Hi, LessWrong Community. I'd like to introduce myself!

My name is Michael Simm. I am passionate about disruptive systems (eg, understanding and using emerging technologies to make the future better). I'd been interested in EA principles long before I learned about the movement, so once I read What We Owe The Future, I jumped right into an In-depth EA Virtual Program and started reading a lot of EA literature. Shout-out to my In-Depth EA group, you all are awesome!

I’m working to establish an extremely high-impact charity with game-changing potential, and I’m working on a forum post to introduce it by the end of the week.

With any luck, you’ll be seeing me around a lot, so here’s a bit about me :)

I’ve been interested in maximizing my impact and trying to improve the future for a long time. Back in high school and college, I got deeply involved in political activism, especially around climate change as I thought it was the biggest existential threat to humanity’s future. I helped organize some of the March For Our Lives stuff (gun control), and then I started a Sunrise Movement Hub (climate activism group - Green New Deal) at my University that saw decent success. I saw activism as the best use of my time to help create large positive change.

Around 2018, I started becoming interested in a very different type of impactful thing: disruptive technologies. With my focus on climate change, I quickly identified electric cars, solar panels, and energy storage (particularly batteries) to be on the verge of upending global reliance on fossil fuels. There, I ran across Dr. Tony Seba, who was one of the only people to accurately predict the massive price declines of solar, electric cars, and batteries. He’s now doing fantastic research into the coming disruptions in energy, transportation, and other areas with an organization called RethinkX. Disruption generally happens when any system proves 5X better than the incumbent one, thus opening a huge opportunity space.

Because of my research around disruptive technology businesses, I put most of my high school savings into Tesla stock. A lot of people thought I was nuts.

In college, my dueling interests in politics and disruptive technologies (systems) led me to major in political science and minor at ASU’s new School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS). My time in college (It wasn’t a lot of time, I graduated in under two years.) was dedicated to school, researching disruptive systems, and political action toward climate change.

At some point, I realized that the marginal impact I’d made through approximately 4 years of political activism was likely less than the impact of one disruptive technology startup (say, Tesla) in one day, if not a few minutes.

My objective became to find a new and emerging disruptive system, and meaningfully impact its trajectory for the betterment of humanity. Depending on the thing, this was something that one person could make a massive impact doing.

After several months of research, I found it.

But they told me not to go over 500 words :/

Again, I’m working to establish a charity with extremely large potential, and I’m working on a forum post to introduce it next week. Please reach out to help me refine my post! How it is written and received may be very important.

Sincerely,

Michael