To recap:

The Series I savings bond is a US government bond offered to US citizens, with purchases limited to $10k per person per year. It pays interest set by a formula based on the official inflation rate, with a built-in lag. (...)

In particular, the interest rate formula for bonds bought before May 1, 2022 will be:

• 3.56% until October 1
• X% for the next 6 months (where X% is the inflation of CPI-U from Sept 2021 to March 2022)
• Y% for the following 6 months (where Y% is the inflation of CPI-U from March 2022 to Sept 2022)

...and so on. You'll forfeit the last 3 months of interest if you redeem anytime before 5 years (which I'm assuming will be correct to do).

When we checked in December, we'd seen 2 months of the Sept'21->Mar'22 period and I had conservatively estimated that the 6-month inflation rate would come in at 2.17%, implying a

an incomplete reading list, seeking suggestions

Since announcing my career change to working on biosecurity (Twitter thread), I've had a few people ask me for resources for learning more about (careers in) pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Here are some resources that I've found helpful in my reading and exploration, in the hopes that they'll be helpful for you, too.

(living list, updated as I find more things)

Other reading Lists

• Chris Bakerlee's biosecurity reading list
• Greg Lewis's biosecurity reading list

Article-to-paper sized content

• 80,000 Hours's article on Reducing global catastrophic biological risks (and more 80k content)
• Open Philanthropy's 2014 cause report on biosecurity
• Andrew Snyder-Beattie's talk Biotechnology and Existential Risk at EA Global London 2017
• Andrew Synder-Beattie and Ethan Alley's Concrete Biosecurity Projects list
• relevant sections of the Future Fund's project ideas list
• proposals for early warning systems from the Council on Strategic Risks, David Ecker, and the Nucleic Acid Observatory
• Erik Minikel's How pharmaceutical industry financial modelers think about your

This January, I left my job as a trader at Jane Street (most recently in Hong Kong) to take a role leading a project at the FTX Foundation. I have positive things to say about Jane Street as an excellent place for many of my friends to work, and my open offer of thoughts and advice to anyone hoping to work there remains, well, open.

Looking forward, I'm thrilled to be working with the Foundation because I want to help build a better future. I've been interested in thoughtful, rigorous, altruistic attempts to improve the world since 2013, and pledged in 2016 to donate at least a tenth of my income to the most effective organizations I can find. I am beyond excited to find an opportunity where I estimate I'll do even more good than I could by earning and donating a quant trader's salary (which I still think was really, really good for the world, on any objective scale).

It's still early days here, and we don't

At just under nine years since I started blogging, I'm changing this blog to a new name. There's no huge story here, just a vague but growing dissatisfaction with My Faults My Own as my brand for personal writing.

(1)

I took the name My Faults My Own in August 2013, in homage to Vi Hart's video Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots, particularly the quote:

Here's the thing about connecting dots. You can have all the steps laid out for you, taking whatever next step is easiest and closest and be sure of what you're getting the whole time. This way is safe and comfortable.

Or, you can try new ways of connecting dots and not know what you're going to get. Maybe it will be something great, maybe it will fail. And when it fails it will be your fault. You can't blame anyone else, not mathematics or the system or the check-boxes.

But if I am to have faults, I would rather they be my own.

This post describes my thoughts, at the end of 2021, about donating money to make the universe a better place. I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to do so.

This year is the first time since 2017 that I'm substantially changing my approach to donations. In 2017, I shifted my focus from mainly global poverty/health to a mix of global poverty, animal welfare, long-term future, and meta EA. This year, I'm shifting to a mix of global poverty, animal welfare, and explicitly 'exploratory' categories.

(1a)

Perhaps the most important long-term development in effective altruism in 2020 and 2021 has been the crypto boom, which has moved at least $30 billion of wealth to committed effective altruists. (The most widely visible of these is Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX.) I would roughly estimate that the top ~ten self-identifying EAs now have plans to move at least $45 billion of donations to EA causes in the next ~30 years -- even in the

Summary: The Series I savings bond is a US government bond offered to US citizens, with purchases limited to $10k per person per year. It pays interest set by a formula based on the official inflation rate, with a built-in lag. If inflation from November '21 to March '22 follows historical patterns, bonds purchased in December '21 and redeemed after 15 months will pay ~4.62% interest annualized. If inflation is higher (as it has been recently), the bonds will pay more; if it's lower, they will pay at least 3.56% interest when redeemed after 12 months.

All of those potential rates are a percentage points higher than any other bond that is even remotely as safe; this is because of the way the inflation adjustment rule works. Specifically, the inflation adjustment for the next six months is set based on what inflation was in the last six months. As a consequence, a Series I purchased between now and April 30 will pay its