Gordon Irlam's page

I am passionate about global poverty and the future of humanity. I love playing around with computing technology, and I am also interested in biotechnology.

I am currently working on biology.

I would like to be exploring risk mitigation for smarter-than-human artificial intelligence.

I volunteer for the GRI Charitable Foundation, a small charitable foundation.

I used to work for Google on Gmail. Before that I worked at Postini, Cygnus Solutions, Sun Microsystems, and Adelaide University.

Current Projects

• Biology
  • An integrated model of the effects on fitness of beneficial, deleterious, and neutral mutations in sexual populations (preprint)
  • Evidence for the macroevolutionarily optimal mutation rate (preprint)
  • The creation-mutation-selection model: simulation and the advantage of sex (preprint)
• Finance
  • AIPlanner (github) - Deep Learning Financial Planner
    • 2018 - Financial Planning via Deep Reinforcement Learning AI
    • 2020 - Multi Scenario Financial Planning via Deep Reinforcement Learning AI
    • 2020 - Lifetime Portfolio Selection: Using Machine Learning (non-paywalled)
    • 2020 - Machine Learning for Retirement Planning (paywalled)
  • AACalc - life expectancy and income annuity calculator
  • Lifetime Portfolio Selection: A Simple Derivation
• Effective altruism
  • Giving What We Can member
    • 34% of income after taxes to effective organizations (1992-2023)
    • 45% of expenditure excluding taxes to effective organizations (1992-2023)
  • Effective Altruism Investing Strategies
    • Asset Allocation
    • Leveraged ETFs
    • Stock Options
  • Effective Altruism Spending Strategies
  • Back of the Envelope Guide to Philanthropy
  • GRI Charitable Foundation

A Penny for my Thoughts?

• What should I do with my life?
  • In praise of Viktor Zhdanov
• Poverty and public health
  • What will it take to end poverty?
  • Andrea: The Pig Lady of Panchimalco - micro-credit in El Salvador.
  • Countries make me sad
  • Mississippi dreaming (homeless in Mountain View)
• Economics
  • A property tax on investments?
• Infopolitics
  • Software patents threaten to devistate the software industry
  • DNS was in danger of fragmenting or getting hijacked