My background is in Industrial Engineering. I’m currently upskilling independently in AI Safety through project-based learning. I aim to combine broad project management abilities with AI Safety research skills, ideally oriented towards a medium-term role in research management. Alternatively I consider AI governance or founding an organisation that addresses a bottleneck in the AI Safety ecosystem.
I’m also involved in EA community building, co-organising the EA university group at UPF and facilitating introductory courses.
Very good questions, thanks for asking.
Reading MASFA was one reason, certainly, although it wasn’t enough. I already knew deep inside that social pressure was not a sufficient argument to justify the suffering of trillions of animals, and that it was necessary for people to go out of their way and face social disapproval if we wanted to make moral progress as a society. The book made these arguments more vivid and concrete, I started to think more about them — but yeah, they aren’t enough, cause I already had the intuition. I had to make the connection.
Probably community played the biggest part. Engaging more with EAs in person, being an EA university group organiser. Knowing that, while I’d face social disapproval at times, there was a community where I could feel safe and at ease.
We are social animals and, for most of us, moral arguments don’t have sufficient force for us to make such big decisions.
There was also this realisation that I believed in taking one’s moral values and reasoning seriously in practice, yet that I wasn’t acting accordingly. And I knew that I wanted to change that, to be consistent with myself, to be an example and be ahead of time in a way. We could call this “ego judo”: these were egoic motivations, but if they could be redirected toward a positive outcome, then so be it. We need to use all leverage points.
But of course every case is different, and what worked for me will be different for others, so I’d be interested in hearing about others’ cases.
I think it’s very important to ask what makes some people make the connection and take their moral intuitions seriously, rather than ignore them. It’s at the core of applied moral philosophy and, in the end, EA.