JP Addison🔸

Karma: 5,915

I’m a moderator for the EA Forum, and an AI Systems Specialist for 80,000 Hours.

I ran the EA Forum team for 2 years, and was the original developer working on the EA Forum 2.0 for 5 years before that.

Prior to CEA, I was a data engineer at an aerospace startup. I got into EA through reading the entire archive of Slate Star Codex in 2015. I found EA naturally compelling, and donated to AMF, then GFI, before settling on my current cause prioritization of meta-EA, with AI x-risk as my object-level preference. I try to have a wholehearted approach to morality, rather than thinking of it as an obligation or opportunity. You see my LessWrong profile here.

In my personal life, I hang out in the Boston EA and Gaymer communities, enjoy houseplants, table tennis, and playing coop games with my partner, who has more karma than me.

Remembering William Foege

JP Addison🔸28 Jan 2026 21:58 UTC

100 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

(news.emory.edu)

JP Addison🔸 28 Jan 2026 20:10 UTC
6 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🔸16 May 2025 17:32 UTC

88 points

9 comments1 min readEA link

(www.bloomberg.com)

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
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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 20:08 UTC

228 points

17 comments2 min readEA link

JP Addison🔸 1 May 2025 20:06 UTC
28 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.