Ajeya Cotra

It sounds like you were a bit on your own.

What did you end up doing with that time?

Yeah.

What sorts of reflections did you have on, I guess, your career so far and your motivation and I guess like what had been difficult in 2023 and 2024?

Yeah, it's like venture capital that OpenPhil is engaged in, in a way.

Is that in part because Holden really wanted this deep research?

He wanted to more deeply understand the idea.

Both personally and he thought it was, I guess, healthy for the organization.

In your notes, you said that you spent a fair bit of time reflecting in this period about what it had been that you liked about effective altruism, I guess, as an ecosystem and as a mentality, and what things you didn't like so much about it to tell us about that.

So there's the being more compassionate to a wider range of beings, which I guess is still the case and probably still something you like about the effective altruist approach.

But there was also going into enormous intellectual depth and just really debating things out.

And then there was also the very high integrity about honesty, like not allowing any chicanery whatsoever.

Yeah, it's not necessarily implied.

I guess it's a practical question whether it is or not.

I guess as things evolved, you found that the second one, the intellectual depth, was now lacking from your job.

Were there other things that were changing that made you less enthusiastic?

It feels like on some level, you really were a more natural grant recipient rather than a vicar.

You should have gotten something to really go in deep on some questions.

Yeah, it's not the case that the world's most impactful organizations are consistently incredibly transparent or even incredibly high integrity.

I guess we should say for people who don't know that I guess over this period, the environment that Openfield was operating in became a lot more challenging and a lot more hostile, I guess.