Joris 🔸

Karma: 1,266

Hi! I am Chief of Staff to Jessica McCurdy, who is CEA’s Director of Community Growth. I work closely with her on the Groups, Online, and Courses teams, and on CEA’s Growth initiative – helping coordinate across teams, set priorities, and keep things moving.

We often post updates on the Forum about what we’re up to, and are always happy to answer questions!

Before this, I led University Groups team, before we split that up into two teams. I also helped start & ran Positive Impact Society Erasmus (PISE) in 2020-2022, and was co-lead for EAGxRotterdam 2022. I’m happy to answer any questions about those experiences!

Joris 🔸 8 Dec 2025 8:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ondřej_Kubů’s comment on: Ondřej_Kubů′s Quick takes
Congrats on taking the pledge Ondřej!

Joris 🔸 27 Nov 2025 8:14 UTC
4 points
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on: Help revive EA at UPenn (looking for board members)
Glad you’re restarting the group! Good luck Hazem!

Joris 🔸 29 Sep 2025 10:41 UTC
8 points
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on: Struggling to Transition into an EA-Aligned Job — Seeking Advice
Just quickly noting the Forum hosted two AMAs recently that might be helpful to browse through (or still engage with!). One was with career advisors, one with recruiters.
Good luck with your job search Taylor and thank you for trying to find an impactful job and for posting here asking for advice!

Joris 🔸 8 Sep 2025 13:57 UTC
5 points
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on: Calling for Experienced University Organisers—Advice on Balancing Commitments
It might be worth also posting this on the EA Group Organizer Slack! See here :)

Joris 🔸 17 Jun 2025 6:33 UTC
8 points
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on: Open Philanthropy: Reflecting on our Recent Effective Giving RFP
Thanks for this write-up and making some cool grants! In particular I’m excited to see Charity Navigator move in an EA direction—thanks for helping make that possible :)

Joris 🔸 11 Jun 2025 16:58 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Vincent Niger🔸’s comment on: Vincent Niger’s Quick takes
Congrats on landing a Bluebook position, that’s so cool! Through the Impactful Policy Careers program I know some EA-aligned folks who’ll also start the next round of Bluebook—happy to put you in touch :)
And happy my post was helpful!

Joris 🔸 4 Jun 2025 8:09 UTC
15 points
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on: The EA’s guide to Moral Ambition
Thanks for writing this!
I wanted to add some personal observations, from interacting with a bunch of people around the School in person, attending some SMA events, and following them quite closely online:
- Many founders / early joiners of the organization are very sympathetic to EA ideas, and think hard about how to have the most impact
- Those who have entered something like the ‘core’ group more recently (e.g. fellows, new employees) seem to catch on to some key ideas, but not others. Specifically, I was surprised how much they care about donating effectively, but don’t seem to have thought much about cause prioritization
- And finally, ‘moral ambition’ has entered mainstream discourse, but in return has become a bit of a watered-down catchphrase. I’ve heard it used to refer to vaguely do-goody things—nothing about the ITN/SSS framework, for example
I also think James from EA Netherlands left some useful thoughts here

Joris 🔸 31 Mar 2025 13:08 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: lauren_mee 🔸’s comment on: What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble
Thanks for providing a bit of context on the ToC of the program / the case for working ‘inside the system’! Sorry I didn’t represent that as clearly in the post

Joris 🔸 31 Mar 2025 9:36 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Jan-Willem’s comment on: What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble
Thanks, those are helpful thoughts! Just to clarify: my excitement about APA roles shouldn’t be read to mean that I think other roles are likely less impactful. It’s super hard to assess it from the outside!
- That hypothesis for the Commission could most certaintly be true. We talked to three EA-aligned folks in the Commission and I think all three of them had pretty different experiences, from “I don’t think I’ve had any impact in my two years at the Commission” to someone who thought he’d influenced quite some things positively (I hope I’m not misrepresenting them)
- For think tank / NGO work specifically, I annoyingly got food poisining on the day where we had various experts from NGOs visit, so was unable to take their perspectives into account. I know some other people who were in the program are reading this—maybe they can share some thoughts on this!
- I’m pretty unsure about impact via Council or member states. I also didn’t get much clarity on secondments. We didn’t discuss them much because the process to be sent to Brussels by a member state is different in every country

What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble

Joris 🔸30 Mar 2025 20:52 UTC

138 points

28 comments4 min readEA link

Joris 🔸 21 Feb 2025 12:38 UTC
6 points
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on: What should we ask Rutger Bregman and Peter Singer about how they changed their minds?
You can maybe pull from this AMA Peter Singer did on the Forum; there’s some unanswered questions there

Joris 🔸 1 Feb 2025 7:37 UTC
34 points
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on: Joris P’s Quick takes
Intro fellowship sign-ups at EA groups participating in Early OSP doubled this Fall.
CEA’s University Groups Team is increasingly focusing its marginal efforts on piloting more involved support to a subset of EA university groups. This pilot program – Early OSP or EOSP^[1] – includes early mentorship (starting in the summer), a semester planning retreat in August, and a workshop around EAG Boston, among other initiatives.
With the Fall semester now complete, we are analyzing initial outcomes. One standout result is that intro fellowship applications at EOSP groups averaged 32 per group, up from 14 the prior year^[2]. Although we lack full baseline data, there are promising indicators – two groups, for instance, went from zero applications in Fall 2023 to meaningful engagement this year.
Of course, this is just one metric among the many that matter^[3]. It is, however, an encouraging signal, that we’re hoping to build on as we continue to build out principles-first EA.
1. ^
  Early OSP (EOSP) is modeled after our regular Organizer Support Program. EOSP kicked off with organizers from these groups: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UChicago, UPenn, Oxford, and Cambridge. They have been anonymized on the graph.
2. ^
  Thank you to everyone who made this happen, especially the group organizers at all these universities!
3. ^
  We’re still collecting data on other metrics, and hope to share a more all-things-considered take in the future.
What links here?
- James Herbert's comment on 5 Historical Case Studies for an EA in Decline by JWS 🔸 (12 May 2025 13:19 UTC; 5 points)

Joris 🔸 24 Jan 2025 8:52 UTC
7 points
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on: Stanford summer course: Economics of Transformative AI
Nice stuff!
Does this in any way relate to the course (and fast track) BlueDot announced recently?

Joris 🔸 13 Jan 2025 8:50 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: gergo’s comment on: Your group needs all the help it can get (FBB #1)
I’d also be keen to hear more about this!

Joris 🔸 11 Jan 2025 15:22 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Yadav’s comment on: Yadav’s Shortform
Thank you for writing this! I wish I had internalized some of these points more while I was at university, and guess others will feel the same.
One thing in particular that I recognized is viewing 80,000 Hours (and the EA community more broadly) as offering definitive answers, rather than tools and questions. Looking back, I realize I maybe fell into that mindset. I almost expected that if I just followed the “right” path they laid out and worked as hard as I could, I’d maximize my impact. That was, of course, a very soothing thought, drastically simplifying the complexity of my career choice. But it was also very wrong, and I’m grateful that this quick take is now there to point this out :)

Joris 🔸 6 Jan 2025 15:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Leo Wu’s comment on: Most smart and skilled people are outside of the EA/rationalist community: an analysis
Just wanted to bump this comment, I’m interested

Joris 🔸 6 Jan 2025 15:16 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing
I came across this post because of Wrapped this year. This was such a nice story, thank you @atb !

Joris 🔸 2 Jan 2025 10:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: Uni Groups Team’s Quick takes
Sent you a DM! Sorry about the delay here, I didn’t see the notifications—I might post from my personal Forum account next time to prevent situations like these :)

Joris 🔸 24 Dec 2024 8:34 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Saul Munn’s comment on: What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers?
Hey Saul, I’m not sure how but I missed this comment! Sorry about that!
I think that the best way to answer your question is by reading this & Open Phil’s original post so that where it says “AI safety groups” you read “non-EA groups”. That is my understanding from Open Phil’s original post.
Does that help?

Joris 🔸 23 Dec 2024 9:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Joris 🔸’s comment on: What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers?
I haven’t managed to fully sync with EAIF or other orgs yet, but in the meantime just wanted to encourage people in this position to apply to OP before the 31st!