JasperGo

Ca­reers con­cern­ing Global Catas­trophic Biolog­i­cal Risks (GCBRs) from a Ger­man perspective

• JasperGoAug 30, 2022, 4:08 PM

  6 points

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  on: What do­mains do you wish some EA was an ex­pert in?

  Someone extremely on top of the cutting-edge multi-omics game. EA has a lot of bio talent but nobody with years-long metagenomics experience and access to the (often unpublished) knowledge on current best practices, pitfalls, and promising upcoming research.

What suc­cess looks like

• JasperGoJun 15, 2022, 4:52 PM

  2 points

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  on: Space Ex­plo­ra­tion & Satel­lites on Our World in Data

  Very cool to see! I’d also be interested in the number of belligerent acts in space (deployed military satellites with offensive capabilities, anti-satellite weapon tests etc.), if such numbers aren’t too small or too hard to come by.

• JasperGoMay 30, 2022, 12:38 PM

  5 points

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  on: In­tro­duc­ing Asterisk

  Very cool to see! I would, however, be quite cautious of infohazards when calling for some areas of biosecurity research and rather consult with experts before publishing such papers.

  E.g., “Are there plausible candidate pathogens outside the usual suspects (flu, pox or coronavirus)?” is an exploration of a topic that most EA biosecurity researchers would not like to see circulated widely.

• JasperGoMay 16, 2022, 11:10 AM

  16 points

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  on: Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philoso­phies: Why Aes­thet­ics Matter

  Lovely post, I really enjoyed reading it. I honestly never really cared for having an EA aesthetic because a) many EAs are minimalistic and as long as the logo on shirts etc. is nice, all is well and b) keep your identity small; as long as the arguments are correct and convince the relevant people, you shouldn’t even need a name like EA stuck to it.

  However, I also totally see the value of an aesthetic and things really are more fun when they look nice. I personally am full on board the solarpunk train (as long as it is only non-sentient plants amidst my industrial complexes)

  But still, for now, I still feel like the EA identity should be kept as light as possible although I don’t have any good answers for when aesthetics should start to increasingly matter.

• JasperGoMay 11, 2022, 7:10 AM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Po­ta­toes: A Crit­i­cal Review

  I agree! I added the Red teaming wiki tag but since that tag is a mix of meta-discussion and examples, it might also be nice to have a separate tag for red teaming examples.

• JasperGoMay 5, 2022, 7:09 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: aarongertler’s Shortform

  Ah, that makes sense. I absolutely adore Fine Structrue and Ra but never considered it ratfic (though I don’t know whether Sam Hughes is hanging in rat circles)

• JasperGoApr 10, 2022, 9:55 PM

  6 points

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  on: EA Fo­rum’s in­ter­est in cause-ar­eas over time and other statistics

  Cool, thanks for the analysis! Should you have also looked into the upvote distribution within the categories; are there large differences or are upvotes generally similarly (normally?) distributed?

• JasperGoApr 10, 2022, 9:47 PM

  8 points

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  on: Four cat­e­gories of effec­tive al­tru­ism critiques

  Thanks for the useful classification with included article selection.

  And I think that, given the variety of critiques, the Criticisms of EA Tag has gotten a bit broad. There are already separate tags for critiques of causes, orgs, and the community, so maybe the EA critique tag can be split into normative and empirical critiques.

• JasperGoApr 10, 2022, 9:31 PM

  8 points

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  in reply to: PabloAMC 🔸’s comment on: A tough ca­reer decision

  Thanks Pablo, good luck to you too! I’ll apply to a few interesting remote positions and have some independent projects in mind. I’ll see :)

• JasperGoApr 9, 2022, 10:10 AM

  19 points

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  on: A tough ca­reer decision

  Thanks for your writeup, it’s reassuring to read your reasoning and decision. I (maybe self-servingly) find it very plausible that you’ve made the right call. I’m in a somewhat similar position; 3 months away from finishing my PhD on a biosecurity-related topic and staying in Germany with/​for my partner for the next years and thus probably missing out on many opportunities that more mobile EAs have.

  For me, the decision was pretty clear one I realised that both my affective well-being and life satisfaction were way higher than in previous relationships and that my partner had just an extremely good influence on me. And it seems very reasonable to prioritise this over the average short-term career decision (I’m not saying that things wouldn’t be different for extremely rare and impactful opportunities). There is and will be enough work for smart and engaged EAs that you don’t need to worry about losing a ton of impact by mainly doing something non-EA for a while and returning to, e.g., AI safety work if the circumstances are right. If your situation is at all like mine, the higher quality-of-life from your relationship alone seems worth it and I’d hazard that you will still learn a lot by working at Xanadu and doing distillation on the side.

  I admit that things might be a bit different if your AI timelines are very short and you believe that the next X years are decisive for our survival, where X is small enough to induce anxiety about your hour-to-hour time management or something.

• JasperGoMar 18, 2022, 8:20 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Max Roser’s comment on: A new Our World in Data ar­ti­cle on longtermism

  Thanks for doing the calculations! I agree, not straightforward. But like Erich said, it was not about representing a single human. It was imagining humanity’s “progress bar” (from first human to final, 600 quadrillionth human in a billion years) as one year. And humanity today being only 8 seconds or so into that year-long progress bar. The idea being that framing progress as seconds in a year is more intuitive than saying 0.0[...]01 %.

• JasperGoMar 17, 2022, 2:00 PM

  12 points

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  on: A new Our World in Data ar­ti­cle on longtermism

  I really enjoyed the article. A well-written, short introduction and great (as usual) visualisations which will likely see widespread use for conveying the scope of our future.

  Personally, I didn’t find the 17m * 4600km beach analogy for 625 quadrillion people super intuitive, and yes, I know, such numbers are basically never intuitive. A framing I found a bit easier to grasp compared the total possible number of humans to seconds in a whole year and said that the number of humans so far equals only a few seconds after midnight on new year or something. But that’s just a tiny personal preference, you probably thought about such analogies a lot more.

  Thanks for clearly presenting numbers and topics that are more difficult to convey, it’s great!

Where would we set up the next EA hubs?

Idea: Red-team­ing fellowships

EA Anal­y­sis of the Ger­man Coal­i­tion Agree­ment 2021–2025

• JasperGoDec 28, 2021, 10:17 AM

  37 points

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  on: The Un­weav­ing of a Beau­tiful Thing

  Thank you so much for this story, I haven’t cried like that for a while. My father passed away earlier this year in the exact moment I came into the room to check on him. The idea that an already-softened death was sitting there, reading, still waiting for me feels really touching.

• JasperGoDec 17, 2021, 8:45 AM

  12 points

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  on: Biose­cu­rity needs en­g­ineers and ma­te­ri­als scientists

  Thanks for the writeup, I very much agree! Also on the engineering side, some are thinking about using microwaves instead of UV to disrupt airborne pathogens.

  https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​articles/​​PMC7089037/​​

  https://​​www.wpafb.af.mil/​​News/​​Article-Display/​​Article/​​2162707/​​afrl-scientists-investigate-can-microwaves-reduce-viability-of-airborne-coronav/​​

• JasperGoDec 14, 2021, 1:27 PM

  9 points

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  on: Pro­pose and vote on po­ten­tial tags

  Biosurveillance

  A central pillar for biodefense against GCBRs and an increasingly feasible intervention with several EAs working on it and potentially cool projects emerging in the near future. Possibly too granular as a tag since there’s not a high volume of biosecurity posts which would warrant the granular distinction. But perhaps valuable from a Wiki standpoint with a definition and a few references. I can create an entry, if the mods are okay with it.

  Example posts:

  • https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​NzqaiopAJuJ37tpJz/​​project-ideas-in-biosecurity-for-eas

  Related: GCBR, Biosecurity