This is a fantastic program. I haven't been directly involved, but I know people who have, and I've been receiving their updates and messages. Rutger Bregman is an inspiring leader, and what is so great about him, and about this program, is that it is so results-oriented. No grand gestures, big statements or whatever. This is about getting the right people working on the core of the problem. It's about getting the best lawyers (and not just volunteers) challenging nasty companies in court based on high-quality research. 

A lot of great EA ideas move slowly because we live in a world where there is so much intertia, intentionally created by people who like the status quo. It is sometimes difficult for young, energetic, well-meaning people to figure out how to change things. This program looks at finding people with the skill-sets needed to really change the systems - from inside if possible.

Probably a lot of the people who would be ideal for this don't have time to read the EA Forum - maybe they're not even EA's. But surely many of us know people - good people who would love to work on vitally important questions, but who have kind of accepted that that's not likely to happen, and that they're going to be in their well-paying but ultimately meaningless corporate jobs until they retire. Maybe relations, parents, friends ... 

Don't hesitate to mention this program to them. Maybe they could join the fellowship - or maybe just reading about it will enable them to find ways to make a greater impact even without switching careers. 

Never underestimate the extent to which what we all consider as self-evident EA thinking may not actually have percolated out to most people outside the EA bubble!

Thanks Alex,

This is a nice update. 

I would really be wonderful if we could see the urgency the world needs applied to this topic. GFI is doing amazing work, but how can we turn this from what appears still to be a niche area, into what it should be: a massive international effort to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time. 

As EA's we're very aware of the multiple challenges the world faces. Alternative protein is unique in that it can bring huge improvements in at least three areas: 

• Reduce the suffering of farmed animals.
• Reduce the massive impact of the meat industry on climate change.
• Enable everyone on earth to have cheap and easy access to a full and healthy diet. (This one is maybe more long-term, but people 100 years from now will see this as normal - we just need to get there faster)

What should EA's be doing to push for more political support, more funding, more investment? Imagine what the industry could achieve with 1% of the crazy investments going into AI ...

Keep up the great work!

I love this. 

Sometimes it feels like we in EA are "too honest" to market ourselves. The reality is that so many people haven't heard of EA, haven't heard of impactful careers or effective giving or whatever. And when we don't reach them, we are depriving them of the chance to improve their own and other people's lives. 

I may contact you to find out some more details to help with the (smaller) campaign we're planning to run with Effective Giving Ireland. 

Keep up the amazing work! I've been on the receiving end of some material from Consultants for Impact (and I am in your target audience), and it has been really engaging. 

Today, the single most impactful thing anyone could do - to reduce existential risk, for animals, for the climate, to help humans in need, whatever - would be to stop Donald Trump's administration. If you don't trust me, pick any one topic and look at his actual actions - from blocking AI governance to repealing the most basic climate-policies to destroying the (albeit flawed) global system, to promoting arms build-ups to supporting thugs like Netanyahu and Putin. 

It's not about Trump personally, but about the policies he's enabling, and about the transition he's enabling in what was once a counterweight to the "bad guys." 

The world has adjusted over the decades to the idea of Russia being Russia and China being China and even to a few European countries having radical leaders. But the US has always been a powerful counterweight. If the US goes down this path, who will save us? 

I hear the argument that opposing Trump is not exactly neglected. The day he dies will be a global celebration on a par with the end of WW2 - but unfortunately, like that celebration, it will be marred by the realisation of the massive damage that has been caused. 

So an EA has to ask themselves not whether opposing Trump's (or Orban's, or Putin's or ...) fascism is the biggest problem, but rather, whether it is the most impactful thing they as an individual could do. 

Honestly, if you are in the privileged position to impact this in some way, I believe that it probably is. Anyone in the AI bubble who can maybe influence those cynical AI companies who give him money, focus on stopping that, the most impactful thing you can do for the climate or for AI Governance is to ensure adults take power in November. 

But if you're, like me, far from the US, not in a country where fascism is a major force, and without any particularly strong means to impact the outcome, it's probably not the right thing to be working on, not because it's not important, but because it's not neglected. So we can keep working on other good stuff, and somehow reduce the harm being done to the world over these 4 infamous years. 

 

I both agree and disagree. 

I agree this is probably the status and that it's not an easy sell. 

But I still think there must be a way. Once you start thinking like an EA, it's hard to go back to ineffective thinking; it just doesn't make sense. So surely the kind of people who get through the EU concours should be the kind of people who would think that way if we could just get them started .. 

I'm thinking about what I could do in this area with my own EU mates. 

This is awesome, Amanda,

Jessica (original co-founder of Hi-Eng) just emailed me to say you'd set this up. I've signed up and will try to find ways to help. Basically we engineers can do so much in so many impactful areas - alternative protein, climate, nuclear, health ... so much of the world's problems need engineers to help solve them. 

I'm super busy these days, but when I have time I will look into ways I might be able to help - even though my GitHub skills are neglegible ... 

Great post, I have heard the same observations before (I live in Brussels). The examples you give are spot on. It is very very difficult to change EU policy on a political level, but I have heard of people working in the commission for less than 4 years being responsible for determining how to distribute millions of euros of developmental aid. Just having a person who asks "can I see the evidence behind the different interventions?" would make a massive difference.

In this context, I sometimes one if the single biggest opportunity is not to turn many more EU administrators into EA's - or at least, to expose them to EA thinking. They are mostly very smart people, mostly motivated to make the world better. They tend to be very quantitatively competent (the entrance exam requires it for many roles). 

If you were to ask yourself where you might find a cohort of people more suited to being impactful EA's, it would be hard to find one. 

Unlike many bureaucracies, most EU staffers are not hardened cynics or party hacks. They mostly did an exam soon after graduation while they were still idealistic. 

From your experience, do you know if there is much effort in this direction. Do EU staff get exposed to EA thinking in a positive way? Or in any way at all? Is there room for an impactful program to improve this? 

You say there are only about two dozen EA or EA-adjacent people out of 32,000. That is tiny. Imagine if we could increase that number to 1% - somehow communicate with the people enough to convince 1% of them to start thinking like an EA. People like Rutger Bregman who have a lot of credibility outside the EA community could help. 

It feels like turning EU Administrators into EA's could be a highly effective, tractable, impactful and neglected opportunity. 

Hi Alex, 

Thanks for writing this wonderful post. I've been following and supporting GFI for a while and I actually looked at working in Alternative Protein (I'm a PhD chemical engineer and spend most of my career doing scale-up research) - but it is surprisingly hard to get into, and so I ended up working with a pretty amazing direct air capture start-up. 

Alternative Protein has so much potential to be a win/win/win/win for the world - climate, land-use, water, nutrition, animal-suffering, preventing famines - it's a total no-brainer ... except to the lobbies who want to preserve the status quo. It is shocking that we don't spend 100 x what we currently spend on bringing this technology to the market. 

Over the past 3 years, while I haven't been working on alternative protein, I have been learning so much (not intentionally!) that may be relevant to the challenges you describe. I won't try to capture it all here, but would be happy to talk to one of your scale-up team members. 

Let me briefly explain what I've learned:

1. Aggressive scaling is possible and you can get it funded. DAC is an even less attractive market than Alternative Protein in many ways, but there is a way to get investors and regulators on board. But it's not trivial. It requires going beyond the business-as-usual approach and focusing on scaling. Basically, one company that says "we'll let all those other people figure out the details - we're going to scale - fast! - and we're going to be ready to use the best technology that the others develop. In other words, instead of waiting until you're "ready" to scale, you scale in parallel with the technology growth. This can be compelling for investors, because you have a tangible time-line within which you plan to be profitable. (Yes, I know this is massively over-simplified and so on, but I can share real examples of where this strategy has worked and how).
2. There is EU Funding at the right scale. One of my side-roles while I was between roles was as an "expert" reviewer for EU Horizon projects. They have "flagship projects" which get up to ~ 20 million euros of funding - these are designed to get the first full-scale production plant build for technologies that struggle to scale. I reviewed proposals in a different area, but I'm sure that alternative protein can have potential in some ways. Writing these proposals is hard work and very tedious, but it can be the breakthrough that is needed. 

3. Legislation is a vital part of the battle. The recent farcical ruling in the EU that products cannot be called meat-names if they're not meat is an example of what can go wrong. (I live in Brussels but I'm not really in the policy / lobbying network, but I see people who are in the climate space, and it is very powerful. Less in the sense that you can influence major policy decisions, but more in the sense that you can influence which initiatives a quite junior commission officer might decide to support with the 100 million euros they have to invest in some particular objective. Do you have people on the ground, in PLux, chatting to people about how alternative protein is a great way to help the climate, to reduce animal suffering, to provide food security for the EU, ... ??

   I think Rutger Bregman is a big supporter of Alternative Protein. Certainly one of the co-leaders of his program is. It would be interesting to see if there's a way that he would consider Alternative Protein as a topic for the next generation of the School of Moral Ambition. This would give a big injection of resources and support in the non-technical aspects, like legislation and funding. If you have a tangible proposal of what this might look like, I know my contact in his org would get it to him. 

4. Many scale-up projects fail at the zeroth step (this from my long industrial career) because they have not clearly defined the one (or two, or three) technical obstacles that, if solved, would enable scale-up. This is also a reason that Horizon applications fail. You need an absolutely ruthless analysis of all the assumptions you're making, and a "devil's advocate" review before you can then say "if we could solve this, we could scale this technology." But once you get it down to the point where you need just one or two innovations, it starts to become more interesting to investors and research funders. 

I wish I had time to follow and deeply understand the technology behind alternative protein - I followed a few lectures and read some articles, but I'm not a biochemical engineer, and so I don't pretend to have the necessary technical mastery. But there are already lots of amazing scientists and engineers working on the technical challenges. If you think it'd be useful to chat to someone from a more hard-nosed scale-up perspective, let me know.  

I keep coming back to this post and feeling that, if anything, I didn't express strongly enough just how awful and dangerous Trump is. 

This is a great post!

I've worked in non-EA roles where I was a hiring manager and we had many high-quality applicants for a single role. For example, hiring post-doc chemists is humbling when you see 50 CV's of people who have each done incredible work and are far more qualified than I am. 

At first, it seems like an abundance of choice. But what is surprising is that we almost never reject someone without a real reason. Sure, "there were better candidates" can be true, but usually I can put my finger on a few reasons why we decided this. You are probably a great person, but if you don't get hired, it's very likely that someone can tell you exactly why - what was it that that other candidate had or did differently? 

So feedback is super useful - but only if you can get good, honest feedback - and you'll only get this if you are very receptive, not defensive and totally respectful of the interviewer's time. 

For good, motivated candidates, I often offer to do a 30 minute feedback session after their last interview. I will get quite granular "when we asked you X, you replied Y, and it wasn't a very convincing answer, we would expect a candidate of your calibre to have given answer Z" or "we had 4 applicants who had done full post-docs in small-angle light scattering, which is the core of the role, and it was always going to be difficult for you without this experience." And also very basic things like "If you start to feel tired, have a strong coffee. We're judging you against other candidates who are fully focused, if you're tired, it's just harder."

When I applied for my first job in a full-time EA role, a very helpful hiring manager, Michael Aird, did exactly this, and gave me so much good feedback and tangible advice that it really step-changed my approach to EA job-seeking. 

I still got plenty of rejection though :) - I was even rejected as an attendee for EAG London even while I was doing an incubator with AIM ! So it's also great to get used to rejection and learn from it!