Aaron Bergman
Bio
Participation4
I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I've interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
How others can help me
- Give me honest, constructive feedback on any of my work
- Introduce me to someone I might like to know :)
- Offer me a job if you think I'd be a good fit
- Send me recommended books, podcasts, or blog posts that there's like a >25% chance a pretty-online-and-into-EA-since 2017 person like me hasn't consumed
- Rule of thumb standard maybe like "at least as good/interesting/useful as a random 80k podcast episode"
How I can help others
- Open to research/writing collaboration :)
- Would be excited to work on impactful data science/analysis/visualization projects
- Can help with writing and/or editing
- Discuss topics I might have some knowledge of
- like: math, economics, philosophy (esp. philosophy of mind and ethics), psychopharmacology (hobby interest), helping to run a university EA group, data science, interning at government agencies
Posts 19
Comments168
Topic contributions1
Offer subject to be arbitrarily stopping at some point (not sure exactly how many I'm willing to do)
Give me chatGPT Deep Research queries and I'll run them. My asks are that:
- You write out exactly what you want the prompt to be so I can just copy and paste something in
- Feel free to request a specific model (I think the options are o1, o1-pro, o3-mini, and o3-mini-high) but be ok with me downgrading to o3-mini
- Be cool with me very hastily answering the inevitable set of follow-up questions that always get asked (seems unavoidable for whatever reason). I might say something like "all details are specified above; please use your best judgement"
I’ll just highlight that it seems particularly cruxy whether to view such NDAs as covenants or contracts that are not intrinsically immoral to break
It’s not obvious to me that it should be the former, especially when the NDA comes with basically a monetary incentive for not breaking
Here is a kinda naive LLM prompt you may wish to use for inspiration and iterate on:
“List positions of power in the world with the highest ratio of power : difficulty to obtain. Focus only on positions that are basically obtainable by normal arbitrary US citizens and are not illegal or generally considered immoral
I’m interested in positions of unusually high leverage over national or international systems”
It’s personal taste, but for me the high standards (if implicit) - not only in reasoning quality but also as you say, formality (and I’d add comprehensiveness/covering all your bases) are a much bigger disincentive to posting than dry/serious tone (which maybe I just don’t mind a ton).
I’m not even sure this is bad; possibly lower standards would be worse all things considered. But still, it’s a major disincentive to publishing.
@MHR🔸 @Laura Duffy, @AbsurdlyMax and I have been raising money for the EA Animal Welfare Fund on Twitter and Bluesky, and today is the last day to donate!
If we raise $3k more today I will transform my room into an EA paradise complete with OWID charts across the walls, a literal bednet, a shrine, and more (and of course post all this online)! Consider donating if and only if you wouldn't use the money for a better purpose!
See some more fun discussion and such by following the replies and quote-tweets here:
Reranking universities by representation in EA survey per undergraduate student, which seems relevant to figuring out what CB strategies are working (obviously plenty of confounders). Data from 1 minute of googling + LLMs so grain of salt
There does seem to be a moderate positive correlation here so nothing shocking IMO.
Same chart as above but by original order