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
Two organisations, both a hundred people. One is growing at 25% a year, the other at 50%. The faster one needs meaningfully more operations capacity to deliver the same service, and the dials show you why: more of its staff are new, more of its managers are new, and its systems break sooner. - What is an extra hour of work worth?
If putting more time into your career makes you better at it, and being better at it pays more, then an hour of career effort has a price. This calculates it, and the answer is usually a good deal higher than your hourly wage — which matters when you're deciding whether an hour of life admin is worth doing.
Past
Operations: I ran the operations team at 80,000 Hours from 2019. It is by far the most valuable thing I have 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 remain confident 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.