A warm welcome to our new Head of Strategic Development, Ysa!
Hi Ysa, and welcome to the EA Sweden team! We are so excited to have you joining us as Head of Strategic Development.
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
It is such a joy to join EA Sweden in such a strategic position! It has been a long standing dream of mine to live in Scandinavia as I fell in love with Norway first, then Sweden, for its black metal music scene and beautiful nature surroundings. I remain French at heart since there is nothing I love more than a good, in-depth discussion with people holding courageous opinions. This might also stem from my past experiences as a researcher, as I hold a PhD in History and a Bachelor in Law.
My PhD was part of a European Research Council project that examined dynamics of state-building, whose main insight was to demonstrate that cooperation was at the heart of building a state and required everyone having a personal interest for it to work, instead of just using strength to govern. This thinking applies well to Effective Altruism, where we think rationally about global issues and try to solve them in the most pragmatic way. I also have a strong liking for stoicism and would opt for Marcus-Aurelius’s thoughts if I had to choose one book and live on a deserted archipelago!
What do you like about the ideas of effective altruism?
Funnily, I entered the EA community through a book whose author isn’t formally an EA, but certainly shaped the way we think about global aid in EA: the Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo’s “Poor Economics”. She advocates for an approach that consists in trusting the people we help to spend their money as wisely as possible, and her empirical research allows tackling big issues with several small data-based experiments, making the best of social sciences mixed with hard economics.
And that is basically what I want to do at EA Sweden: designing a flexible, data-based strategy based on several experiments, always reviewing what went wrong and, hopefully, right!
What is something you changed your mind about in the past year?
I have been skeptical about the good that crypto money can do, especially regarding how polluting its mining is and how it has been used so far. But reading about blockchain and the many uses it might have in the future–decentralizing politics, reliable way to vote, among other benefits– made me nuance my jugement. I am looking forward to see where this takes us and relevantly it can be used for the common good.
