About me

(It’s pronounced May-zlee)

I’m a full-time writer supported by a grant from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) to do deep dives on AI, policy, and other topics. I am not employed by CG and my views do not represent theirs. The grant does not obligate me to write from any specific perspective. The full text description of the grant’s purpose reads:

To support one year of writing and communications work made publicly available on topics related to AI, public policy, and other topics.

Before this I ran the effective altruist DC city network for 4 years, where I represented EA to the broader public and connected new members to each other and job opportunities. Before that I taught high school physics for 7 years. I still have all my lectures up on my YouTube channel here, I’m currently the most popular channel for the specific IB physics curriculum.

In college I was a double major in philosophy and physics at Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts. I’m originally from Webster nearby.

I’m basically always excited to chat with people who are following me. Feel free to reach out to me at AndyMasley@Gmail.com. Follow my full media empire here.

General goals for the blog

These are the main topics I expect to write a lot about this year:

• AI and data center impacts on the environment. This topic is how I built my audience. Ever since I posted my first article on it my subscriber count has basically been a straight upward line.

  

  Because I’ve become a significant voice in the AI/environment debate, I’m going to continue to spend a decent amount of time on it. There’s still a lot to cover and new questions emerging. But it will be a smaller part of my output now compared to other topics. I think broader questions about AI ultimately matter incredibly more, and I suspect as AI becomes more capable the main debate will move far away from the water consumed by individual data centers and to questions of economics, war, philosophy of mind, and risks from very advanced AI.

• Animal welfare.

• AI in general.

• Effective altruism.

• Political liberalism.

• General recs and advice.

Some writers I like a lot

• I think Joseph Heath writes about politics and philosophy better than almost any other contemporary writer, especially in The Machinery of Government and Following the Rules. He’s a wonderful explainer of ideas and I try to mimic his style a lot

• When I’m writing about the environment, I’m often trying to mimic

• Reading a lot of Joe Carlsmith convinced me that trying to write about big general stuff is really valuable and something I could do. This piece by him is a good place to start. His style combines efficiency and minimalism with poetic language that tries to point at important hard-to-articulate stuff. He also mainly pulls from a lot of other writers to create good and useful overviews of exciting intellectual spaces, which is what I’m trying to do for the stuff I care about.

• When I’m writing about philosophy I’m trying my best to mimic the style of either Derek Parfit, Christine Korsgaard, or Martha Nussbaum.

Paid content

Right now I’m not paywalling any content. I’m mainly interested in sharing ideas and building a network here, not making money. I’ve been extremely grateful to the people who have decided to support the blog with money. It’s been an amazing surprise to have such a big and supportive audience and it motivates me to post more.

If you’re interested in supporting me, my number one ask would be that instead you consider setting up a recurring donation to one of my two favorite charities: GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund or Farmkind’s Impact Fund. If you send me proof that you started donating I’ll hype you up on a note.

My original motivations for writing more

• Writing is a useful exercise for myself. This Paul Graham post fits my experience:

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.

• Writing even one essay makes me permanently better at speaking and thinking about the topic. I think there’s an incredibly high payoff to speaking and thinking well about ideas you’re building your life around and that you think are fundamentally important.

• Writing in public has been much more fun than I expected. I’ve met a disproportionate number of really cool people with surprisingly deep similarities to me purely through posting on Twitter and Medium, and some of the best conversations I’ve had in the last few years were started by stuff I or the other person was writing about. I’m still meeting a lot of new people via public writing who I have a sense of as being on the same general team in the world, and I want to see where I can take that.

• I often don’t have clear summaries of ideas which are having a big effect on my life available to share with my friends, and I’d like to have those on hand. I also have a lot of conversations with friends that I wish other friends could have been around for and contributed to, so I want to the ideas from those conversations public when I can.