Jia Yuan LOKE

Cause Areas of Interest in EA:

• AI safety & technical research

How did you first get involved with the EA community?

A friend gave me The Life You Can Save when I was in junior college (JC), and many ideas in the book seemed intuitively sensible to me. But I didn’t act on this EA stuff until my final year of university, when I realised that since I had to get a job, I might as well try to do something impactful.

How has Effective Altruism influenced you in your journey of trying to do the most good?

Taking seriously the idea that we should try to do more good rather than less good is hard and confusing, so having other people to fumble through this stuff with is cool. I’ve benefited a lot from direct mentorship, as well as generally being around people who are thoughtful, ambitious, and deeply kind.

What would you like to see more in your EA community?

I’m not sure what counts as “my EA community”, since I’m from Singapore but currently live elsewhere. 

Anyhow, maybe less deferring to status?

Also, I’m not sure how to balance my belief that impact and talent are heavy-tailed with my desire to make the community big and welcoming. So I’d like more people to figure this out.

What advice would you give to someone who is considering a career change into an EA-aligned one?

Jobs at EA organisations might be overrated; there are useful things one can do at places not explicitly labeled as EA orgs.

Can you share one (random) fact which you think most people would not know about?

When a hornet enters the hive of Japanese honeybees, hundreds of bees can respond by forming a ball around a hornet. While the bees face an immense disadvantage in both size and strength, the bees working in unison can vibrate to produce heat, raising the temperature in the formation, like a tiny oven, to over 45 Celsius. Bees can survive the high temperature, but the hornet cannot, and after up to an hour of cooking, the hornet dies.