Job board to work on problems like climate change and food insecurity
goodjobs.careers
goodjobs.careers
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I would absolutely love a site like 80,000 Hours that wasn't tainted by a weird nerd ideology addressing paranoid fears of a malignant AGI.
I don't. To me, they're just a convenient list of tech jobs at non-profits, or at least they were a few years ago.
> then consider the possibility that they are smart, reasonable people who came to a different conclusion on AGI. And then consider whether their fears may have merit.
There are plenty of smart, reasonable people who don't worry themselves sick over Roko's basilisk, and I choose to listen to them instead.
* Primer - Reach your leads everywhere
* Andium - Digitizing the Oil & Gas Industry
fit into the "problems like climate change and food insecurity" bucket.
- https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/biden-admins-me...
- https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2021/03/26/environmental-advoc...
You might have a benefit to lowering the CI of each barrel minutely but really at the end of the day you are hurting the other industries that are trying to get a footing. That's why you are getting some negative feedback. Either through lack of knowledge of the history of the industry or intentionally painting a climate tech friendly perspective due to the new found interest at large of the general population / investing population.
- "At Andium, we’re saving companies millions of dollars annually, while increasing safety"
- "we offer an ecosystem of automated products and services that provide the next generation of remote monitoring capabilities"
- "Increasing site visibility while reducing onsite time, manual labor, and human error equates to major cost savings, and saving our clients’ time and money is in our DNA"
- "We've spent countless hours developing our technology and created the first-ever thermal imaging solution for safe, cost-effective tank-level management that has saved our clients millions at scale"
If you're truly in the same bucket as "problems like climate change and food insecurity" problems, you probably want to update your core messaging across your website
The challenge in selling to O&G companies is they don't really care about climate initiatives. They do have concerns but its not their bread and butter there fore you have to package your sell in other ways such as cost efficiency.
Respectfully, this is not the business we are in, but I understand how our current messaging could convey it that way. That being said, there is a strong incentive to build products that both address climate pollution and reduce costs. It's a fine line and one that we think about constantly at the company.
So they have to "put on their Sunday best" or they get shellacked in socially responsible index fund investor calls and press.
Honest question, but doesn't enabling the Oil & Gas industries to reach peak effectiveness have the opposite effect?
What I mean by this, O&G right now is highly ineffective and to fit into regulatory limit they need to downscale operations just to have a "reserve". By allowing them, for example, to monitor the Flare and other things, don't you actually allow them to increase the production because now they have the data and means how to squeeze effectively into the limits?
The short answer is that nobody knows for sure ... yet. Regulatory bodies, NGOs, and ESG-focused activist and impact investors are actively developing frameworks and methodologies for total life cycle GHG accounting. [1] and [2] are a couple of examples in the US from around the time the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. This area is evolving quickly as momentum has built over the last few years for a global approach to getting to net-zero emissions. We keep a close eye on this and continuously evaluate the latest developments in the context of product development ideation.
[1] from 2016: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-03/documents...
[2] from 2015: https://www.eia.gov/conference/2015/pdf/presentations/skone....
Andium looks somewhat similar to Rebellion Photonics (recently sold to Honeywell), although the use case is different. Not sure if you’re familiar with their product.
When the oil companies are finally out of the hydrocarbon game, they will have built their platform upon the biggest set of externalised costs in history, and their old assets will still be polluting in new hands.
My thought process: 1. Oh - neat idea! [ Checks website ] 2. Okay, cool. Early stages, but on the right track. 3. Who the hell are these companies 4. Ugh, I'm not going to click on each one to find out. 5. Let's go comment about this on HN. I bet someone beat me to the punch.
80,000 hours does this well https://80000hours.org/job-board/
"Research Scientist, AI. Facebook"
"Data Scientist, Technology and Resource Investment Decision-making. US Government, Central Intelligence Agency"
"Deep Learning Researcher, Computer Vision Algorithms. Baidu"
1. ML at Facebook and Baidu pay well so you could use that money to fund more effective things.
2. By working in these roles you have the ability to change how things are done. Certainly more than you usually could from the outside.
3. There's a big push in the effective altruism group on safe AI/ML. I disagree with this but that's a factor in their weightings.
No salaried employee is going to change Facebook's incentives to profit from violating privacy and selling their users' data.
Working at a company that does these things is no lesser evil in my book.
1: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/mqw86u/i_am_sophie_zh...
Seriously, what meaningful and controversial change has the rank-and-file (or even the managerial staff) at Facebook managed to accomplish? I'm not really asking for your opinion here as much as I am asking if you have any reports or information on the matter that contradicts the things I've heard or seen or read.
Why are you so certain? Their own employees feel that public pressure is the only way out, evidenced by their employees publicly speaking out or leaking things to the press to effect change. How, in your eyes, does this come anywhere close to a degree of certainty that change from within is possible?
I've read similar evidence about people not being able to do much, but someone (or some committee) is having an impact on research direction somewhere within the company (else they wouldn't have even started that research department to begin with).
Is that change from within? Is this not proving my point?
> else they wouldn't have even started that research department to begin with
You couldn't think of a single other reason to start a research department? Like, say, to say you're doing research but without regard for the results?
For a job board like this, I would prefer that the companies themselves are directly working on high impact problems that are a benefit to society and the environment.
Would also be nice to see a quick description of the impact each company is trying to have.
Not sure your plans for this page, but could be an interesting conversation with that founder.
As the target audience for a job board like this, the question I am starting with isn't "how can tech solve climate change?", it's "how can I apply my tech skills to a problem like climate change?".
That's true by definition. As political systems are very sensitive to technology, doing tech work can be a very effective form of activism.
Excellent and simple analysis. I should also add housing (in most parts of the world ) to the list.