Former CTO and co-founder of earn-to-give fintech Mast.
Henry Stanley đ¸
Karma: 1,820
if I had kept at it and pushed harder, maybe the project would have got further⌠but I donât think I actually wanted to be in that position either!
I think this is a problem with for-profit startups as well. Most of the time they fail. But sometimes they succeed (in the sense of ânot failingâ rather than breakout success which is far rarer), and in that case youâre stuck with the thing to see it through to an exit.
I enjoyed this, and I miss bumping into you on the stairs at house parties!
Honestly, I kind of hated doing [GTP].
Are you willing to share why you hated it?
people who have strong conviction in EA start with a radical critique of the status quo (e.g. a lot of things like cancer research or art or politics or volunteering with lonely seniors seem a lot less effective than GiveWell charities or the like, so we should scorn them), then see the rationales for the status quo (e.g. ultimately, society would start to fall apart if tried to divert too many resources to GiveWell charities and the like by taking them away from everything else), and then come full circle back around to some less radical position
I agree that we probably shouldnât just defund all arts/âcancer/âold people charities overnight, but there are lots of causes that plausibly âdeserveâ way less funding on the margin which would be better spent by GiveWell without society falling apart.
I take a Chestertonâs fence sorta view here where I imagine a world which has zero arts funding and maybe that ends up being impoverished in a hard-to-quantify way, and that seems worth avoiding. But for the time being Iâm happy to tell people to stop donating to the Cancer Research UK and send it to AMF instead.
One thing that occurs to me (as someone considering a career pivot) is the case of who someone isnât committed to a specific cause area. Here you talk about someone who is essentially choosing between EtG for AI safety or doing AI safety work directly.
But in my case, Iâm considering a pivot to AI safety from EtGâbut currently I exclusively support animal welfare causes when I donate. Perhaps this is just irrational on my part. My thinking is that Iâm unlikely, given my skillset, to be any good at doing direct work in the animal welfare space, but consider it the most important issue of our time. I also think AI safety is important and timely but I might actually have the potential to work on it directly, hence considering the switch.
So in some cases thereâs a tradeoff of donations foregone in one area vs direct work done in another, which I guess is trickier to model.
I wonder why this hasnât attracted more upvotesâseems like a very interesting and high-effort post!
SpitballingâI guess thereâs such a lot of math here that many people (including me) wonât be able to fully engage with the key claims of the post, which limits the surface area of people who are likely to find it interesting.
I note that when I play with the app, the headline numbers donât change for me when I change the parameters of the model. May be a bug?
Not an answer to your question, but I also think most futures will be net negative for similar reasons, so itâs not just you!
I can start by giving my own answer to this (things I might do with my time):
travel widely and without real goals/âtimelines (e.g. Interrailing without too many pre-defined stops, just go where your heart takes you and if you like a place then stay longer)
perhaps directed a little towards where I have friends, where there are EA hubs that are likely to provide fruitful social interactions
do Pieter Levelsâ 12 startups in 12 months (maybe with Claude Code this could be 12 startups in 12 weeks, who knows) - spend some time building side projects for the sake of it
these could either be money-making or EA-focused, or just fun
my last startup was found-to-give so making money is still a motivation, although I feel less called to the grind these days
do a silent meditation retreat, and build a daily meditation habit
fix health problems (mental and physical) - spend money and time on this
explore living somewhere newâspend a month in the Bay, Berlin, other cities Iâd like to live
write regularlyâI looked into doing Inkhaven and am going to run a free online version of it for the month of November
[Question] How to spend a sabÂbatÂiÂcal?
Are you two talking about different Sams?
IIRC this was basically the thesis behind the EA Hotel (now CEELEAR) - a low-cost space for nascent EAs to do a bunch of thinking without having to worry too much about the basics.
More broadly this is also a benefit of academic tenureâbeing able to do your research without having to worry about finding a job (although of course getting funding is still the bottleneck and a big force in directing where research effort is directed).
Surely both things can be true at onceâthat itâs been historically very useful and also a shame that itâs available to so few?
Itâs not the ideal movement (i.e. not what weâd design from scratch), but itâs the closest weâve got
Interested to hear what such a movement would look like if you were building it from scratch.
Well spotted, thank you!
Probably (even just Amazon price differences, I havenât looked elsewhere). 6200 is ÂŁ18, one set of filters ÂŁ11. 4251 is ÂŁ20. Maybe itâs a false economy, just thinking about cost savings if you wanted to buy a handful of masks for family.
What do we thinking about maintenance-free masks (theyâre like the half-face respirators but have single-use filters) - seems like better than using N95s/âhaving nothing but worse than having swappable filters?
(The cost of mask + swappable filters seems much higher than the maintenance-free mask, maybe 2x judging by the cost on Amazon UK)
Looks like the amendment passed, sadly:
Lawmakers at the European Parliament voted by 355 to 247 in favour of an amendment to a regulation designed to give farmers a stronger negotiating position so that powerful companies in the food supply chain do not impose unfavourable conditions.
The text of the final regulation will follow negotiations between representatives of the Parliament, EU governments and the Commission, with the Parliament backing a ban of terms such as âveggie-burgerâ or âvegan sausageâ.
You can also do both to some extentâwhen people query it you can say that youâre vegan but that the impact of doing so is far less than e.g. oneâs own personal giving to animal orgs.
I guess itâs an interesting position youâre inâyou might personally want to be strictly vegan, but also in some ways the whole point of FarmKind is that you donât need to do that/âdoing that doesnât have all that large an impact.
Which also puts you in a bit of a bind bc as you say there are animal advocates who will see not being vegan as a mark of unseriousness.
Getting FarmKind featured by Sam Harris would be a real coup.
Indeed; seems more like founding to give.