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 with Max Dalton (Executive Director of Forethought) at Same Page.
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 I've made
The interactive models behind my claims about running orgs and careers →
Running tours
Claude writes me narrated running tours of my own streets, with the kind of facts that explain what I've been looking at for years. It wrote up how, with a prompt you can use →
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. (Residue of that time: 13 facts from an ex-doctor to make your life very mildly better.)
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 by pointing people to specific episodes of that podcast, rather than the podcast in general. Here's a list of podcast 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.