Biosecurity Culture, Computer Security Culture
While I've only worked in biosecurity for about a year and my computer security background consists of things I picked up while working on other aspects of software engineering, the cultures seem...
View ArticleCommonsense Good, Creative Good
Let's say you're vegan and you go to a vegan restaurant. The food is quite bad, and you'd normally leave a bad review, but now you're worried: what if your bad review leads people to go to non-vegan...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Weighing Animal Worth
It's common for people who approach helping animals from a quantitative direction to need some concept of "moral weights" so they can prioritize. If you can avert one year of suffering for a chicken...
View ArticleMy Mid-Career Transition into Biosecurity
After working as a professional programmer for fourteen years, primarily in ads and web performance, I switched careers to biosecurity. It's now been a bit over a year: how has it gone? In terms of my...
View ArticleRevisiting Guide Dogs and Blindness Prevention
In early effective altruism it was commonfor peopleto givethe example of deciding between donating to fund the training of guide dogs in wealthy countries or to reduce blindness in very poor...
View ArticleComputational Approaches to Pathogen Detection
While this post is my perspective and not an official post of my employer's, it also draws on a lot of collaborative work with others at the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO). One of the future scenarios...
View ArticlePublic Weights?
While this is close to areas I work in, it's a personal post. No one reviewed this before I published it, or asked me to (or not to) write something. All mistakes are my own. A few days ago, some of my...
View ArticleAMA: Earning to Give
This week the Effective Altruism Forum is running an Effective Giving Spotlight, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on my experience earning to give. Some background: I was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Post-EAG Music Party
This year the fall EA Global conference was back in Boston, and it was my first time attending one since 2017. Our first floor tenants had recently moved out, our new tenants hadn't moved in yet: good...
View ArticleAccounting for Foregone Pay
While the effective altruism movement started out with a strong focus on donations, over time it has shifted more towards careers. If you're trying to understand how levels of commitment have changed...
View ArticleOut-of-distribution Bioattacks
The main goal of my work these days is trying to reduce the chances of individuals or small groups causing large-scale harm through engineered pandemics, potentially civilizational collapse or...
View ArticleWhen Does Altruism Strengthen Altruism?
Joey Savoie recently wrote that Altruism Sharpens Altruism: I think many EAs have a unique view about how one altruistic action affects the next altruistic action, something like altruism is powerful...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sequencing Swabs
While this is about an area I work in, I'm speaking for myself and not my organization. At the Nucleic Acid Observatory we've been mostly looking at metagenomic sequencing of wastewater as a way to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Strange ACH Corner Case
It turns out ACH transactions can fail because your bank has too many people out for the holidays. Which isn't great if you're trying to get your donation in before the end of the year! Juila and I...
View ArticleLegality as a Career Harm Assessment Heuristic
A question many people in the effective altruism movement have struggled with around earning to give is how to handlepotentially harmful careers. It's obviously self-defeating if you cause more harm...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trying to Do More Good
This is an edited transcript of a talk I gave last week at Commonwealth School, a high school in Boston that I attended from 2000 to 2004. I'm typing from memory, so in places it may be closer to what...
View ArticlePandemic Identification Simulator
At my day job I work on identifying potential pandemics sooner, so we have more time to respond. I recently made a simulator which pulls a lot ofthings I'vebeen thinkingabout recently into a single...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Spending Update 2024
I'm generally a pretty big fan of transparency, and one way I try to promote this is writing up our finances every few years (2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014). This is also useful to me: putting things...
View Article
