Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Henry Stanley šø
Karma: 1,913
I love the name
I feel like not many people really have āa job that can mostly be done from anywhereā, and a lot hinges on that assumption here. If youāre full time remote then sure, the case for being in a high COL area is weaker. But I suspect the majority of jobs have some expectation of being in the office at least sometimes.
If your organisation pays people less if they do the same work from a cheaper area, consider if you are creating weird incentives
If your org takes the view than collaborating in person is better than working fully remote (and plenty of orgs do take this view, and quite reasonably) then that org should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and pay people more if theyāre coming into the office. This is what we did when I was running a fintech startup. By extension you should be willing to take a lower salary if youāre going to work remotely from a cheaper place.
I think your piece treats being in a high COL place as solely an EA move; in reality EA hubs are not picked from a random list and are attractive places in themselves. People want to be in e.g. London for lots of reasons (more connections, friends, fun things going on) and it being an EA hub is a nice side benefit. I was based in London for many years and wouldnāt for example make the move out to a cheaper UK city, leaving behind friends and family and a large dating poolāthere would need to be a strong draw to overcome the cost of doing that beyond just lower cost of living.
My ānew & upvotedā feed on the homepage is now all zero karma posts (or perhaps ā1 to +2). Is that expected?
Looks like the linked post has been removed
Is it just me or is the post itself not showing here?
A fantastically inspiring story and a super interesting takeāsounds like Wasoko was a lot of hard graft. Well done for sticking with it for 11 years. I also see youāve pledged 70% of the proceeds with Founders Pledge; also extremely cool.
(Makes my B2B SaaS founding to give efforts seem much less Herculean in comparison!)
we already had multiple strong studies showing that the availability of equivalent substitutes does not lead to major changes in meat consumption.
This feels like your weakest argument. So far there arenāt āequivalent substitutesā to meatāonly plant based imitationsāso itās not clear what these studies are telling us. The RP study you link to explicitly says itās an analysis of plant-based meats and not cultured meat.
Katjaās blogging from Inkhaven too!
Can you say more on why the first $40M is the only money moving the needle? I think very little funding goes on diet change (at least in the EA animal welfare world it feels like itās barely a focus these days) and much more on corporate campaigning, lobbying, legal action, innovations in farmed animal welfare technology etc.
April Foolās isnāt for a couple more weeks
Thank you for your service š«”
The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Could you give more detail on this?
I donāt see any mention here or in the comments about neglectedness, which seems like the most obvious reason for why EA isnāt a good fit here. There are enormous, well-funded, long-established ecosystems dedicated to exactly this sort of thingācivil liberties organisations, legal defence funds, democratic governance NGOs, journalism, academic institutions, unions, anti-fascist networks etc.
I think thereās some argument that the EA mindset could be applied to finding tractable interventions here but ultimately I just think there are more pressing problems that need our attention.
An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital āyouāre welcome to use our drug so long as you donāt use it in any abortions,ā it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
This is a great intuition pump.
CEA was aware it was shared with people outside of HR by Riley, even if they themselves did not share it outside HR.
And it seems then like any confidentiality obligation on HR is expunged, given that this Riley shared the document themselves. Or at the very least thereās no case for them failing to act because of the need to keep the document/āits author confidential, as they had already shared it widely.
Donāt have much to add except that this sounds exceptionally fucked-up and Iām sorry you had to go through it.
I once had a conversation with a friend who felt that Anthropic advancing the AI frontier (despite their explicit commitment not to) was fine because theyāre āleading from the frontā in terms of their ethical stance.
It seems like that might not actually work? Advancing the frontier presumably encourages other labs to competeāand if those labs donāt have the same ethical strictures then leading from the front has no effect except to have moved the frontier forward faster than it would have otherwiseā¦
(Referencing OpenAIās deal with the Pentagon announced shortly after the Anthropic sanctions)
I donāt think this is meaningfully different from previous admins (not sure about autonomous weapons but certainly mass surveillance of Americans at home has been going on since the 2010s).
Broadly agree but:
The current problem is the lack of good training programs in impact-focused thinking, so itās hard for people with tons of experience and great credentials to get to the required EA-ness stage (impact-focused mindset, landscape familiarity) quickly enough to get the positions on offer, when they join EA.
Arenāt we mitigating this with things like MATS and BlueDot et al? These should be producing useful hires at a high rate so training isnāt the issue it seems
Let me write something up and come back to you.
Broadly in order of safety itās probably caffeine > modafinil > amphetamines (Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, dexamphatamine etc). But amphetamines are very commonly prescribed for ADHD/ānarcolepsy (usually with an ECG and occasional blood pressure checks). I think the risk-reward works out very much positively but obviously Iām eliding a lot of detail.
Looks like a lovely retreat. I love how incredibly cheap this worked out at as well! (Not that I dislike the semi-lavishness of EAG, but quite refreshing too.)
Iāll have to come along next year!