

  on: Is this a weird way for me to donate to char­ity?

  From a consequentialist perspective, I think you’re better off sticking to digital — it takes a lot of time to sell things online, and you could be using that time for some combination of work and fun that would leave everyone better off (unless you place a very high value on physical manga).

  Low-confidence idea: It might help to find some small ritual/​mantra that you can use when you donate (or invest, etc.) the money you would have spent on physical manga — something along the lines of “I’m making the right decision” or “this is better for everyone”.