JasperGo

Karma: 465

Currently: Research Scientist in SecureBio’s AI and Biotechnology Risks team

Previously: Biosecurity roadmapping (focus on built-environment disinfection via far-UVC) at Convergent Research. Finishing a virology PhD on clinical sequencing, diversity, and evolution of DNA viruses in the transplant setting.

Also ran EA Osnabrück and Hannover from 2015–2022. Cultivating a wide range of EA-related interests, including welfare bio, metaethics, progress studies, and many more.

All posts and comments are in purely personal capacity.

JasperGo May 30, 2022, 12:38 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo May 16, 2022, 11:10 AM
16 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo May 11, 2022, 7:10 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo May 5, 2022, 7:09 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
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)

JasperGo Apr 10, 2022, 9:55 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
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?

JasperGo Apr 10, 2022, 9:47 PM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo Apr 10, 2022, 9:31 PM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
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 :)

JasperGo Apr 9, 2022, 10:10 AM
19 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo Mar 18, 2022, 8:20 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
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 %.

JasperGo Mar 17, 2022, 2:00 PM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
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!

JasperGo Dec 28, 2021, 10:17 AM
37 points
0 ∶ 0
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.

JasperGo Dec 17, 2021, 8:45 AM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
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/

JasperGo Dec 14, 2021, 1:27 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
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

JasperGo Dec 8, 2021, 10:04 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Are we going to run out of phosphorous?
The worry about peak phosphorous was always small but present in the back of my head. Reading this gave me one thing less to worry about and this is very sharable for future discussions. Thanks for the nice and concise analysis!

JasperGo Dec 6, 2021, 12:06 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Hamming Questions for Project Planning
I really like this selection of questions! I’m not doing any major project planning myself at the moment, otherwise I’d try it immediately. But I’d be interested in an eventual update which of the questions worked best/elicited the most insight for you.

JasperGo Dec 6, 2021, 11:56 AM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: [Linkpost] Millions face starvation in Afghanistan
That sounds really devastating. Not having looked into it further yet, do you have any hunch how likely this will get alleviated by the World Bank given the possible funding paths? It already has gathered media and political attention and the governmental situation in the country seem to make it very intractable for international, non-state actors. And disaster-relief is usually more complicated anyways, given logistic challenges etc.

JasperGo Dec 6, 2021, 11:40 AM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Want To Be An Expert? Build Deep Models
Great to have this written up. I usually had this experience when talking to senior professors; they tend to have so much cross-referential knowledge that any piece of data just does much more work than for non-experts. I just never explicitly looked at expertise from a model-perspective. Your posts gives good pointers, but are there any things you see good model-builders intuitively do better? Like not just reading but questioning and grokking. I feel like model-building is also not fully learnable but somewhat distributed among people so I’d be interested in possible differences.

JasperGo Dec 6, 2021, 10:34 AM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Biblical advice for people with short AI timelines
I think an important difference is the explicitness of credences. I expect most of the short-timeline AI people to have explicit probability distributions and I expect them to behave accordingly. This would then definitely entail retirement savings etc. as (from my personal encounters) many have non-negligible probability mass on AGI after their lifetime.
I’m sure there are also the “99.9% within the next 20 years”-people but I’m sure they’re doing better within their subculture than early Christians did and usually don’t risk unemployment, starvation, or ostracism.

JasperGo Dec 4, 2021, 3:26 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: EA megaprojects continued
Thanks for your further suggestions! We actually briefly looked at the ALLFED website and their publications but had the sense that many ideas were still in the modelling/research phase so we didn’t include them. The new 80k episode goes into a bit more detail (e.g. funding conversion kits for paper mills to enable quick repurposing for glucose production), so anybody more familiar with their work is very welcome to share potential megaproject ideas.

JasperGo Apr 15, 2021, 1:20 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA for Christians Annual Conference
I hope you’ll have a great conference with interesting talks and conversations. And I’m also all for small communities of like-minded people within EA sharing experiences and discussing their (possibly unique) views on the project of world improvement.

I do, however, have some reservations against the phrase “advancing God’s kingdom”. I’m assuming it just means “increasing wellbeing/reducing suffering for sentient beings” or something along those lines, but I believe that it can be misread as “adopting EA methodology for missionary purposes since we believe this is (Christian) EA’s top cause”, which would certainly put you beyond the pale of EA thinking/methodology.

Your website doesn’t make any such claims, so people interacting with you likely get the right impression, but I just wanted to flag this and similar phrasings as a caveat :)