Matthew first encountered effective altruism when Toby Ord gave a talk at his high school around the time Toby cofounded Giving What We Can.
As an undergraduate studying philosophy at the University of Cambridge, he was initially considering a career in journalism or international development. He read more about effective altruism while at Cambridge, and did an internship at Giving What We Can in 2013. This led him to take the Giving What We Can pledge to give 10% of his income to effective charities. He initially decided to switch into earning to give, and after graduating top of his class in philosophy, he took a job in finance.
In 2017, Matthew decided that earning to give wasn’t the best way for him to make an impact. He was persuaded of the moral importance of future generations, and became particularly concerned about catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence. As a result, he decided to switch towards building career capital in policymaking, motivated by our career profile on civil service careers.
Matthew spoke to 80,000 Hours advisors in early 2018, looking for advice on deciding between offers to join the UK civil service or a master’s in public policy at Oxford, and how best to use a six-month career break to gain useful information about his personal fit in different roles.
We suggested that he consider opportunities for direct work in AI policy, such as working at DeepMind. In the summer of 2018, he attended EA Global in San Francisco, which he credits with shifting his focus to direct work in global catastrophic risks. He was accepted into FHI’s Research Scholars Programme, before being pointed to a position working with Toby Ord on his book on existential risk. Matthew worked on The Precipice for two years, as a researcher and project manager. The book has sold around 50,000 copies.
Matthew now works as a research assistant to FHI Director Nick Bostrom, and expects to continue working on existential risk and macrostrategy in the medium term.
To learn more about Matthew’s line of work and global priorities research more generally, check out:
- Our problem profile on the importance global priorities research
- Our career review of global priorities researchers
- Our articles on how you can support excellent researchers (like Nick Bostrom) through research management, operations management, and being an executive assistant
- Our podcast episode with Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity’s potential futures
- Our podcast episode with FHI researcher Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
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