Denis

Karma: 611

Denis 1 Jul 2026 14:48 UTC
1 point
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on: How I Got Accepted Into AIM’s Charity Entrepreneurship Program
Great post!

And just so people don’t get the wrong idea about this being just for people straight out of college, I got accepted after many years working as an R&D engineer with no direct connection to EA or charity. If you’re experienced and motivated, chances are you may already have done some of these exercises, which makes following this advice even easier!

Denis 17 Jun 2026 9:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Denis ’s comment on: Experience of a ‘generalist’ transitioning into AI safety in 2026
I was just reading this post, How to become a better applicant in one week, from 80,000 Hours, and was struck by this paragraph:

Here’s what my previous hiring round was like:
Just under 800 people applied. I split the pile with a colleague, which gave me 400 resumes and 1200 short-answer questions to read.¹
To get this done within the week, while also doing the rest of my job, I had to spend less than five minutes per person. And we only had time to grade a few dozen work tests, so we had to cut over 90% of the applicants. These numbers aren’t unusual for an open hiring round.

I just cannot believe that this is right. IMHO we delude ourselves that we’re being fair and effective, while in reality we’re putting a lot of energy, hard-work and resources into applying for jobs (800 people did this for one job !!! - think about how many hours that is—and they all had to answer 3 short-answer questions with enough care and attention. For many of them, that application process was probably at least half a day of work. So, 1-2 years of “EA work” went into just applying for this one role. Surely there were more valuable ways the EA movement could have used all this energy and creativity ???

Denis 17 Jun 2026 8:50 UTC
1 point
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on: Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty
There is something wonderful about this conversation, and about what it says about effective altruism and our aim to do the most good possible.

Cash-transfers as done by Give Directly are a phenomenal initiative. So obvious in retrospect, but only when you remove your preconceived bias about poor people being partly responsible for their own predicament.

So it would be great, and laudable, for any organisation to look for ways to scale and expand programs like this. (And by supporting Give Directly, we can all help to enable this).
But the effective altruists (in this case, GiveWell) go a step further. How can we make this even better?
[I’ve spend many years working in one of the best corporate R&D organisations in the world, and this was a big part of what made us successful—to be always asking “how could we make this even better?”]
Once you start asking this, the ideas arrive: who are the most effective people to give the money to? when is the most effective time to give money? how to coordinate cash-transfers with other initiatives to maximise impact? Etc.
Of course there’s still a lot of research needed to answer these. But the value of asking these questions is enormous, and unfortunately I get the impression that this is where many charities fail—they find a model that’s good enough, and stick to it—doing a lot of good, but also not helping as many people as they might, as much as they might.
I realise this entire comment falls under what Basil Fawlty would describe as “the bleedin’ obvious” for this EA audience—but to me it is a beautiful example we can use to explain how and why EA’s can always create more impact. I will write about this in the Effective Giving Ireland journal and maybe convince one or two extra donors to support effective charities …

Denis 13 Jun 2026 22:25 UTC
2 points
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on: Good-tasting alt meat is a scientific problem we can solve: $10M RFP for Alternative Protein R&D
I love to see this. Based on the Horizon experience in the EU, these kinds of problems are often best tackled by a mixed consortium—maybe a university, a start-up and a multinational—which bring different aspects and questions.

These technical questions are very tractable but very complex. There are universities and industry groups who work on them in other contexts. For example there is a field called tribology which studies the texture of foods in the mouth, and texture is critical to our view of “meatiness”—and very difficult to copy. If it were just taste, we could must mix amino-acids a paste and flavour them, but consumers want not just the taste, but also the mouthfeel, the aroma, the feeling you get when you bite into a steak, and how that changes as you chew it and as it interacts with your saliva. It is hard, but if you get it wrong, people won’t say “well, it was a good effort,” they’ll just say “sorry, but it’s not meat!”

Artificial meat/fish/eggs might be the single greatest opportunity for the world. It can prevent so much animal suffering in factory farms. It can prevent so many emissions. It and reduce the land-use and water-use needed to feed us. And it can ultimately give us a low-cost, plentiful, nutritious food supply with no need for antibiotics, which can feed the world.

It’s great to see the focus on this.

Denis 13 Jun 2026 18:42 UTC
2 points
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on: Experience of a ‘generalist’ transitioning into AI safety in 2026
Thanks Emily, this is a very valuable post.

I think many people who work in EA orgs do not understand how difficult it is to find a job in an EA org. Once you’re in, perhaps it seems obvious how to get in. Perhaps they lucked out or knew someone or got hired on their first application.

And so they sincerely encourage others, believing that it’s just a matter of time. Because, based on the subset of applicants they know (the people they work with), there is a 100% success rate!

However, most people report applying for jobs and seeing literally hundreds of applicants for each position, and many just give up.

I wrote here previously (I think, it was a while ago) about the amount of effort people put into looking for work in the EA field is actually highly ineffective use of motivated people’s energy and skills.

I also know that EA organisations, more than other companies, put huge effort into giving fair consideration to all applicants, and so many of their hours are spent on recruitment, which is not directly advancing the projects their organisation works on. But I question whether being fair to candidates in this way is consistent with being truly effective in advancing the goals of EA.

And I also wonder if even the candidates themselves would prefer a quicker, less work-intensive process, even if it were less fair.

I would love it if some organisations could do a meta-analysis of the impact of eliminating 90% of the effort of recruiting. How:

1. Very clear criteria in the job description. If you don’t meet these, don’t waste your time and our time applying. (as in: do not put the usual “please apply even if you don’t think you’re a good fit with the criteria”—let people apply to fewer jobs, but with a higher chance of success for each).
2. Very short application forms—like 5-10 minutes maximum for the initial application.
3. Option to submit automatic AI application based on your CV / linked-in, and to be evaluated by AI, which would eliminate most candidates and select only the top few % for in-depth analysis. (Also option to not be evaluated by AI if you think it will unfairly disadvantage you).
4. Hire someone “reasonably good” on a 3-month trial rather than spending 3 months working on recruiting. Take a risk. If they don’t work out, hire someone else. Most applicants who look reasonable good will be reasonably good.

The key points here:
- The goal of effective altruism is to do the most good possible.
- Being fair to job-applicants (ensuring the best applicant gets the job) is NOT a primary goal of EA. We all have such an inherent sense of fairness, we want to reward the best applicant and find the best candidate—but IMHO for most roles, EA as a whole would be better off with a much less time-consuming process, even if sometimes we didn’t get the best people.
  - When you need a plumbing job done at home, you look for a competent plumber and usually they work out. You don’t spend months searching for the best plumber and interviewing them. How many EA roles just need someone who is committed and competent?
- Ensuring that we get the very best hire for every role should NOT be a critical goal except where there is a demonstrated and strong correlation with achieving the best results. Maybe for a visionary leadership role yes.
  - I believe people who work in EA orgs are mostly wonderful and brilliant (truly), but so are many of the job-applicants that are rejected.
- Having applicants and people new to EA spend huge amounts of effort just to get hired is not effective use of their energy, and it can be very demotivating.
- in general (not just in EA) the accuracy of recruitment is greatly overrated. How strong is the evidence that we even get better people after all the work we put in.
- I keep reading of EA orgs which are “bottlenecked” not by funding but by lack of people in specific roles. Given the millions of people looking for EA-related work, this suggests a flawed recruitment process.

Denis 5 Jun 2026 17:52 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The Singularity is a Veil of Ignorance
Kind of sad that it’s probably needed, but if this is a way to get more people thinking more empathically, we need to start sharing this idea.

Denis 22 May 2026 22:51 UTC
1 point
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on: How to Actually Spend Billions on AI Safety
Wow! Possibly the single best, most important post I’ve seen on here.

EA’s ideas are often extremely good, to the extent that if we could get people to listen to our arguments for a few hours, most of them would probably agree with us.

But too often the only people we actually convince are the small minority who are willing to come to EA forums and other blogs and read long arguments in very dense prose.

And that’s why so many of our great ideas remain in the minority, or, at best, weakly but not passionately supported by a majority.

You have perfectly identified the two groups of people who know how to change this—the advertisers and communication experts who know how to influence public opinion, and the lobbyists who know how to influence political decisions and policies.

Have you considered applying for funding specifically for what you outline here? I mean literally going to Coefficient Giving or someone and saying “I would like to design a program and run some trials / focus groups / whatever to find out what works. Could you give me $1m? In 6 months I will come back with a plan for how to spend $100m.”

(anyone who works in the corporate world knows that this is how things are done there. And these sums of money, if they can have the impact needed, are relative peanuts.)

Denis 22 Apr 2026 21:19 UTC
1 point
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on: Building the Field of AI Safety
Love this post. So many posts about careers are aimed at new graduates. Finally one aimed at mid-career people (at least partly)! Definitely going to look into this in more depth!

Denis 2 Apr 2026 9:04 UTC
3 points
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on: Moral Ambition Fellowships now open!
This is a fantastic program. I haven’t been directly involved, but I know people who have, and I’ve been receiving their updates and messages. Rutger Bregman is an inspiring leader, and what is so great about him, and about this program, is that it is so results-oriented. No grand gestures, big statements or whatever. This is about getting the right people working on the core of the problem. It’s about getting the best lawyers (and not just volunteers) challenging nasty companies in court based on high-quality research.

A lot of great EA ideas move slowly because we live in a world where there is so much intertia, intentionally created by people who like the status quo. It is sometimes difficult for young, energetic, well-meaning people to figure out how to change things. This program looks at finding people with the skill-sets needed to really change the systems—from inside if possible.
Probably a lot of the people who would be ideal for this don’t have time to read the EA Forum—maybe they’re not even EA’s. But surely many of us know people—good people who would love to work on vitally important questions, but who have kind of accepted that that’s not likely to happen, and that they’re going to be in their well-paying but ultimately meaningless corporate jobs until they retire. Maybe relations, parents, friends …
Don’t hesitate to mention this program to them. Maybe they could join the fellowship—or maybe just reading about it will enable them to find ways to make a greater impact even without switching careers.
Never underestimate the extent to which what we all consider as self-evident EA thinking may not actually have percolated out to most people outside the EA bubble!

Denis 2 Apr 2026 8:54 UTC
2 points
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on: How the alternative protein ecosystem in Europe has evolved, and where barriers remain
Thanks Alex,

This is a nice update.

I would really be wonderful if we could see the urgency the world needs applied to this topic. GFI is doing amazing work, but how can we turn this from what appears still to be a niche area, into what it should be: a massive international effort to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time.

As EA’s we’re very aware of the multiple challenges the world faces. Alternative protein is unique in that it can bring huge improvements in at least three areas:
- Reduce the suffering of farmed animals.
- Reduce the massive impact of the meat industry on climate change.
- Enable everyone on earth to have cheap and easy access to a full and healthy diet. (This one is maybe more long-term, but people 100 years from now will see this as normal—we just need to get there faster)
What should EA’s be doing to push for more political support, more funding, more investment? Imagine what the industry could achieve with 1% of the crazy investments going into AI …

Keep up the great work!

Denis 28 Mar 2026 0:18 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What happens when an EA org actually invests in marketing? A case study.
I love this.

Sometimes it feels like we in EA are “too honest” to market ourselves. The reality is that so many people haven’t heard of EA, haven’t heard of impactful careers or effective giving or whatever. And when we don’t reach them, we are depriving them of the chance to improve their own and other people’s lives.

I may contact you to find out some more details to help with the (smaller) campaign we’re planning to run with Effective Giving Ireland.

Keep up the amazing work! I’ve been on the receiving end of some material from Consultants for Impact (and I am in your target audience), and it has been really engaging.

Denis 7 Mar 2026 0:34 UTC
1 point
2 ∶ 4
on: Why isn’t anti-fascism a bigger topic at EAG events (or on this forum)?
Today, the single most impactful thing anyone could do—to reduce existential risk, for animals, for the climate, to help humans in need, whatever—would be to stop Donald Trump’s administration. If you don’t trust me, pick any one topic and look at his actual actions—from blocking AI governance to repealing the most basic climate-policies to destroying the (albeit flawed) global system, to promoting arms build-ups to supporting thugs like Netanyahu and Putin.

It’s not about Trump personally, but about the policies he’s enabling, and about the transition he’s enabling in what was once a counterweight to the “bad guys.”

The world has adjusted over the decades to the idea of Russia being Russia and China being China and even to a few European countries having radical leaders. But the US has always been a powerful counterweight. If the US goes down this path, who will save us?

I hear the argument that opposing Trump is not exactly neglected. The day he dies will be a global celebration on a par with the end of WW2 - but unfortunately, like that celebration, it will be marred by the realisation of the massive damage that has been caused.

So an EA has to ask themselves not whether opposing Trump’s (or Orban’s, or Putin’s or …) fascism is the biggest problem, but rather, whether it is the most impactful thing they as an individual could do.

Honestly, if you are in the privileged position to impact this in some way, I believe that it probably is. Anyone in the AI bubble who can maybe influence those cynical AI companies who give him money, focus on stopping that, the most impactful thing you can do for the climate or for AI Governance is to ensure adults take power in November.

But if you’re, like me, far from the US, not in a country where fascism is a major force, and without any particularly strong means to impact the outcome, it’s probably not the right thing to be working on, not because it’s not important, but because it’s not neglected. So we can keep working on other good stuff, and somehow reduce the harm being done to the world over these 4 infamous years.

Denis 14 Feb 2026 18:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: EU Policy Careers’s comment on: More EAs should consider working for the EU
I both agree and disagree.

I agree this is probably the status and that it’s not an easy sell.

But I still think there must be a way. Once you start thinking like an EA, it’s hard to go back to ineffective thinking; it just doesn’t make sense. So surely the kind of people who get through the EU concours should be the kind of people who would think that way if we could just get them started ..

I’m thinking about what I could do in this area with my own EU mates.

Denis 9 Feb 2026 22:59 UTC
2 points
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on: High Impact Engineers is back
This is awesome, Amanda,

Jessica (original co-founder of Hi-Eng) just emailed me to say you’d set this up. I’ve signed up and will try to find ways to help. Basically we engineers can do so much in so many impactful areas—alternative protein, climate, nuclear, health … so much of the world’s problems need engineers to help solve them.

I’m super busy these days, but when I have time I will look into ways I might be able to help—even though my GitHub skills are neglegible …

Denis 5 Feb 2026 22:54 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: More EAs should consider working for the EU
Great post, I have heard the same observations before (I live in Brussels). The examples you give are spot on. It is very very difficult to change EU policy on a political level, but I have heard of people working in the commission for less than 4 years being responsible for determining how to distribute millions of euros of developmental aid. Just having a person who asks “can I see the evidence behind the different interventions?” would make a massive difference.

In this context, I sometimes one if the single biggest opportunity is not to turn many more EU administrators into EA’s—or at least, to expose them to EA thinking. They are mostly very smart people, mostly motivated to make the world better. They tend to be very quantitatively competent (the entrance exam requires it for many roles).

If you were to ask yourself where you might find a cohort of people more suited to being impactful EA’s, it would be hard to find one.

Unlike many bureaucracies, most EU staffers are not hardened cynics or party hacks. They mostly did an exam soon after graduation while they were still idealistic.

From your experience, do you know if there is much effort in this direction. Do EU staff get exposed to EA thinking in a positive way? Or in any way at all? Is there room for an impactful program to improve this?

You say there are only about two dozen EA or EA-adjacent people out of 32,000. That is tiny. Imagine if we could increase that number to 1% - somehow communicate with the people enough to convince 1% of them to start thinking like an EA. People like Rutger Bregman who have a lot of credibility outside the EA community could help.

It feels like turning EU Administrators into EA’s could be a highly effective, tractable, impactful and neglected opportunity.

This post from one year ago got MINUS 29 Karma.

Denis 3 Feb 2026 23:52 UTC

−3 points

0 comments3 min readEA link

Denis 9 Nov 2025 0:32 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Scale-up: the neglected bottleneck facing alternative proteins
Hi Alex,

Thanks for writing this wonderful post. I’ve been following and supporting GFI for a while and I actually looked at working in Alternative Protein (I’m a PhD chemical engineer and spend most of my career doing scale-up research) - but it is surprisingly hard to get into, and so I ended up working with a pretty amazing direct air capture start-up.

Alternative Protein has so much potential to be a win/win/win/win for the world—climate, land-use, water, nutrition, animal-suffering, preventing famines—it’s a total no-brainer … except to the lobbies who want to preserve the status quo. It is shocking that we don’t spend 100 x what we currently spend on bringing this technology to the market.

Over the past 3 years, while I haven’t been working on alternative protein, I have been learning so much (not intentionally!) that may be relevant to the challenges you describe. I won’t try to capture it all here, but would be happy to talk to one of your scale-up team members.

Let me briefly explain what I’ve learned:
1. Aggressive scaling is possible and you can get it funded. DAC is an even less attractive market than Alternative Protein in many ways, but there is a way to get investors and regulators on board. But it’s not trivial. It requires going beyond the business-as-usual approach and focusing on scaling. Basically, one company that says “we’ll let all those other people figure out the details—we’re going to scale—fast! - and we’re going to be ready to use the best technology that the others develop. In other words, instead of waiting until you’re “ready” to scale, you scale in parallel with the technology growth. This can be compelling for investors, because you have a tangible time-line within which you plan to be profitable. (Yes, I know this is massively over-simplified and so on, but I can share real examples of where this strategy has worked and how).
2. There is EU Funding at the right scale. One of my side-roles while I was between roles was as an “expert” reviewer for EU Horizon projects. They have “flagship projects” which get up to ~ 20 million euros of funding—these are designed to get the first full-scale production plant build for technologies that struggle to scale. I reviewed proposals in a different area, but I’m sure that alternative protein can have potential in some ways. Writing these proposals is hard work and very tedious, but it can be the breakthrough that is needed.
3. Legislation is a vital part of the battle. The recent farcical ruling in the EU that products cannot be called meat-names if they’re not meat is an example of what can go wrong. (I live in Brussels but I’m not really in the policy / lobbying network, but I see people who are in the climate space, and it is very powerful. Less in the sense that you can influence major policy decisions, but more in the sense that you can influence which initiatives a quite junior commission officer might decide to support with the 100 million euros they have to invest in some particular objective. Do you have people on the ground, in PLux, chatting to people about how alternative protein is a great way to help the climate, to reduce animal suffering, to provide food security for the EU, … ??
  I think Rutger Bregman is a big supporter of Alternative Protein. Certainly one of the co-leaders of his program is. It would be interesting to see if there’s a way that he would consider Alternative Protein as a topic for the next generation of the School of Moral Ambition. This would give a big injection of resources and support in the non-technical aspects, like legislation and funding. If you have a tangible proposal of what this might look like, I know my contact in his org would get it to him.
4. Many scale-up projects fail at the zeroth step (this from my long industrial career) because they have not clearly defined the one (or two, or three) technical obstacles that, if solved, would enable scale-up. This is also a reason that Horizon applications fail. You need an absolutely ruthless analysis of all the assumptions you’re making, and a “devil’s advocate” review before you can then say “if we could solve this, we could scale this technology.” But once you get it down to the point where you need just one or two innovations, it starts to become more interesting to investors and research funders.
I wish I had time to follow and deeply understand the technology behind alternative protein—I followed a few lectures and read some articles, but I’m not a biochemical engineer, and so I don’t pretend to have the necessary technical mastery. But there are already lots of amazing scientists and engineers working on the technical challenges. If you think it’d be useful to chat to someone from a more hard-nosed scale-up perspective, let me know.

Denis 25 Oct 2025 17:10 UTC
1 point
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on: How can we stop Trump?
I keep coming back to this post and feeling that, if anything, I didn’t express strongly enough just how awful and dangerous Trump is.

Denis 25 Oct 2025 17:06 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Applying to EA orgs? My thoughts as a new recruiter with AIM
This is a great post!

I’ve worked in non-EA roles where I was a hiring manager and we had many high-quality applicants for a single role. For example, hiring post-doc chemists is humbling when you see 50 CV’s of people who have each done incredible work and are far more qualified than I am.

At first, it seems like an abundance of choice. But what is surprising is that we almost never reject someone without a real reason. Sure, “there were better candidates” can be true, but usually I can put my finger on a few reasons why we decided this. You are probably a great person, but if you don’t get hired, it’s very likely that someone can tell you exactly why—what was it that that other candidate had or did differently?

So feedback is super useful—but only if you can get good, honest feedback—and you’ll only get this if you are very receptive, not defensive and totally respectful of the interviewer’s time.

For good, motivated candidates, I often offer to do a 30 minute feedback session after their last interview. I will get quite granular “when we asked you X, you replied Y, and it wasn’t a very convincing answer, we would expect a candidate of your calibre to have given answer Z” or “we had 4 applicants who had done full post-docs in small-angle light scattering, which is the core of the role, and it was always going to be difficult for you without this experience.” And also very basic things like “If you start to feel tired, have a strong coffee. We’re judging you against other candidates who are fully focused, if you’re tired, it’s just harder.”

When I applied for my first job in a full-time EA role, a very helpful hiring manager, Michael Aird, did exactly this, and gave me so much good feedback and tangible advice that it really step-changed my approach to EA job-seeking.

I still got plenty of rejection though :) - I was even rejected as an attendee for EAG London even while I was doing an incubator with AIM ! So it’s also great to get used to rejection and learn from it!

Denis 31 Aug 2025 0:42 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: AnonymousTurtle’s comment on: Politics is an EA blindspot
Yes, in many circles the EA brand is toxic.

But sometimes we stick our heads in the sand as if that were something we couldn’t control.

Or maybe some EA’s kind of like this feeling of being outsiders and being the minority. I don’t know.

Every other group I’ve ever worked with accepts that PR is part of the world. Companies know that they will get good press and bad press, and that it won’t always reflect reality, but they hire people to make it as positive as possible. Politicians are the same. They run focus groups and figure out what words to use to share their message with the public, to maximise support.

Too often we act like we’re above all that. We’re right and that’s enough. If people can’t accept that, that’s their loss.

But it’s not their loss. It’s our loss. it’s the world’s loss.

Public perception of EA’s outside the EA community is often “a bunch of ‘rationalist’ tech guys who like to argue about abstract concepts and believe that AI should have rights,” or something along those lines. This is totally at odds with vast majority of EA’s who are among the most generous, caring people in the world, who want to help people and animals who are suffering.

A world run by EA’s, or on EA principles, would be so wonderful. This should be our vision if we’re truly sincere. But if we want to make this happen, we need to be willing to get our hands dirty, do the PR, challenge the newspaper articles that mis-characterize us, learn to communicate in 15 second tweets as well as 22222222243 word essays so that more people can be exposed to EA ideas rather than stereotypes.

If you ask anyone outside the EA community to name an EA, they probably only have heard of SBF. If you push them, they might wonder if Elon Musk is also an EA. It’s no wonder they don’t trust EA’s. But it’s up to us to proactively change that perception.