Digital Sentience Career Transition Fellow at Digital Sentience Consortium
Following this transition period, Iām planning to work on field-building initiatives to grow the community and research around digital sentience.
Studying Philosophy double major in Business Administration graduating in 2026
Uni Group Mentor (OSP),
I believe Amsterdam has a very active community. I was a bit disappointed at first, but I think that was due to my unrealistic expectations. After returning to Turkey, Iām very glad that I did my exchange in Amsterdam, most of that gratitude comes from the wonderful community there. Iād be happy to give more details on my experience, send me DM if youād like to!
Iād be happy to see more writing on:
Making earn-to-give mainstream again within EA
More posts on digital sentience
Descriptive stories about the emotions people experience before committing to take a high-impact action.
Posts that show vulnerability
Rule of thumbs for potential biases like this post
I want to write about:
How founders and agency can be the real bottleneck in Effective Altruism
How funders can improve coordination with minimal effort
Why the field of potential digital sentience is highly neglected
10 community-building project ideas
Letās create example trial tasks to strengthen EA hiring?
EA orgs use trial tasks quite a lot in hiring, which is great since candidates can demonstrate their skills, which is what truly matters regardless of their background. However, outside of EA, trial tasks are often quite different, and for the average candidate, it usually takes several rejections before they learn how to show their best in that setting.
It would be great if we had example trial tasks for different roles (research, operations, etc.) so that people could practice before applying to real jobs. This way, strong candidates would not get lost in the hiring process simply due to inexperience with trial tasks.
Jeff Bezos used to mandate an empty chair at Amazon meetings to represent the customer, and keep them as the focus in decision-making.
Maybe we can do something similar and add an empty chair at our meetings for impact to remind ourselves about it and keep our focus.
I was initially triggered when I saw the article, but I decided to read it with the intention of challenging my own views, and Iām very glad I did. Thank you for writing such a courageous post. I believe I agree with high majority of your points, and Iāll be more mindful about my supplementation and probably start incorporating bivalves into my diet. Once again, I truly appreciate your courage and good intentions in writing this piece.
Im unsure if consuming animal products in very little amounts would have harmful effects due to trans fats and heavy metals since theyāll be so little in the body. At the end of the day we need to accept a trade-off and being conservative could make sense given how little we know about nutrition science.
I liked the summary as an argument against the marker method, but found the title disconnected from the summary itself.
Amazing post. Thank you!
Thanks a lot James! Glad you found it useful.
Budget: We didnāt have a set budget but were experimenting. We stopped after spending around $250 on Meta ads without getting any applicants.
Process: Our call-to-action directed people straight to the application form. In hindsight, your approach with instant forms and automatic follow-up emails sounds really smart. I hadnāt considered that before, and it makes sense because the Instagram scrolling mindset probably isnāt the best fit for filling out a full application right away.
Great post! Thanks for writing it.
I believe many interventions in this area could be cost-effective. However, given the vastness of the space, each projectās cost-effectiveness and expected value should be carefully assessed and compared against the most effective charities in EA.
I wanted to underline this because this is also a quite āsweetā idea, where you spread EA ideas with the world, and due to the sweetness of the idea, sometimes even the EA community forgets about the fat-tailed nature of impact. The bar for effectiveness we have should be kept the same, and if math doesnāt math we should stop doing this type of intervention
Thanks for flagging this. Someone else DMed about this, but it worked in my and a friendās devices. What device and browser are you using?
Thanks for the comment! Which parts sounded the most like an LLM? Iām surprised because I only used AI (Grammarly) to catch grammar/āspelling mistakes.
Iām honestly sad that the first/āprimary motivation youād think of for writing a post like this would be to āstand out, act cutesy to hirers, and get a jobā. Iāve written this as a first post for a series on how the current broken view of Impactful EA Career can be revised. I find the first part of your comment rude and assuming to have bad intent.
Apart from this, I agree with you on the impact point. Iām very skeptical of your counterfactual impact with the 2nd or 3rd candidates for a role. I (generally) believe that optimising for different higher-absorbency, less EA-crowded paths is more impactful than landing a position on the 80K job board.
But disagree with the cause of this. I donāt think this is about ālooking professionalā at all. The problem isnāt about the single orgs that are doing the hiring. An org would open a role, do interviews, and hire someone who thinks they fit the role best. The cause is the disproportionality between āthe number of jobs in the classic EA orgsā and āthe number of smart, altruistic people who want to work in a classic EA orgā.
We need to change the belief that the best way to create impact with your career is by āworking at classic EA orgsā. So that people are more motivated to do earn to give, skill-build, found new orgs, try different projects, test new ideas etc. All these career options to have an impact should have higher status in the community.
Thanks for the amazing post. Iām adding it to EA Turkeyās syllabus of career mentorship program for inspiration š
Are these disagreements representative of the general disagreements between people with long and short AI timelines?
Hi,
When do you plan to publish your response?
I think you didnāt misunderstand me.
If you are not assuming the longterm effects, the intervals below are only for shorttermish effects. (this is what I got from your comment, correct please if Itās wrong)
H=[100,200]Ć[ā300,50]Ć[ā50,50]
Isnāt one of the main problems brought by deep moral uncertinity is about how an intervention itself is benefical for the target group or not?
An intervention effects far future. Far future effect is generally more important than short term effects. So even if our short therm analysis shows the intervention was beneficial it doesnāt mean in aggregate it is net positive. Thus we donāt know the impact of the intervention.
I believe this was the one of the main problems of moral uncertinity/ācluenessness. What I donāt get is how the model can solve moral uncertinity if it does not takes far longterm effects into account.
I guess I didnāt specify how far these sets of targets go into the future, so you could assume Iām ignoring far future moral patients, or we can extend the example to include them, with interventions positive in expectation for some sets of far future targets.
Is the bolded part even possible? Is there interventions that are highly likely to be positive for the target group in the very far future?
P.S: Thank you for responding my comment this fast even if the post is 5 years old :)
In the caculation below it is assumed that, we know at least one intervention for each cause area that has no negatives so that we use our funds to compensate this net positive with negatives from other interventions.
However isnāt it hard to assume this? I personally canāt think of an intervention that is definitely positive in the long term. It feels like instead of numbers there should be question marks due to complexity of everything. Am I missing something?
Very exiting, thanks for all your work.