— I engineer ambitious ideas until they survive the battlefield of reality —
I have received funding from the LTFF and the SFF and have also done work for an EA-adjacent organization.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a nacent Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts whether helping to build one wind farm at a time was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
Love this:
Maybe one good way to be an EA is to choose something to do, then always being uncomfortable with it? Like having a romantic partner, but every day thinking “maybe I should break up?”, or “maybe there is someone better out there, this person I am seeing has this thing I don’t really like” (the romantic partner is the cause btw, not the relationship to EA—EA is more like the parent, biologically unseverable, causes and interventions are more like romantic partners, they might come and go).