Interested in biosecurity, policy, AI governance, community building, and entrepreneurship.
Talos Fellow, trained as a biomedical engineer in France and Switzerland (MSc).
Originally from France.
Alix Pham
Karma: 916
Scope-Sensitive Biosecurity Policy in France: An Opportunity?
In favor of an AI-powered translation button on the EA Forum
I read this a while ago, and the part about being an end in ourselves really stuck. I’m now saying it to others. Thanks for writing this.
As a full-time community builder myself, I often go into phases of asking myself why I give so much when I could be more selfish, and this part of the post really helped crystallize how I felt—though I’m not saying people are ungrateful, that is as far away as describing my experience with people in EA communities as one can get!
10 Lessons Learned—One Year at EA Switzerland
Yes, this is consistent with my experience too. Bad calibration of expected timelines, unresponsiveness to (two) emails asking for updates or if they needed anything (over one month), and something I would also qualify as somewhat disrespectful: they asked for additional information that was already available in the initial application.
For me it means that they probably didn’t read through completely before asking for more, besides the application being less than a dozen sentences long, one of them being “here are the relevant links” which contained all the information the follow-up email was asking for. I agree that it was not obvious that the requested info was there in the application, but I would expect a grant manager to actually skim or even read everything before asking for additional details.
In my perspective, it felt like a disregard for my time in an attempt to compensate for a longer turnaround than they wished they would have.
(Opinions my own)
PS: We received a decision a bit less than 3 months after applying.
Thank you for sharing this!
I’m a little bit surprised the other comments only focus on the pension thing, even though it’s the title.
I enjoyed how you unravel the chronology of your thoughts on existential risk from AI. It shows the complexity of this topic and the challenging journey towards developing an opinion and structuring ideas about it. That’s the kind of story that helps me deal with my own confusion, as I can see the struggle of others too.
You’re probably right. It still feels like many other languages are using this word in its original meaning, so even if the English language has a different definition, bringing some “utopian” concepts to a global community might be misunderstood.
Why does nobody use the term “eutopia”? From Greek etymology, dystopia means “bad place”, and utopia means… “non-place”—like an unachievable place, while eutopia means “lucky place”. Shouldn’t we use a word pointing toward something that we can hope for?
Wikipedia mentions that the fact that both utopia and eutopia are pronounced identically might have given rise to a change of meaning. But I think the difference in meaning is important—should we deliberately use—and thus mispronounce—eutopia /ɘːˈtoʊpiə/?
Alix Pham’s Quick takes
Thanks for this comment. I think I agree with a lot of what you say, and wanted to clarify that I am not saying people should pick sides. I just wanted to point out the imbalance of total personal support expressed for each “side”, without implying that you can’t show support for both.
Thank you Milena for writing this. Let’s not forget the painful reality of the victims. The fact that their anonymity prevents them from getting the personal support of many only exacerbates the need for our solidarity with them.
Thank you for your comment Charlotte! Yes I think it’s probably something additional (and not necessarily very visible) that non-native speakers might struggle with in intense events such as EAG(x)s and retreats. What do you think you might do differently now?
Thank you Peeter for this message! This is quite interesting, I’ll reflect on this!
Not necessarily no, as you ask for clarification—though if you were to form an opinion about the person commenting before the resolution of this potential misunderstanding, that could be caused by a lower language proficiency than expected and not a misunderstanding of the movement dynamics, then maybe yes?
I didn’t think about it at first, but I am only now realizing that this could be precisely the kind of interaction this post is talking about!
Thank you Vasco! Yes, I mentioned the founder’s effect in this paragraph, and I agree.
I am uncertain whether asking about participation being hindered is truly where the problem lies, but it should help understand the scale of the problem. There’s also something unseen from the participant side, where people you interact with form judgments about you that you will not be aware of, that are biased. I hope this makes sense. What I mean is: I wouldn’t say that my participation has been hindered due to my linguistic ability, but I am somewhat sure some of my conversation mates have formed impressions of me that are wrong because English is not my native language or culture.
I also think this misses the point that those people have perspectives that could benefit the movement but are not as listened to as they could be.
I think that’s indeed one of the dynamics. Thanks for pointing it out! Not sure what to think of it yet, though...
It can’t help in face-to-face conversations though, which is a great part of an impression someone has of you, especially with respect to interviews or 1-on-1s during conferences, etc.
I just found this. Thanks, Rocky. It resonates a lot and wakes up something that was somewhere in the limbo of my mind and never crystallized in words.
Embrace the grey, as nobody can’t hide from it.
Thansk for writing this! This is a very useful framework to think about growth in an org. I’d say it’s also relevant for meta-EA regional orgs (MEAROs)?