Joseph

Karma: 3,256

I have work experience in HR and Operations. I read a lot, I enjoy taking online courses, and I do some yoga and some rock climbing. I enjoy learning languages, and I think that I tend to have a fairly international/cross-cultural focus or awareness in my life. I was born and raised in a monolingual household in the US, but I’ve lived most of my adult life outside the US, with about ten years in China, two years in Spain, and less than a year in Brazil.

As far as EA is concerned, I’m fairly cause agnostic/cause neutral. I think that I am a little bit more influenced by virtue ethics and stoicism than the average EA, and I also occasionally find myself thinking about inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in EA. Some parts of the EA community that I’ve observed in-person seem not very welcoming to outsides, or somewhat gatekept. I tend to care quite a bit about how exclusionary or welcoming communities are.

I was told by a friend in EA that I should brag about how many books I read because it is impressive, but I feel uncomfortable being boastful, so here is my clunky attempt to brag about that.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s.

Joseph Mar 24, 2025, 10:04 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
- One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
- When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small cages, (such as California’s Proposition 2 from 2008) then it might just shift production elsewhere.
- Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.
- More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).
- A little bit different, but a classic example of this kind of “poor reasoning about second order effects” is the cobra effect (or any similar incentive for extermination)
- Welfare traps

Joseph Mar 22, 2025, 3:04 PM
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: “Actually local groups”—an easy way to meet fellow EAs from your neighborhood
I also want to give a shout out to the EA Anywhere community for those of us that don’t have neighborhoods. EA Anywhere’s Slack workspace isn’t as nice as living within walking distance of friends or getting together for lunch, but it is a really nice little community for those of us that would otherwise require a bus, two flights, and a train to meet in-person.
An additional upside: people from a variety of countries and cultures are there. If I recall correctly, the people who founded and ran EA Anywhere were from three very different countries.

Joseph Mar 21, 2025, 12:51 PM
4 points
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on: Bridging Worldviews: Tantric Retreat Centre Goes Earning to Give
Tantra and yin/yang are definitly not things I expected to read about on the EA Forum today, but bravo for managing to adapt the ideas and build bridges across cultural differences. This is a lovely example of tailoring communication to the intended audience. I think that a lot of us interested in and involved in effective altruism could learn from this.

Joseph Mar 19, 2025, 8:18 PM
8 points
2 ∶ 0
on: I made an infographic for the Introduction to Effective Altruism post (feedback welcome!)
I love seeing this kind of initiative, and it is great that the skills you have allow you to contribute in such a clear way.

Joseph Mar 18, 2025, 6:24 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
I think it is admirable to strive for that. I also notice the tendency within myself to be uselessly nitpicky with well actually. Recurse Center’s social rules have provided some small inspiration for me: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules

Joseph Mar 14, 2025, 2:51 PM
2 points
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on: Why do EA longtermists not discuss the alleged problem of cognitive decline?
My best guess is that most EAs have never heard of this argument, and that the few who have heard of it think that it isn’t accurate. It conflicts with their informal impressions/anecdotes, and it also conflicts with what they’ve learned about the world and society changing during the past few years.
If I did think it was accurate and really believed that human intelligence was getting worse over time, here are some thoughts that would probably come along with that:
- Does average/mean intelligence even make sense?
- Maybe we should do something about public schooling?
- Anything relating to restricting dumb people from having babies feels pretty unpalatable to me, so even if it was completely convinced that was the right choice, I’m not confident I would pursue it. I’m willing to accept sub-optimal results along some metric in exchange for having rights; I don’t want to naively optimize.
- We probably shouldn’t look at a trend of a decade or two and assume that it will continue in a linear fashion. (relevant XKCD)
- People were on average dumber 50 years ago (and 100, and 500), and human civilization still managed to survive, thrive, and develop. So maybe it would just be a yo-yo effect over the course of a couple centuries, and humans get smarter, then dumber, then smarter again, repeatedly? I can’t say this with any confidence, but it does seem accurate that if the human average went down by 5 IQ points over the next few decades, it wouldn’t cause civilization to collapse.
- Maybe this is somewhat similar to poor people having lots of kids, and as they get wealthier they have fewer kids? So maybe as people get more education they have fewer children also? So we should make sure that kindergarten and elementary schools are good quality.

Joseph Mar 14, 2025, 2:36 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why do EA longtermists not discuss the alleged problem of cognitive decline?
The phrasing here is a bit tricky, since Bouke De Vries seems to be stating (from my brief skim of his article and of) not that people are getting less smart, but that less smart people are reproducing faster than smart people.
Overall, this seems like the kind of social science issue where most of us haven’t read the research and barely grasp the meaning, and yet people tend have opinions on it anyway. I’d take a more cautious approach and wait either A) until I’ve read through some of the literature to have sufficient context to actually understand it, or B) until someone with good contextual knowledge of the research can write a summary.
As an example of how our ignorance of the research can lead us astray, some of the sources Bouke De Vries cites (Egeland, 2022, Lynn and Harvey, 2008) don’t seem to fully support the argument that “residents of many Western countries as well as high-income non-Western ones are becoming less intelligent.” Even the book he cites (Dutton and Woodley of Menie, 2018) seems to have overly simplistic and fallacious arguments, such as claiming that the Concord no longer flies between London and New York because we are too dumb to figure out how to make it fly, rather than the decision to stop it due to high operating costs.
But maybe the facts really do support Bouke De Vries argument and my quick skim of a dense academic article is leading me astray, because I don’t have the context to fully understand.

Joseph Mar 11, 2025, 2:44 PM
4 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Avoiding some 1:1 Pitfalls at EA Global/x
“we had nothing in common, they couldn’t explain why they chose to set up a meeting with me.”
To add on to this: even without any non-platonic vibe, I had a few people (single digits, maybe between 2 and 6 people?) reach out to me on Swapcard without any reason/justification and without any explanation. People requested a meeting without any context about what they want to meet about. In my mind, this is very similar to strangers attempting to add me on LinkedIn without any message; they are just “collecting contacts” through a kind of fear of missing out, or they think being connected to me might be useful someday. I try to respond with a polite way of figuring out what they want, such as “can I help you?” or “what can I do for you?”, but I do wish that people would be more clear about why they are requesting a meeting (or a connection).
To be clear, this was only a few individuals. The majority of people that reached out to me seemed to do a fine job of providing justification for why they wanted to meet and providing context.

Joseph Mar 10, 2025, 10:22 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: History of diversity efforts and trends in EA
I really appreciate that you consolidated all this. This is a really helpful overview.

Joseph Mar 10, 2025, 10:20 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: History of diversity efforts and trends in EA
I’m not 100% confident, but I suspect that I’ve read more on diversity than most EAs, so I’ll venture a guess and share some musings. The goal of many diversity efforts is less about adding an additional condition, and more about removing a “hidden” condition that we weren’t really cognizant of. In fact, my impression is that it is incredibly rare to have sex, race, etc., as a condition for employment (although it may often be an unofficial condition in a social, non-professional context). I do think that often this is done poorly and it often fails, but I don’t think that is an EA-specific thing.
Broadly speaking, my informal mental framework is that there tend to be two reasons for diversity and similar initiatives for an organization/company: the justice/fairness argument, and the innovation/creativity argument. I’m at the risk of rambling here, so I’ll instead just leave a link to a Notion page that I put together a while back: Joseph’s notes on Diversity.
I don’t have any data, but I hypothesize that most engaged EAs care about both instrumental diversity and diversity^[1]. Each of them has uses/benefits, but it would be a bit foolish to naively assume that either of them is useful in all contexts, for all end goals. I do think that a diverse outlook (or experience, or knowledge) can be very helpful in certain contexts, but unfortunately we (I mean people in general) often use membership in a certain group as a sloppy and imperfect proxy for that outlook.^[2] When superficial diversity is what gets emphasized, then you end up with “All skin folk ain’t kinfolk.” I’m reminded of a quote from The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, from a Mexican student at Harvard College who “struggled to come to terms with the huge gap between himself and other people who looked like him.”
I started realizing race and class didn’t always go hand in hand. There were minorities I thought I could relate to, but when they talk about money, I feel the distance.… Moving in, my floor posted our hometowns on the doors. I see Mexico City. I was like “Another Mexican? We’re about to be homies!” I was so excited. But he was an aristocrat from Mexico. He says, “Dallas Cowboys; they’re my favorite team. I have my dad fly me out to every home game.” Excuse me! Plane ticket, game tickets, hotel: Are you joking? That was shocking; my first introduction to the huge disparities… he has this Ralph Lauren velvet, beautiful bathrobe. He’s like, “I don’t want to pack this.” He’s going to throw it away. I took it.
For a more light-hearted critique, here is a meme/joke about diversity along Wall Street Analysts. (for anybody without the culture context, the snarky joke here is that these people are all from incredibly wealthy backgrounds, and are quite similar in all ways aside from superficial diversity).
1. ^
  Although we might label them as something like the appearance of diversity and diversity of perspective. Both of them have value, but American pop-culture tends to focus much more on the former. I might also be engaged in too much sloppy generalization, assuming that my values and perspectives are widely shared. So take this all with a grain of salt.
2. ^
  I’m reminded about hearing how many black Americans were very happy in 2008 when Obama was elected as president, but who also felt that in a certain sense he didn’t really represent them, because his childhood and his experiences were so different. The thought experiment that I occasionally use is to think of a stereotypical college brochures showing a group of students, and imagine which variation would be more diverse:
  a group of students of the same race, gender, ethnicity, and disability status with radically different worldviews and life experiences (maybe one is a upper middle class American Marxist, one grew up in a slum and can barely read, one is a hardcore Buddhist who as taken a vow of silence, one was orphaned and then grew up in a series of short-term foster care homes), or
  a group of students of a various races, genders, ethnicities, and disability statuses, all of whom had broadly similar life experiences (maybe they grew up in the same neighborhood, with similar family income levels, attended the same school, read the same books, etc.).

How to read more books

JosephMar 1, 2025, 5:30 PM

18 points

0 comments7 min readEA link

Joseph Mar 1, 2025, 4:49 PM
3 points
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on: A small case for small events: EA Belgium Summer Retreat 2023 & 2024 analysis
15-20 people sharing costs for a small EA weekend sounds really cozy. :)
Could you describe the sleeping arrangements/accommodations a little bit? Did the person who volunteered the house happen to have a large number of guest bedrooms? Did participants bring tents and sleeping bags?

Joseph Feb 25, 2025, 5:51 PM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
on: How confident are you that it’s preferable for America to develop AGI before China does?
I don’t have a clear answer to the question, but I want to point on the simplicity/simplification of some of the claims. (to be clear, I am not making claims here that one country/government is better than the other, or that one would be preferably to have AGI)
The idea that the Chinese government is responsible for improved prosperity of the Chinese people is somewhat true, but an alternative narrative would be that the Chinese government stopped preventing people from improving their lives, and then lots of foreign direct investment helped. There is also something to be said of “catch-up growth.” Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest of understandings of the factors that influenced Chinese growth over the past few decades. I think it is also worth nothing that many of the things that the Chinese government has done for the flourishing of it’s citizens are things that the US government had done previously (infrastructure, consumer protection, public universities, etc.).
The claim that a wealthy China will take care of everyone is a very strong claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nations and governments tend to show a strong preference in favor of their own existence and their own people.
While there are plenty of things I dislike about the United States, I very much like the “liberal” aspect of liberal democracy: individual right matter, and a very strong justification is needed to violate individual rights. The USA doesn’t always do this well, but I feel comfortable saying that it is less common for the US government and for government employees to violate individual rights than in China.
It is true that America’s founding and expansion were based on exterminating other people. It is also true that many countries throughout history (including China) have spent military and government resources exterminating “others.” It has been several decades since the USA engaged in or openly endorsed the extermination of a people. I hope that hope modern people look on those events with shame and disgust, regardless of whether they were 10 years ago or 500 years ago.
These are, of course, a very complex topic with lots of details and nuance. Plenty of full dissertations have been written on them. But to the extent possible I’d like to nudge us toward avoiding overly simplified narratives here on the EA Forum.

Joseph Feb 19, 2025, 6:01 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
Thank you. Both the links to the tag on LessWrong and the dozen examples are helpful. I appreciate it.

Joseph Feb 18, 2025, 3:33 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
When people write “more dakka,” do they simply meaning that we need to try harder and/or try more things? I’ve seen this in two or three pieces of writing on the EA Forum, but I’ve never seen a clear explanation. Apparently “dakka” is slang from a sci-fi video game/tabletop RPG? Is this useless in-group terminology, or does this actually have value?
As best I can tell, “more dakka” is a reference to this quote. Can anyone point me to a more clear or authoritative explanation?
We know the solution. Our bullets work. We just need more. We need More (and better) (metaphorical) Dakka – rather than firing the standard number of metaphorical bullets, we need to fire more, absurdly more, whatever it takes until the enemy keels over dead.

Joseph Feb 18, 2025, 2:51 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The Quest for a Stone-Free World: Chanca Piedra (Phyllanthus niruri) as an Acute and Prophylactic Treatment for Kidney Stones and Their Associated Extreme Negative Valence
Very interesting work! A few questions:
- Would it be easier to convince lots of people to buy and consume chanca piedra than to convince lots of people to drink an extra liter of water each day? Any thoughts comparing the relative impact and tractability of these two paths? I’m particularly thinking of patient compliance and of the fad/popularity of large water bottles in recent years.
- Have you spoken with a doctor or medical researcher specializing in kidney stones about this?
- Considerations regarding the distribution of pain? Not all kidney stones result in intense pain; some result in moderate or minor pain, which can be managed with analgesics and muscle relaxers. It does make sense that accounts online tend toward the more extreme, but we don’t want to assume that these are representative of kidney stone experiences. As an analogy to cancer, The top voted and most visible posts about cancer online are never stage A1 cancers that are easily treated and cause minimal life disruption.
I’ll certainly add some chanca piedra to my digital shopping cart and consider actually buying some. I appreciate you taking all the time and effort to do this. I imagine it took a lot of effort.

Joseph Feb 10, 2025, 4:22 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
I would very much like to see something like this. Being able to communicate EA ideas to people that are roughly aligned in terms of many altruistic values is useful.

Joseph Feb 7, 2025, 4:07 PM
17 points
5 ∶ 0
on: FIRE and doing good
A lot of the happiness or unhappiness that people have in jobs tends to be situationally specific. Thus, maybe if you took on a similar job at a different organization you wouldn’t find it so burdensome.
With the enormous caveat that I don’t know all the details about your preferences and life situation, I think that Staying in my role or org—or do a lateral switch to a similar org would be the best option. You preserve some optionality (you can always quit or switch if/when you feel that you have hit a ceiling), you are able to continue to build your career capital and your financial capital (both of which can be deployed for positive impact), there are benefits to being associated with an established organization (not just benefits/perks, but also networks, social respect, and the assessment/judgement that people make of an individual based on organizational affiliation).
If you really don’t enjoy all of the coaching, delegation, and general people management that comes with your role (Your “people, ugh” comment made me laugh), then it will probably be challenging to find a senior-level role that you’d be happy with. A big part of greater authority, influence, power, and impact in organizations tends to flow through people. There are exceptions of course, but it does seems to be the most common situation. A few off the top of my head ideas:
- Perhaps you could find some sort of subject matter expert role, where you are a senior-level technical specialist, and you don’t have to do much ‘people stuff.’
- Or maybe you could hire somebody to tag-team some of these tasks with you. Many organizations have HRBPs, but you might be able to hire an executive assistant, or even to partner with someone so that you are able to offload some of the tasks that you dislike. Imagine if somebody else could handle even just 40% or 50% of the hiring, developing, promoting, off-boarding, reallocating people, and building alignment?
- There might also be some level of tailoring your role, if you speak to your manager and tell them that you enjoy the role overall but some parts of it are things that bring you down. Maybe your job responsibilities could be adjusted.
Unless you have a very special situation, I would lean against a career reset (from an impact-focused perspective). You might find it challenging for people to give you a junior-level role doing something that you have never done before, or something that you haven’t been focused on for many years. Do you actually have the skills to be competitive as a data scientist in a tech startup (or in some other role?), or would you need to get a few years of training and then complete alongside fresh grads?
It is really hard to find a high-impact volunteer role.

Joseph Feb 7, 2025, 3:53 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: FIRE and doing good
I’m not able to provide much insight regarding the options you listed, but I want to make a quick note about reaching your FIRE number and potential future donations. If you decided that you need X dollars per year before you feel comfortable FIREing, see if you can have enough in investments so that you have a little more than X per year in investment income, maybe 1.1X or 1.2X. That way you would be able to generate ever-increasing donations without lowering your own quality of life.
Some previous thoughts I threw together a while back that might help a little bit: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sbtdPJpeKDtYLr2Zf/joseph-lemien-s-shortform?commentId=AWaKkWjBpiAnrtRAC

Joseph Feb 5, 2025, 3:36 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jeroen Willems🔸’s comment on: Jeroen_W’s Shortform
I’m going to draw an analogy to finance/investments. If I check the level of the stock market every day or multiple times a day, I become acutely aware of increases and decreases. I might feel a rush of adrenaline when the stock market goes up by 2%, and an overwhelming feeling of despair if it drops by 2%. But if I stop checking it frequently, I can “zoom out” and see that the broader trend is upward. It is true that there is a lot of variation on a short timeline, but over decades the trend is quite clearly upward. Like all analogies, this falls somewhat short in a variety of ways, but the idea I want to drive home is that “the news is just incredibly depressing” because we look at the short-term news. We allow ourselves to be emotionally buffeted and battered by what is happening this day or this week rather than paying attention to larger trends. If it really is vital for a job to stay up to date on the latest news, then at least try to keep some perspective: what is and isn’t within your control, and this too shall pass.
One useful framing can be asking yourself if there is anything you can do to affect this, asking why you care about this particular issue, and asking if there is any purpose/outcome in focusing it. I think that people dying in a civil war in Yemen is horrible because I detest suffering in general, but I have no influence to affect that at all, and my worrying about it doesn’t serve any purpose. I think that the world will be a worse place if USAID funding is reduced, but there isn’t any benefit to me stressing out about that. There are a million things that I would like to see different in the world, but most of them are very much outside my scope of influence.