Hazem🔸

• Hazem🔸 17 Jun 2026 16:50 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: The fu­ture of an­i­mal welfare: Re­sist­ing ‘nom­i­na­tive de­ter­minism’

  Never thought about how labels could affect animal welfare until now.

  Apparently the Good Food Insitute is looking into this. A study from 2022 had the following highlights:

  • Differentiation: Overall, “cultivated meat” and “cell-cultured meat” are similarly effective at differentiating from conventional meat.

  • Accuracy & descriptiveness: “Cultivated meat” and “cell-cultivated meat” are the most accurate and descriptive terms.

  • Appeal: “Cultivated meat” is the most appealing term, followed by “cultured meat.”

  • Use: When asked which names they could imagine using personally, more than four times as many respondents selected “cultivated meat” compared to “cell-cultured meat.” 75% of companies use the term “cultivated meat.”

• Hazem🔸 20 May 2026 21:07 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing Effec­tive Altru­ism Egypt 🇪🇬

  Great job starting this! One small correction, though:

  … the first official EA community in Egypt and the Arab world.

  Not quite. Check these out:

  • EA in Arabic

  • EA at NYU Abu Dhabi

  • Effective Altruism UAE

  • EA at American University of Sharjah

  • Effective Altruism Middle East (currently dead)

  Also, there are groups that are not strictly “Arab” but are (semi?)active in the region like Muslims for EA and EA Israel.

  Good luck!

• Hazem🔸 19 May 2026 3:47 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Hazem🔸’s comment on: Hazem Has­san ’s Quick takes

  I specified undergrads because I assume they’re similar to me. This can of course apply to non-undergrads.

  Also, I recommend checking prediction markets and prioritizing elections that are close calls (e.g. don’t volunteer for a 90%-likely-to-win candidate, or a 10% one that is dwarfed by two other 40% candidates). Aim for 35-50% (judgement call)

• Hazem🔸 19 May 2026 3:42 UTC

  53 points

  7 ∶ 0

  on: Hazem Has­san ’s Quick takes

  More EA undergrads should do political volunteering. It’s impactful AND fun.

  Choose an election that’s impactful (e.g. AI safety candidate) and neglected (e.g. primaries in always-blue/​red places), couch-crash the weekend there, and volunteer with the campaign.

  I say this after doing 15 hours of street canvassing myself. I was surprised by how anecdotally impactful and fun it was. If you like people-watching, talking to strangers, and/​or joining passionate projects for a weekend, I think you’ll also love this.

  I wish I thought of this earlier.

  Literature on the impact (Claude-generated): Kalla & Broockman’s meta-analysis of 49 field experiments finds zero average persuasive effect in general elections, but effects do show up when voters lack a partisan cue (i.e. primaries and ballot measures). Mann & Haenschen (2024) find mobilization effects (e.g. canvassing) are 33-76% larger in low-attention races than in high-attention ones. Your marginal volunteer hour goes much further in a primary.

• Hazem🔸 19 May 2026 1:56 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackc’s comment on: What is the Ex­pected Value of Work­ing on AI Safety? I Ran the Num­bers.

  Thank you for the correction and apologies for the error.

  I’m actually not sure where 0.75% came from now that I look at it. I wrote this a month ago and cannot remember my state of mind. I probably didn’t double-check the number while Claude-source-finding.

  I’m adding a disclaimer at the top of the post and will update the calculator. Thanks again.

• Hazem🔸 14 Apr 2026 5:17 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Hit me up if you go to Dart­mouth Col­lege!

  Amazing post (loved the image)
  
  To anyone from Darty who’s reading this and is on the fence: I revived the EA group at UPenn and it’s been one of my best decisions. It’s easier than you think (& I’m saying this as a freshman). Shreya’s very right that there is a lack of EA presence on campuses; if you’re considering organizing and think “someone else will prob. do it” or “I’m not sure I’m qualified” I fully believe you’re already in the top 10 people who can organize this, and that the most likely outcome is that all 10 don’t do anything. Please change that!

• Hazem🔸 8 Apr 2026 21:15 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: What is the Ex­pected Value of Work­ing on AI Safety? I Ran the Num­bers.

  It would be more useful to compare AI safety work vs. other longtermist interventions, since it’s unlikely that donations to GiveWell would beat longtermist interventions from a longtermist POV

  I agree that would be incredibly useful; maybe I’ll do that next (20% chance). The same model can be used for pandemics and nuclear risk—I’d just need to update (1) P(doom) for each, (2) tractability (for AI, that’s the ‘AI safety decreases risk by 7% per doubling of staff’), and (3) personal contribution. It could be a quick tool for anyone to realize how impactful longtermist careers are and, based on their beliefs about the world and their own ability, choose the career with the highest EV, though I’d only recommend acting on that comparison if the difference is quite large (my hunch is 5x or higher) given the uncertainty involved.

  It would also force people to hold self-consistent beliefs. If there’s a separate calculator for AI safety and one for biosecurity, someone could claim that non-[x-risk at hand] is much higher than [x-isk at hand] in each case, but that wouldn’t be consistent across the two, cause each [x-risk at hand] would factor into the other’s non-[x-risk at hand]. In other words, it can be used as a tool to calibrate beliefs about existential risks (I think it would do that for me, at least).

  The biggest thing missing from the model is the possibility that safety research is net harmful.

  This is quite interesting; I hadn’t thought of this. Do you think it should be approximated as “% chance that AI safety is actually bad” and “increase in AI risk per doubling of staff”? e.g. it would look like this:

  1. 90% chance AI safety reduces AI risk, decreasing it by 10% per doubling of staff

  2. 10% chance AI safety increases AI risk, increasing it by 10% per doubling of staff

  Or is that too rudimentary, you think?

• Hazem🔸 8 Apr 2026 20:58 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackchang110’s comment on: What is the Ex­pected Value of Work­ing on AI Safety? I Ran the Num­bers.

  I compared GiveWell to convince people who believe in global dev but are skeptical of AI risk. I could have kept the explanation of why dollars to GiveWell should be discounted and instead said “Donate [smaller yet still big amount] to AI safety /​ longtermist solutions” which would be equivalent to “Donate $5M to GiveWell” (assuming my discounting is accurate), but I feared it would sound circular. Some people’s natural response would be “I already don’t believe AI risk is that big of a deal!” even though the two framings are logically equivalent

• Hazem🔸 8 Apr 2026 15:07 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The con­tri­bu­tion of av­er­age di­rect worker in AI risks may be lower than a den­tist who donates $80k a year(Wel­come any cri­tique)

  Your post reminded me to revive this project from my drafts and publish it:
  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​y7BGB3ikhN4RNzAq5/​​what-is-the-expected-value-of-working-on-ai-safety-i-ran-the. TL;DR below:

  I estimate the expected impact of an additional early-career AI safety researcher by combining assumptions about AI risk, tractability, counterfactual replaceability, and population at stake to express the result in GiveWell-equivalent terms. Under what I believe are very conservative inputs, the estimate is on the order of a few million dollars per year in equivalent donations. The results are very sensitive to some unkown parameters, though. Access the calculator/​model used here (tweakable to a wide range of beliefs and judgements).

  In short, I think the competing earning-to-give number is $5M/​yr (or so), not $80k/​yr.

• Hazem🔸 28 Feb 2026 20:55 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: bruce’s comment on: CEA’s re­sponse to sex­ual harassment

  Oh that was a complete misunderstanding on my part. Thank you

• Hazem🔸 28 Feb 2026 10:38 UTC

  −18 points

  0 ∶ 2

  in reply to: bruce’s comment on: CEA’s re­sponse to sex­ual harassment

  The messages in the Claude conversation are beyond horrifying—particularly:

  i am HR
  i don’t want to make a big deal out of this, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal?

  If 20% of CEA couldn’t do the trivial good (report the incident) for months on end, and the most responsible role to handle this (HR) is getting begged by an AI to do the right thing and still not doing it, then a re-evaluation of the entire structure of CEA might be necessary.

  This is very unfortunate and shocking.

  Unrelated: how did you get access to this conversation? Are shared Claude conversations publicly searchable/​listed somewhere?

• Hazem🔸 28 Feb 2026 5:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Breg­man makes a de­cent case for boy­cotting Chat GPT

  Your post (along with Anthropic’s statement, and Sam Altman’s tweet) convinced me to switch from ChatGPT Plus to Claude Pro.

  I am not particuarly convinced by Bregman’s reasoning. I think the frequent prompts (by your post, Anthropic’s, and Altman’s) to consider boycotting ChatGPT is probably what actually convinced me, which is not very rational to best honest.

  My “rational” justification is that I think moving $20/​month from OpenAI to Anthropic is most likely non-negative (and probably positive). I’m not sure it why I never thought of this before haha

  Thank you!

• Hazem🔸 24 Feb 2026 12:50 UTC

  2 points

  13 ∶ 0

  on: Re­build­ing Egypt’s Scien­tific Ta­lent Pipeline: A Stu­dent-Led, Zero-Cost Olympiad Revival

  I might be biased (same school, tried something similar in physics), but great work! I recommend promoting the Olympiads nationally once they’re stable, so more students can benefit. I believe (not super confident about this, though) that the private tutoring market in Egypt can absorb a lot of demand from students wanting to participate in Science Olympiads, so you shouldn’t (at least in my opinion) try to train students en masse; just create the incentive. No idea how you can do that, though—I assume social media is the cheapest method?

  Also, not trying to bring you down, but Egypt’s bureaucracy is hell (you probably know this already). If you manage to launch just one Olympiad and keep it stable for 1-2 years, that’s fantastic. If you ever feel like you’re hitting too many walls, it’s totally fine to rethink the whole project and invest your time in other (more impactful) ones
  
  Good luck!