Projects

80,000 Hours: I'm the Director of Special Projects at 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that helps people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. I joined in 2017.

Same Page: I write about mission-driven management at Same Page, with Max Dalton (Executive Director of Forethought).

World record: I hold held the world record for the most throws of a five kilogram medicine ball between two people while standing five metres apart wearing boxing gloves.

Models to play with

Little interactive things I've built to make an argument concrete. Drag the dials; the numbers are made up, but the shapes are the point.

• Circles of responsibility
  A map of how ownership cascades down through an organisation, and what each layer is actually holding. It's a companion to the ownership sequence I wrote for Same Page — the argument is much easier to see than to read.
• Faster growing teams need more ops staff
  I noticed that when we grew faster, operations became harder. This is a model where I tried to play with that.
• How much extra will you earn if you work for another hour?
  Previously I thought about putting more time into work as a positive mostly altruistically. Now that salaries in effective altruism and AI have increased, the selfish case is worth taking seriously too.

Past

Operations: I oversaw the operations function at 80,000 Hours from 2019 until 2026. It is by far the most valuable thing I have ever done for the world, and I am proud of it.

Medicine: I worked as a doctor in Australia. Having considered the research on the impact of clinical medicine, I moved to 80,000 Hours. I harbour an unjustified sense of confidence that I could insert a drip.

Run to Better Days: I co-founded Run to Better Days, which gave presentations on effective development aid to more than 30,000 people.

Effective Altruism Australia: I also co-founded Effective Altruism Australia, through which Australians have now donated more than $30 million to effective charities helping the global poor.

Self-experiments: I once ate only Soylent for a week. It was a bad experience. Later, when I was older and wiser, I ate only potatoes for a week. It was a bad experience.

Opinions

• The best podcast ever made is 'The Missing Hit', from Reply All.
• The right way to recommend podcasts is with specific episode recommendations. Here's a list of episode recommendations.
• Ireland has a weirdly manageable number of mammals: there are 27 species of terrestrial mammal. This means that if you ever see a hedgehog, you can be like "oh, that must be the western European hedgehog, because that is the only hedgehog here". If you see a mole, you can be like "oh, I mustn't be in Ireland, because they don't have any moles, because they ran out of mammals". This is a weirdly manageable number of mammals.

Elsewhere