Sam Damashek

Substack | LinkedIn | Twitter

Some things about me:

• Grew up homeschooled in Fairfax, (No)Va
• Homeschooling got lonely so I went to TJ
• Got really into CTFs
• Went to CMU for CS because of PPP
• Interned on Jane Street cybersecurity; realized trading was more interesting
• Worked for 3 years at JS as an options quant
• Founded Zoa, an AI forecasting lab (we're hiring!)
• Based in NYC, frequently in SF
• (Try to) source my dopamine from updating my mental map

Some problems I care about:

• Democratic decay
• The continued success of democracy requires both high standards of living and growth
• Technology is the primary force for both
• We need to clear barriers to domestic building and let the market work in areas like housing, education, energy, and manufacturing
• At the same time, government intervention sometimes makes sense, e.g. healthcare
• Artificial intelligence
• AI is poised to massively boost both standards of living and growth
• The most likely risk is that AI will boost growth but not standards of living
• The worst risk is that AI will wipe out humanity, which is less likely but obviously worth taking seriously
• Raising the ceiling of human health
• It's crazy how little we understand about mental health
• It's only slightly less crazy how little we understand about physical health
• Longevity research is good, but maximizing QALYs should be the goal

Some things I believe:

• Impatience is a virtue
• The best things in life unfold
• System 1 can be trained
• Our intuitions have inherent biases
• But we can change this through calibration
• This is important because system 1 has far more compute and memory
• Everything is correlated
• Returns to decorrelated ideas are larger than you'd think
• Working on more..

If any of this resonates, reach out! I love meeting new people.

• Email: (anything)@sdamashek.me
• Signal: @sdamashek.17

Inspired by nat.org