Interested in biosecurity, alternative proteins, community building, entrepreneurship, and policy.
Trained as a biomedical engineer in France and Switzerland (MSc). Started but did not finish a PhD in biotechnology (microbiology + tissue engineering to study the gut microbiota).
Originally from France.
Ideas and insights about community building, comparative advantage, special programs. Discussions about principle-based versus cause-specific outreach. Also very interested in fit testing and small to big projects around biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and field building in that cause area.
I have insights around community building locally and nationally, career planning and exploration. I also have some experience in academia (started but didn't finish my PhD) that I'm happy to share.
Thank you for sharing this!
I'm a little bit surprised the other comments only focus on the pension thing, even though it's the title.
I enjoyed how you unravel the chronology of your thoughts on existential risk from AI. It shows the complexity of this topic and the challenging journey towards developing an opinion and structuring ideas about it. That's the kind of story that helps me deal with my own confusion, as I can see the struggle of others too.
Why does nobody use the term "eutopia"? From Greek etymology, dystopia means "bad place", and utopia means... "non-place" - like an unachievable place, while eutopia means "lucky place". Shouldn't we use a word pointing toward something that we can hope for?
Wikipedia mentions that the fact that both utopia and eutopia are pronounced identically might have given rise to a change of meaning. But I think the difference in meaning is important - should we deliberately use - and thus mispronounce - eutopia /ɘːˈtoʊpiə/?
Not necessarily no, as you ask for clarification - though if you were to form an opinion about the person commenting before the resolution of this potential misunderstanding, that could be caused by a lower language proficiency than expected and not a misunderstanding of the movement dynamics, then maybe yes?
Yes, this is consistent with my experience too. Bad calibration of expected timelines, unresponsiveness to (two) emails asking for updates or if they needed anything (over one month), and something I would also qualify as somewhat disrespectful: they asked for additional information that was already available in the initial application.
For me it means that they probably didn't read through completely before asking for more, besides the application being less than a dozen sentences long, one of them being "here are the relevant links" which contained all the information the follow-up email was asking for. I agree that it was not obvious that the requested info was there in the application, but I would expect a grant manager to actually skim or even read everything before asking for additional details.
In my perspective, it felt like a disregard for my time in an attempt to compensate for a longer turnaround than they wished they would have.
(Opinions my own)
PS: We received a decision a bit less than 3 months after applying.