JP Addison🔸

• JP Addison🔸 5 Feb 2026 20:03 UTC

  10 points

  3 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: Un­falsifi­able sto­ries of doom

  This thread seems to have gone in an unhelpful direction.
  
  Questioning motivations is a hard point to make well. I’m unwilling to endorse that they are never relevant, but it immediately becomes personal. Keeping the focus primarily on the level of the arguments themselves is an approach more likely to enlighten and less likely to lead to flamewars.
  
  I’m not here to issue a moderation warning to anyone for the conversation ending up on the point of motivations. I do want to take my moderation hat off and suggest that people spend more time on the object level.
  
  I will then put my moderation hat back on and say that this and Jan’s previous comment breaks norms. You can disagree with someone without being this insulting.

Re­mem­ber­ing William Foege

• JP Addison🔸 28 Jan 2026 20:10 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Do your job un­rea­son­ably well

  I like this a lot.

  [Musing] I suppose that I would expect that it’s sometimes correct to have personal dev goals look like spending work time learning AI safety. It’s a question of whether you’re hill climbing to a better version of yourself or attempting to jump to a different peak.

  Like a junior ops person could spend 10% of her time on learning to code, to use a potentially antiquated example.

• JP Addison🔸 15 Jan 2026 14:35 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: New Fo­rum Li­cense: Creative Commons

  [Answering from memory, without any knowledge of recent Forum UI changes.]

  I believe the checkbox only appears for first-time authors. We needed to balance making sure people who cared were informed, without introducing too much friction.

• JP Addison🔸 9 Jan 2026 18:33 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ekim’s comment on: EA Core Skillset

  Nice, I hope you train this bundle well! Was it linked somewhere in the In-Depth Program?

  Here are 4 hypotheses for what could be going on:

  1. Any generally smart person, in an EA context, will develop a bunch of these traits, to their advantage

  2. There’s some factor that’s not general intelligence, but not specific to EA, that will cause these to be more correlated than expected, but would also apply to someone if they went into another field like biotech

  3. There’s some factor that causes these traits to be more correlated in the EA context in particular, such that noticing this allows you to find people who are unusually good fits for doing EA-style work

  4. That factor is trainable

  1 & 2 are kinda interesting, but you don’t need a post on the EA Forum to tell you about intelligence and something like “competence for intellectual work.”

  3 starts to get interesting because then you can take someone’s ability to both speak fluently about fish welfare and to use probabilities as a sign that someone will be able to understand and improve your organizations strategy, and even to be unusually cooperative.^[1]

  If that last clause sounds dangerous to you, I don’t disagree. I think over-reliance of the cooperativeness of other people sharing these traits has caused more than one problem. I nevertheless think this is one of the things that makes EA extremely powerful as an idea.

  4 is where you might start getting really hyped about projects like an In Depth Fellowship or an EA Forum. 🙂

  1. ^

     That’s what correlation means. Learning about correlations means you can update your bayesian prior about one fact when you learn about a correlated fact.

• JP Addison🔸 11 Sep 2025 23:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸’s comment on: JP’s Shortform

  That seems like the reverse, right? Given candidates, find me the best ones? So you’d want different prompts, though potentially some of the same logic carries over. In any case with the primitive nature of my prompts, and the complexity of the approach, I would probably advise someone to start from scratch. I’m generally a fan of open source though, and I could imagine releasing it.

• JP Addison🔸 11 Sep 2025 20:33 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: JP’s Shortform

  Quick ask: I’m working on an AI tool that takes your resume/​LinkedIn and shows you the most relevant opportunities from the 80k Job Board, then lets you discuss them with an AI.

  I like to talk to 5-10 people for quick user interviews (30 mins). You might be interested if you:

  • Are job hunting or career planning

  • Want to help me build a tool for others trying to have an impact with their career

  Drop your details here if interested.

• JP Addison🔸 10 Jun 2025 20:14 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tristan D’s comment on: EA Core Skillset

  I agree they’re generally useful. I claim^[1] they’re especially useful in EA. But that’s not enough to make this interesting.

  There are many generally useful correlated traits where the correlation with general mental ability is stronger than the correlation between those traits. So being a good writer is good, and also being good at solving math problems is good. And they’re positively correlated. But most things are, just through general intelligence.

  What becomes interesting is identifying a cluster of traits that are more correlated with each other than with intelligence, and also predictive of success. These are rare, and usually wrong.^[2] If such a cluster can be identified, than knowing about it can help you identify talent that will do well.

  If such a cluster is also trainable, well then, you’ve got a real prize.

  1. ^

     With the noted caveats.

  2. ^

     Citation needed.

• JP Addison🔸 21 May 2025 16:25 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Alex (Αλέξανδρος)’s comment on: Reflec­tions on 7 years build­ing the EA Fo­rum — and mov­ing on

  Much of the credit belongs to LessWrong!

Money Stuff on char­ity-ad­justed billion­aire rankings

• JP Addison🔸 6 May 2025 21:35 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Reflec­tions on 7 years build­ing the EA Fo­rum — and mov­ing on

  Fair, I was probably too loose there. I believe specifically that posts which were copied from google docs^[1] failed to wrap at the screen width. But I wasn’t a much of a mobile reader at the time.

  Also thank you! I didn’t realize you were the one who added mobile support.

  1. ^

     IIRC, maybe it was some other cause that affected a subset of posts

• JP Addison🔸 6 May 2025 14:33 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA as a Tree of Questions

  I like the branching tree metaphor, and I like the attempt to framework these intro conversations — good post.

• JP Addison🔸 2 May 2025 14:44 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lizka’s comment on: Reflec­tions on 7 years build­ing the EA Fo­rum — and mov­ing on

  Thanks, Lizka. I think this is one of the best retirement presents I could have gotten.

Reflec­tions on 7 years build­ing the EA Fo­rum — and mov­ing on

• JP Addison🔸 1 May 2025 20:06 UTC

  29 points

  13 ∶ 0

  on: Pri­ori­tiz­ing Work

  A Forum post can be short. What a great ratio of punch per word.

• JP Addison🔸 7 Apr 2025 20:49 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Life’s Work of Ban­er­jee, Du­flo, and Kremer

  Nice, I like this. Have you considered crossposting the full content? Usually those get a lot more people reading them, and more visibility, though do note the CC-BY restriction.

• JP Addison🔸 7 Apr 2025 14:37 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Con­tact us

  Good ideas, thank you!

• JP Addison🔸 31 Mar 2025 21:04 UTC

  2 points

  2 ∶ 4

  in reply to: NobodyInteresting’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is shift­ing its strate­gic ap­proach to fo­cus more on AGI

  We’re issuing @NobodyInteresting a warning for the above comment. The comment does not meet the expectations for civility and engaging in good faith. I would not recommend a public warning for this comment on it’s own (though I would downvote it for the above reasons, and recommend a discrete DM), but we have less tolerance for users who have not yet shown that they can engage productively.

EA Core Skillset

• JP Addison🔸 4 Mar 2025 17:01 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Grayden 🔸’s comment on: His­tor­i­cal ex­am­ples of stew­ard­ship in EA

  I think this is a good and useful point. And one that’s underappreciated in general.