Simon Holm

• Simon Holm 8 Dec 2025 21:30 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Ar­tifi­cial Wombs as a High Im­pact Ca­reer Path: Help Me Fore­cast the Timeline

  Hi medinot—thanks a lot for writing this up and contributing to the forum!

  I never heard of artificial wombs before other than the “The Pod Generation” movie and I think the idea is cool.

  What I would love to see when you are making such a big decision as whether you should dedicate your career to it is a Theory of Change (have you heard about this?) to make your assumptions about why this would be impactful more explicit.
  
  Spontaneous questions that arise for me are: what are the concrete harms with population collapse? How will research be conducted to find the effects of artificial wombs on the children born from them? How will the economics of this technology look like (and could it give rise to inequality)? Are there more benefits to artificial wombs that we don’t think of?

  
  Would love to hear your thoughts.
  
  Not comfortable answering your second question :)

• Simon Holm 3 Jul 2025 15:17 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Net­flix Series on FTX collapse

  Oh! Fantastic, thanks for letting me know Toby—should’ve looked in the “COMMENTS” section of the search results as well!

Net­flix Series on FTX collapse

• Simon Holm 22 Mar 2025 11:56 UTC

  3 points

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  on: You prob­a­bly won’t solve malaria or x-risk, and that’s ok

  Thanks for sharing these perspectives Rory! On an emotional level, combining what you are saying with the thought of there being others that are also trying their best to e.g. save starfish, makes me think “Maybe, just maybe, we can solve the whole problem”—and that gives me both inspiration and hope :)

• Simon Holm 8 Feb 2025 11:09 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Sarah Cheng 🔸’s comment on: What are we do­ing about the EA Fo­rum? (Jan 2025)

  Thanks a lot for your input here Sarah! These are all good points, some of which were not obvious to me as a user, for sure.
  
  I’d be curious what would happen if you would run some tiny experiment on breaking the unified space, and I don’t think structural siloing necessarily would correlate with epistemic siloing (even though I get that many posts do not fit single categories and that it would be a difficult meta-question around what categories would be appropriate).
  
  To me, a unified space can create the feeling of having a discussion with lots of people, which I find more difficult than if there is a smaller discussion group.

• Simon Holm 13 Jan 2025 20:53 UTC

  10 points

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  on: What are we do­ing about the EA Fo­rum? (Jan 2025)

  If you view the forum from a UX lens and put it in the context of different categories of online community infrastructures (e.g. Facebook/​Twitter feed of short posts, Discord/​Slack channel-based, Quora/​StackExchange/​Reddit upvote/​question-based and more traditional forums with defined categories/​aubcategories and threads), what do you think are the pros and cons of how the Forum is currently structured and how does that facilitate (or not facilitate) what you would like to see happen in online EA community building? Would also be curious to hear how you would compare the Forum to that of the many existing EA Slack channels.

The Univer­sity Spe­cial­ist—an EA Swe­den com­mu­nity build­ing trial

• Simon Holm 21 Feb 2023 13:47 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Jana W.🔸’s comment on: Ex­er­cise for ‘Differ­ences in Im­pact’

  Thanks a lot for finding and linking! :)

• Simon Holm 15 Nov 2022 20:06 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Friend­ship For­ever (new EA cause area?)

  I would be super-keen on reading more essays exploring friendship from a well-being/​making-the-world-a-better-place point-of-view, and I do think there is something to say there with regards to community building, too!
  
  In any case, I found this post to be a thoughtful reminder for my personal goals with regards to relationships. And thanks for making me laugh! Not something I expect from an ordinary Tuesday evening *hat off*.

• Simon Holm 3 Oct 2022 12:28 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: We all teach: here’s how to do it better

  Thanks for writing this post! I would love to see how elements of what is reported here could potentially improve CEA’s virtual introductory program and be more discussed among/​taught to community builders on a consistent basis. I look forward to digesting these topics more properly to see how it can benefit the work I do as university group supporter.

• Simon Holm 3 Oct 2022 12:08 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Ex­er­cise for ‘Differ­ences in Im­pact’

  For the sake of using the handbook for an intro fellowship—where is the “earlier estimate of your future income” located, if anywhere, in the handbook? Does it refer to some exercise or to a graph in one of the articles on economic inequality? And if there is no such thing, perhaps an alternative phrasing or including the estimate in the exercise would be great!

• Simon Holm 29 Sep 2022 19:27 UTC

  7 points

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  on: com­mu­nity build­ing solely as a tool for im­pact cre­ates toxic communities

  I really like this point, and it sparks a few questions, confusions and thoughts I have about community building, some of which are:
  
  (1) I believe what you are pointing at can be a good distinction between the tasks of national/​regional groups vs. local groups at universities and in cities—the more local groups catering towards creating a healthy community (for example through the activities you suggested), and the bigger groups catering towards helping/​”making sure” the community serves humanity in addition to itself.
  
  (2) What do we actually mean with community building and what is the difference between a community building and movement building (and is one of them preferred)?
  
  (3) Is what you’re bringing up an example of Goodhart’s law (this question may say more about my understanding of the law than about community building)?
  
  (4) (related to above points) I wonder if we weigh the intrinsic value of (the) EA community(s) too little, compared to its/​their instrumental value, much like treating rest as a means to be, say, more productive, will make it harder to get proper rest (not sure if this is an actual thing, but I’m pretty sure there’s a named concept for it which I have forgotten), and also missing out on the intrinsic value, of course! Making the community healthy would be, I guess, more of catering to the community for the community’s sake, whilst also (probably) making it more likely for it/​its members to have a greater impact.
  
  Perhaps some of these points have already been adressed in previous posts on community building—would love to get tips on this!
  
  I hope this doesn’t interfere with the intent of your post; I really felt like sharing my associations! Please let me know if anything was irrelevant. Would love to hear if you have any thoughts on mine.

• Simon Holm 23 Sep 2022 11:19 UTC

  2 points

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  on: A frame­work for com­par­ing global prob­lems in terms of ex­pected impact

  I am not sure if it’s only in my browser, but the very first table in this article has a strange formatting which makes the columns too thin so that the table becomes hard to read—would be awesome if this could be improved :)

• Simon Holm 9 Sep 2022 14:15 UTC

  26 points

  15 ∶ 0

  on: Cause Ex­plo­ra­tion Prizes: An­nounc­ing our prizes

  Amazing to see the variation and the effort put into the contributions here—a joy to skim through. Well done everyone!

• Simon Holm 16 Aug 2022 9:05 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jesse Rothman’s comment on: PDF of EA Hand­book?

  Hi Jesse! Thanks for replying, and good to hear that you are also positive idea, even though - the answer seems to be clear here. I’ll hold my thumbs for the future!

[Question] PDF of EA Hand­book?

• Simon Holm 12 Jul 2022 9:27 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: SeanEngelhart’s comment on: In­ves­ti­gat­ing Cause Areas vs. Jump­ing In

  It absolutely depends on particular circumstances!
  
  I realise now that my current impression of GPR is that it really is its own field, i.e. that you would not spending much time dipping your toes into specific (other) cause areas. See more here: https://​​globalprioritiesinstitute.org/​​research-agenda-web-version/​​
  But it would be more useful to talk to someone who works with it to find out more, for sure!

Red-team­ing Holden Karnofsky’s AI timelines

• Simon Holm 8 May 2022 7:19 UTC

  3 points

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  on: In­ves­ti­gat­ing Cause Areas vs. Jump­ing In

  I don’t feel justified to give you any advice, but I’ll tell you some of my thoughts on this.

  I struggle with this question, too, and I find that it is easy to come to the conclusion that one should become a full-time philosopher or global priorities researcher to straighten these uncertainties out, depending on to what degree you want all of your actions justified.

  My current practical strategy to deal with this (which I am sure can be improved) is to do both of the things you’ve described, but simultaneously. For example, I’ve been participating in a career accountability group for the last year where I have thought about career-related questions (i.e. “What do I feel passionate about?”, “What roles could be a good personal fit for me?”, “What do I think are the most pressing issues?”), but I have simultaneously jumped at volunteering to organise a local group and started a writing project on the side.

  But I do also work part-time, so I have an easier time to take time for these things than you do.

  What is your end goal, exactly? Maximising impact right now? Later? Finding a job which is a great personal fit, but more impactful than the job you have currently? There are different degrees to wanting to have an impact, and I think making it concrete may help.

  Let me know your thoughts on this!

• Simon Holm 28 Oct 2021 17:14 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Greg_Colbourn ⏸️ ’s comment on: The hum­bling art of catch­ing golden fish

  Dear Greg—thank you for reading my story and for your comment!
  
  When I asked a teacher in creative writing, he told me that for readers to be interested, we need to make a difference between portrayal and description—that is, if you have a message in your story, it shouldn’t be too obvious, or the reader will feel like they can’t think for themselves. I guess there is a scale, for if too subtle, then the message will not get across at all, perhaps shadowed by other interpretations.
  
  I think your suggestions may help me bring the story closer to the optimal point on this scale, for I believe I am being too subtle.