I run Sage, a charity building tools to make sense of the future.
We're building tools to help people rapidly get better at forecasting, at Fatebook and Quantified Intuitions, and visual explainers on AI capabilities and their effects, at AI Digest.
I live in London.
I recently married and changed my name from Adam Binks to Adam Binksmith!
🔭 Building tools for forecasting and thinking
I’m interested in the potential of software tools to help people make more accurate probabilistic forecasts.
Often when we are making decisions, it’s based on what we expect their consequences to be. So if we can improve our ability to predict future events, we can make better decisions.
I think better forecasting may help us reduce global catastrophic risks, so I’m exploring the potential of tools to improve the forecasting process.
I was previously a PhD student at the University of St Andrews in Computer Science, supervised by Alice Toniolo and Miguel Nacenta, and part of SACHI.
In my PhD, I designed a tool for forecasters and thinkers to progressively externalise their mental models, fluidly move between and create formalisms, and share their thinking with the community.
🗺️ Studying transformations between representations
To support the design of tools for forecasting and thinking, I’m interested in how representations (like diagrams and visualisations) can affect the way we think, and what kinds of structures we discover.
Lots of great work has been done on the content of representations. But I think it’s also worth looking at how we transform, or move between, representations.
I made Write Reason, a tool to study transformations. It combines a text editor and a mapping interface.
🗻 Map of Why
I made a prototype of a tool for tracking your goals. The idea: track how your daily to-do list contributes to your ultimate life goals and intrinsic values. Maybe one day I'll return to this - with LLMs, I think the task of mapping out your full goal tree is more feasible.
🧠 Improving rationality
I previously worked as a researcher at Clearer Thinking. I built interactive tools, ran studies, and wrote articles, to help people improve their rationality and achieve their goals.
I made a tool to help you uncover your guiding principles, to help you make decisions more in line with your values, faster.
I wrote about what AI can do, what it can’t do, and what’s coming (in 2022, so it's now very out of date).
💡 Effective Altruism
I’m fascinated by the project of Effective Altruism. I helped run EA St Andrews.
I co-founded One for the World: St Andrews. It’s a community where we pledge to give a portion of our future income to highly effective charities, based on research from GiveWell.