Saul Munn

Karma: 829

Saul Munn 18 Mar 2026 4:41 UTC
26 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Saul Munn’s Quick takes
UC Berkeley EA is hosting a west coast uni student EA retreat on april 10-12, with ~50 attendees from Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, UCI, UCSD, & more, as well as special guests like Matt Reardon, Jake McKinnon, Jesse Gilbert, Julie Steele, Adam Khoja, Richard Ren, & more...
...but we only know to reach out to people who’re involved with their uni’s clubs. so: if you’re interested in attending, book a 5-10 minute chat with alex or aiden :)
some examples of gaps in our outreach:
- unis that don’t have an EA club
- students who haven’t joined their uni’s EA club
- transfers to west-coast unis
- students who’re on leave from their uni and presently living on the west coast
- high-schoolers who’ll soon be starting at west coast
we won’t be able to take everyone, but reading the ea forum is a pretty positive indicator that you’d be a good fit!

Saul Munn 10 Mar 2026 22:44 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Saul Munn’s comment on: Saul Munn’s Quick takes
some further & updated thoughts, written in ~30 min, are below. canonical version lives here.
Here’s a frame I’ve found helpful for thinking about effective altruism:
- When I look inside myself, I notice that I care about a lot of things.
  - You could also reasonably replace “care” with “wanting,” “preferring,” “valuing,” “desiring,” “having goals,” etc, rather than “caring.” I’m okay being loose.
  - Some examples of things I care about:
    I want my sister to have an excellent career.
    I’m hungry, and want some food.
    I want to be valued by people I respect.
    I want my dogs to have enjoyable lives.
    (And many, many more).
  - (It’s often useful to be introspective/clear-eyed about what you care about, what that ontology looks like, which values are instrumental to which other values, etc., but I won’t be doing that here, and indeed I think it might be anti-helpful in this particular frame at this particular time. Stay with me until the end.)
- Sort-of by definition, I want more of the things I care about. I see my life as a difficult, high-level optimization problem aimed at making decisions which, given my resources at various times, increase my values across time.
- Some of the things I care about — like wanting food because I’m hungry — are fundamentally oriented at myself. And I take actions to do better along these axes.
  - Some examples of actions:
    Reading a book on tax strategies
    Learning how to cook
    Asking people for feedback on my sartorial choices
    etc
  - And in general, I try to be effective at getting what I want, here — that is, I aim to achieve these kinds of goals/values/preferences to as great of a degree as possible.
- But other things I care about — like wanting my sister to have an excellent career, or my dogs to have enjoyable lives — are fundamentally oriented at others-by-their-lights. And I take actions to do better along these axes, too.
  - These motivations often look starkly different in a lot of different situations.
  - For some of these altruistic motivations, it just so happens that some lovely dynamics have coalesced such that there’s an existing group of people / infrastructure / etc who have worked & are working quite hard toward helping me get what I want w/r/t some of those things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights. In particular, I haven’t found any community which is more effective at helping me achieve the things I care about that are oriented at others-by-their-lights than this one.
    (The group of people / infrastructure / etc I’m referring to is effective altruism.)
Why do I like this frame?
- Because it’s apparent that I care about quite a few things. It becomes evident quickly that totalizing stances toward EA are just not worth it; a bad trade; just getting less of what I want.
  - In particular, I think this kind of frame can be validating toward folks who’ve gone quite far, and repressed the values that they in-fact have in other areas of their life. (I think I was in this camp ~two years ago.)
- There are interesting subproblems that come into clearer view, e.g.:
  - When should, on the margin, my resources go toward different things that I care about?
  - What actions would get me more access to the things that I want with greater robustness (i.e. getting me closer to many different things I want, all at once)?
  - etc

Saul Munn 16 Dec 2025 6:46 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Noah Birnbaum’s Quick takes
Started something sorta similar about a month ago: https://saul-munn.notion.site/A-collection-of-content-resources-on-digital-minds-AI-welfare-29f667c7aef380949e4efec04b3637e9?pvs=74

Saul Munn 29 Nov 2025 21:23 UTC
29 points
12 ∶ 0
on: Why doesn’t EA denounce OpenAI?
What, concretely, would that involve? /What, concretely, are you proposing?

Saul Munn 5 Nov 2025 8:31 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Eric Neyman’s Quick takes
I think affecting P(things go really well | no AI takeover) is pretty tractable!
What interventions are you most excited about? Why? What are they bottlenecked on?

Saul Munn 23 Oct 2025 18:18 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Saul Munn’s Quick takes
PurpleAir collects data from a network of private air quality sensors. Looks interesting, and possibly useful for tracking rapid changes in air quality (e.g. from a wildfire).

Saul Munn 16 Oct 2025 20:53 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: calebp’s Shortform
(written v quickly, sorry for informal tone/etc)
i think that a happy medium is getting small-group conversations (that are useful, effective, etc) of size 3–4 people. this includes 1-1s, but the vibe of a Formal, Thirty Minute One on One is a very different vibe from floating through 10–15, 3–4-person conversations in a day, each that last varying amounts of time.
- much more information can flow with 3-4 ppl than with just 2 ppl
- people can dip in and out of small conversations more than they can with 1-1s
- more-organic time blocks means that particularly unhelpful conversations can end after 5-10m, and particularly helpful ones can last the duration that would be good for them to last (even many hours!)
- 3-4 person conversations naturally select for a good 1-1. once 1-2 people have left a 3-4 person conversation, the conversation is then just a 1-1 of the two people who’ve engaged in the conversation longest — which seems like some evidence of their being a good match for a 1-1.
however, i think that this is operationally much harder to do for organizers than just 1-1s. my understanding is that this is much of the reason EAGs (& other conferences) do 1-1s, instead of small group conversations.
- i think Writehaven did a mediocre job of this at LessOnline this past year (but, tbc, it did vastly better than any other piece of software i’ve encountered).
- i think Lighthaven as a venue forces this sort of thing to happen, since there are so so so many nooks for 2-4 people to sit and chat, and the space is set up to make 10+ person conversations less likely to happen.
i know that The Curve (from @Rachel Weinberg) created some “Curated Conversations:” they manually selected people to have predetermined conversations for some set amount of time. iirc this was typically 3-6 people for ~1h, but i could be wrong on the details. rachel: how did these end up going, relative to the cost of putting them together?

Saul Munn 21 Sep 2025 1:26 UTC
2 points
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on: Saul Munn’s Quick takes
[srs unconf at lighthaven this sunday ⁹⁄₂₁]
Memoria is a one-day festival/unconference for spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems. It’s hosted at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on September 21st, from 10am through the afternoon/evening.
Michael Nielsen, Andy Matuschak, Soren Bjornstad, Martin Schneider, and about 90–110 others will be there — if you use & tinker with memory systems like Anki, SuperMemo, Remnote, MathAcademy, etc, then maybe you should come!
Tickets are $80 and include lunch & dinner. More info at memoria.day.

Saul Munn 11 Sep 2025 16:43 UTC
1 point
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on: My tool for tracking predictions
have you tried Fatebook.io, from @Adam Binksmith ?

Saul Munn 31 Aug 2025 1:04 UTC
3 points
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on: Deferring
i thought this was excellent. thank you for writing it up!

Saul Munn 15 Jul 2025 13:14 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Reflecting on One Year of Mieux Donner: Launching the French Effective Giving Initiative
Thank you for this! It can take a lot of effort to write, edit, and publish reports like this, but they (generally) create quite a bit of value. I found this one exceptionally concrete & clear to read — well done!

Saul Munn 15 Jul 2025 10:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams
thanks for writing/cross-posting! i particularly liked that you had the reader pause at a moment where we could reasonably attempt to figure it out on our own.

Saul Munn 2 Jul 2025 21:50 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: How Unofficial Work Gets You Hired: Building Your Surface Area for Serendipity
I skimmed most of this post, and it seems great! Thank you for writing it.
However:
In this post, I introduce a concept I call surface area for serendipity …
I’m not sure what you mean by “introduce” here? I read it as “here is this new phrase that I’m putting forward for use” — unless I’m misunderstanding, I’m quite confident that’s wrong. You’re definitely not the first person to use the phrase.
Consider editing it to be:
In this post, I describe a concept I use called surface area for serendipity…
Or something similar.

Saul Munn 14 May 2025 0:44 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
fwiw i instinctively read it as the 2nd, which i think is caleb’s intended reading

Saul Munn’s Quick takes

Saul Munn13 May 2025 23:03 UTC

5 points

10 comments EA link

Saul Munn 13 May 2025 23:03 UTC
52 points
2 ∶ 2
on: Saul Munn’s Quick takes
why do i find myself less involved in EA?
epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it’s been bubbling for a while, but i haven’t spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it’d be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don’t expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it’s probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i’m not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i’d prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status.
- 1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc).
- i am now a lot less involved in EA.
  - e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA
  - e.g. i haven’t attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials
  - e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones
  - e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community
- (to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i’ve also moved a bit away from EA’s frames of thinking.)
- why?
  - a lot of EA seems fake
    the stuff — the orientations — the orgs — i’m finding it hard to straightforwardly point at, but it feels kinda easy for me to notice ex-post
  - there’s been an odd mix of orientations toward [ aiming at a character of transparent/open/clear/etc ] alongside [ taking actions that are strategic/instrumentally useful/best at accomplishing narrow goals… that also happen to be mildly deceptive, or lying by omission, or otherwise somewhat slimy/untrustworthy/etc ]
    the thing that really gets me is the combination of an implicit (and sometimes explicit!) request for deep trust alongside a level of trust that doesn’t live up to that expectation.
    it’s fine to be in a low-trust environment, and also fine to be in a high-trust environment; it’s not fine to signal one and be the other. my experience of EA has been that people have generally behaved extremely well/with high integrity and with high trust… but not quite as well & as high as what was written on the tin.
    for a concrete ex (& note that i totally might be screwing up some of the details here, please don’t index too hard on the specific people/orgs involved): when i was participating in — and then organizing for — brandeis EA, it seemed like our goal was (very roughly speaking) to increase awareness of EA ideas/principles, both via increasing depth & quantity of conversation and via increasing membership. i noticed a lack of action/doing-things-in-the-world, which felt kinda annoying to me… until i became aware that the action was “organizing the group,” and that some of the organizers (and higher up the chain, people at CEA/on the Groups team/at UGAP/etc) believed that most of the impact of university groups comes from recruiting/training organizers — that the “action” i felt was missing wasn’t missing at all, it was just happening to me, not from me. i doubt there was some point where anyone said “oh, and make sure not to tell the people in the club that their value is to be a training ground for the organizers!” — but that’s sorta how it felt, both on the object-level and on the deception-level.
    this sort of orientation feels decently reprensentative of the 25th percentile end of what i’m talking about.
  - also some confusion around ethics/how i should behave given my confusion/etc
    importantly, some confusions around how i value things. it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i’m blinding myself. i think it’s taken me awhile to know what that feels like, and i’ve grown to find that blinding & meta-blinding extremely distasteful, and a signal that something’s wrong.
    some of this might merely be confusion about orientation, and not ethics — e.g. it might be that in some sense the right doxastic attitude is “EA,” but that the right conative attitude is somewhere closer to (e.g.) “embody your character — be kind, warm, clear-thinking, goofy, loving, wise, [insert more virtues i want to be here]. oh and do some EA on the side, timeboxed & contained, like when you’re donating your yearly pledge money.”
- where now?
  - i’m not sure! i could imagine the pendulum swinging more in either direction, and want to avoid doing any further prediction about where it will swing for fear of that prediction interacting harmfully with a sincere process of reflection.
  - i did find writing this out useful, though!

Saul Munn 24 Dec 2024 18:59 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joris 🔸’s comment on: What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers?
Thanks for the clarification — I’ve sent a similar comment on the Open Phil post, to get confirmation from them that your reading is accurate :)

Saul Munn 24 Dec 2024 18:58 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Upcoming changes to Open Philanthropy’s university group funding
How will this change affect university groups currently supported by Open Philanthropy that are neither under the banner of AI safety nor EA? The category on my mind is university forecasting clubs, but I’d also be keen to get a better sense of this for e.g. biosecurity clubs, rationality clubs, etc.

(I originally posted this comment under the Uni Groups Team’s/Joris’s post (link), but Joris didn’t seem to have a super conclusive answer, and directed me to this post.)
What links here?
- Saul Munn's comment on What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers? by CEA Groups Team (24 Dec 2024 18:59 UTC; 3 points)
- Saul Munn's comment on Upcoming changes to Open Philanthropy’s university group funding by Eli Rose🔸 (24 Dec 2024 18:58 UTC; 3 points)

Saul Munn 13 Dec 2024 5:32 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Saul Munn’s comment on: What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers?
(also — thanks for taking the time to write this out & share it. these sorts of announcement posts don’t just magically happen!)

Saul Munn 13 Dec 2024 5:31 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What do Open Philanthropy’s recent changes mean for university group organizers?
How will this change affect university groups currently supported by Open Philanthropy that are neither under the banner of AI safety nor EA? The category on my mind is university forecasting clubs, but I’d also be keen to get a better sense of this for e.g. biosecurity clubs, rationality clubs, etc.

Saul Munn

Saul Munn’s Quick takes

why do i find myself less involved in EA?