Denis

Karma: 649

Denis 12 Aug 2026 15:31 UTC
2 points
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on: About The Altruists: the Netflix series on FTX
Fantastic!
IMHO, as a relative newbie to EA, you guys do a terrible job on PR!
I say that as a compliment. :)
EA is full of amazing, committed people who want to help animals suffer less, help poor people have better lives, help make the world better, because you CARE. And anytime I’ve seen EA portrayed to the general public, this caring aspect is totally omitted.
- EA’s are often portrayed as nerds who see the whole enterprise as an intellectual, logical game. The focus is 100% on the “effective” and 0% on the “altruism”.
- They show the long intellectual debates, often described as esoteric or abstract. They rarely show the long hours people spend designing, implementing and supporting projects that really help people and animals.
- They often highlight the controversial arguments (longtermism, earning-to-give, for example) and ignore all the work on poverty alleviation in the world’s poorest countries.
- They often portray EA as guilt-washing for over-paid IT workers who ease their consciences at the luxury of their lives while others struggle by making a show of donating a small % of their wealth.
- Etc.
It is absurd but true that many people, if they hear the term Effective Altruist, first think of SBF—an ultra-rich, conceited guy living a life of pure luxury—rather than the vast majority of EA people who volunteer or work for low salaries so that they can help more people.
It would be wonderful and highly impactful if we could change this perception and so encourage the millions of people who agree with our true priorities to join and support us.
I have quite a bit of second-hand experience working on brand-image and public perceptions for a big multi-national—how to research it, how to improve it, etc. Happy to help if that sounds useful.

Denis 12 Aug 2026 15:06 UTC
3 points
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on: You can now afford to work at AIM: our new salary policy, program stipends, and founder salary advice
This is all good. But AIM is still a very young organisation. The experience of 99% of successful businesses throughout history is that performance-based salary increases are one of the best long-term motivational tools.
It’s not all, or mostly, about the money! Pay-rises are seen as the one tangible, non-bullshit validation that you are growing your impact over time.
People who put more in get more out, and everyone finds that fair.
I wonder if your model is sustainable for long-term employees. Yes it’s very liberating, but it also means you have to self-motivate every day, even on days where you’re not feeling altruistic … It may work for some people, maybe for young, highly idealistic people without kids. If you are human, there are days when you feel less motivated, where you need a little push.
This is especially true in non-glamorous roles where there is no tangible number you can point at as a measure of what you’ve achieved.
And in most companies, part of the push thst motivates people comes from the annual performance and pay review. It’s a game, you want to score more. You want to win. Countless research shows that “gamification” increases effort and performance, causing people to achieve more than they thought possible.
It is also a quite clear way for people to judge what is reasonable commitment to their work. Is it right to skip football practice to complete an urgent project on time? It it right to re-schedule a family vacation to travel to a project site? (stupid examples)
You are deliberately de-gamifying performance, at least in terms of salary. It is an ambitious objective. I really hope it works, but a part of me wonders if this won’t lead to some more ambitious (and that’s in your name) employees moving on after a few years—I hope I’m wrong.
An alternative might be to give performance-related raises but with the option to forego them, or to take only a % of your salary in a given year, based on need.

Denis 10 Aug 2026 10:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: simon’s comment on: EAs Should Use Less Bayesian Reasoning
Fair, It seems you know more about this than I do! Thanks!

Why it’s so hard to get experienced senior managers for EA organisations.

Denis 9 Aug 2026 15:11 UTC

24 points

1 comment2 min readEA link

Denis 8 Aug 2026 18:02 UTC
11 points
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on: General capability—and capabilities generally—have no good y-axis
Very provocative post. A few minor comments, not criticisms!
1. Maybe some of your reference cases are more complex than you imagine. Temperature, for example, is not trivial. Depending how you measure it (ideal gas vs electrical conductivity), you get two aifferent seemingly linear scales that agree only at the two points where you force agreement (e.g. Oc and 100C). But also even using Kelvin, it’s not at all obvious that this is the correct linear scale to use. Maybe the true scale is exponential or logarithmic relative to this: (e.g. one could argue that the differencebetween 10 K and 100 K is the same as that between 100 K and 1000 K … or you could argue (if you’re a chemist, that in the correct scale 300 k is 2x 290 K which is 2x 280 K …). Today, after mant years, we have a settled system, but it doesn’t mean anything—anybody working with quantum computers will know that one degree close to 0K is a lot more “difficult” than going from 285 to 284 K, while maybe cosmologists use phrases like “10′s of millions of degrees” where Celsius and Kelvin are basically the same, and only worry if the temperature changes by a million degrees …
2. All this to point out that the question of measurement is rarely trivial once you get past counting things!
3. What people do in science and engineering is to make two lists:
  1. what are the tangible outcomes we need? (e.g. what is the cost per kJ of energy delivered to a home? …)
  2. what are the physical, tangible measures we can make? (e.g. how many kg of fuel did we use? what temperature was reached? what was the % completeness of the reaction? …)
4. And then, they try to build a model in which the available data will predict the desired output. Sometimes it’s possible, but usually it requires a lot of assumptions, which need to be tested and validated continuously.
5. They always also keep in mind that all models are wrong, but some are useful, and constantly re-check if their model is useful and remind themselves of the ways it is wrong, especially if applied in and area it wasn’t intended for.
6. In this context, IMHO asking how capable an AI is is just far too difficult and too broad. To use your football analogy, Messi might be better than anyone in the world at scoring with his left foot, but there are guys on my amateur team who would be better at defending a corner than he would.
7. What’s most realistic is to ask more granular questions (e.g. likelihood to enable a bioterrorist to produce a new virus, likelihood to successfully complete a problem that takes a skilled human 1 week, … ), and then look at more tangible ways to test exactly that. Which of course is what AI Safety labs do. Just as IQ is meaningful but flawed, any measure of general capability will be flawed.
All this was a long-winded way of saying that yours is a great analysis and a valuable contribution, but that with the right mentality, people have found ways to measure and predict in complex situations before. It feels that AI is another level of complexity, but the principles that give us the most insight do not change.

Denis 7 Aug 2026 10:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: simon’s comment on: EAs Should Use Less Bayesian Reasoning
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was referring to the fee structure, where many funds charge 2% of the investment as annual management fees. Two and Twenty: Explanation of the Hedge Fund Fee Structure.
So hedge-fund managers can become absurdly rich despite adding very little value to society. IMHO if a fund manager had to set these out as numbers rather than percentages, clients would be more likely to complain that (for large investors) the management fees are ridiculous. (“How can you justify earning $30 m in one year for managing my money?”). But when they see “2%” maybe it feels cheap to objest to such a “small” number.

Denis 6 Aug 2026 19:14 UTC
1 point
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on: EAs Should Use Less Bayesian Reasoning
Great post. I’m not sure most of it relates to Bayesian thinking, but just bad logic. I especially appreciate your point about low-probability events—but then the entire hedge-fund industry is based on the fact that people think 2% is a very small number, so we’re not alone.
I think there is a lot of value in discounting estimates’ influence on actions based on uncertainty.

Denis 16 Jul 2026 14:15 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: Let’s taboo the V-word
You actually wrote “I agree that we should embrace non-vegans in the animal rights movement.” You actually wrote that !!

As in, in your eyes, the true animal-rights movement is limited to the 1-2% of people who are vegans, but you deign to accept the help of some of the 98% of people who are not.

Vegans do not own the animal rights movement. People who care about animals and make commitments to help them own the animal rights movement.

If I, as an individual, decide that I want to do as much as possible to help end factory-farming, then becoming vegan would probably not be in the top 5 more impactful things I could do. On the other hand, it might well be among the most difficult things I could do.

Imagine if all the people who work on artificial protein decided that they owned the animal rights movement (because many people would argue that they are working on a much more viable long-term solution than veganism), but they were not so tolerant and decided that they didn’t want vegans in their movement unless they also dedicated their careers to artificial protein.

I do agree that it’s not about making veganism taboo. Vegans play a huge role in animal-rights, especially if they are clear that they do this because they oppose the killing of animals for food. (those of you who live in the kind of EA-bubble may not realise this, but most people do not immediately make this association—veganism is often seen as a kind of hippy / mindful / health-driven kind of thing rather than a robust position held by strong-willed people who care about animals.)
But when it’s used to exclude (as in, you wouldn’t be happy to have non-vegans leading the animal-rights movement), it is absolutely not helping.
Unless you see veganism as a total solution in itself. In that case, it’s not nearly enough to be vegan. You need to convince everyone to become vegan. Not just people who care about animal rights. Everyone. There is absolutely space for a movement to convince more people to become vegans, but (maybe I’m out of the loop) I haven’t seen any evidence of this. This is not about asking individual vegans to become advocates—they are already doing their part by role-modelling the behaviour—but about a movement that aggressively communicates how horrific it is that we kill animals and eat them, and then proposes a solution.

(Ironically, even this doesn’t necessarily have to be led by vegans—it might even work better if the protagonists were non-vegans who were trying to become vegans and encountering the same challenges that everyone else faces, rather than people who are already past them).

Denis 16 Jul 2026 14:00 UTC
3 points
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on: Let’s taboo the V-word
This is an absolutely wonderful post.

Vegans role-model a behaviour that can be a powerful signal and something that makes others pause. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s not easy and they do it anyway. in that context—where veganism is seen as an “extreme” form of commitment, it can be very powerful and can motivate others to fight for animal rights.

But once veganism becomes a minimum criterion, the problems highlighted in this post come to the fore, and it does more harm than good. Outside the EA-bubble, most people do not meet many vegans in their daily lives, people hosting a small dinner party do not plan vegan options, and very few men are (openly) vegans.

On the other hand, if you talk about factory farming and suffering animals in tiny cages, most people will immediate react with disgust and agree (in principle at least) that this needs to stop, that it is a stain on our society. We absolutely need to channel this energy without filtering it though purity-criteria like veganism.
There are many ways that people can contribute to animal rights. Working on artificial protein. Advocating for better legislation and for tax-incentives that promote better treatment of animals. Donating to organisations like FarmKind which fight factory farming. Protesting at factory farms. Opposing the Big Food protests in Brussels and elsewhere that try to pass themselves off as standing up for poor farmers’ rights. Being a vegan and role-modelling your veganism in a positive, inclusive way.

Animals need all of these right now. They do not want anyone excluded because they are not pure enough.

Denis 4 Jul 2026 21:29 UTC
1 point
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on: Possible mistake EAs are making and shout out to Pause AI UK
Thanks for this Michelle (and Pause AI).
Being located in Brussels, it always feels that there must be ways to influence the people within the EU who have so much power. Not just the politicians (for whom there are thousands of professional and well-paid full-time lobbyists), but also the eurocrats who manage a lot of the tangible work the EU does.
It always feels like the bad guys (the oil-companies and tobacco companies and people looking for reduced regulation (often using the euphemism “simplification” to describe what is really reducing consumer-protection, reducing environmental protection, slowing AI legislation, etc.) have all the money, power and influence. I would love to see more EA’s aggressively and effectively working in this area. There are many NGO’s of course who do this, full of people who do great work. But it just feels like they are often out-manned and struggling to be heard.

The example that always comes to mind is the few people lobbying for better legislation on issues like factory farming or alternative protein trying to be heard when there are regular many-thousand strong violent demonstrations by “farmers” with tractors opposing anything that they don’t like. It’s annoying because I strongly believe that the farmers involved in these protests represent the huge industrial factory farms, and not the many smaller farmers who do have genuine concerns and challenges. The legislation serves neither the animals nor the true farmers, just the factory farms who have the money to lobby and protest.

Denis 1 Jul 2026 14:48 UTC
2 points
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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
1 ∶ 0
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

Why it’s so hard to get ex­pe­rienced se­nior man­agers for EA or­gani­sa­tions.

Why it’s so hard to get experienced senior managers for EA organisations.