Hi! I’m Harri. I offer coaching.

Some of the questions I’m interested exploring with you:

• How are you?
• What is the life you want? What is holding you back?
• What would it be, to live life in fullest integrity?

And perhaps also, time permitting:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

A big influence on my coaching is the practice of ‘circling’ - connecting through embodied presence. You don’t need to have circled before.

I’m particularly interested in talking with people who are in and around the effective altruism community (but not exclusively!).

I do this on a donation basis.

‘How can I do the most good?’ I think this is a beautiful question, and one that’s guided a significant part of my life.

But this hasn’t been the only question, not even in the good-doing domain. Other ones, murkier, less beautiful, but no less powerful. For example:

• Am I doing enough? Am I enough?
• What will people think of me?
• Do I have enough money?
• How can I make sure I am ok?

Variously accompanied by fear, resentment, pride, guilt, shame etc. and variously express through - through sycophancy, tribalism, defensiveness and so on. See ‘I cheated on an EA work task’ for some of these in action.

‘How can I do the most good?’ is a guiding question for the effective altruism community and many ‘EA-adjacents’. And a lot of people’s answers to this question, especially nowadays, are related to making AI go well.

Richard Ngo recently wrote A Retrospective of AI Alignment. The main pieces as I understand it:

• The AI alignment community had a plan to differentially advance alignment (the good stuff) over capabilities (the bad stuff).
• The AI alignment community has mostly done the opposite
• A lot of this is downstream of being driven by fear, prestige, power and other things.

I’m going to be a weaselly fence-sitter and remain agnostic about the main pieces, especially 1 and 2. But it does bring to the fore a sense of this is important. Where this is people acting from a place of integrity and sincerity, and not self-deception and insecurity.

To be clear, I think there’s a lot of nobility, courage and altruism within the broader EA community. And also, it’s very easy for the question of ‘How can I do the most good?’ to be substituted for more ego-centric ones.

The AI situation is really popping off these days, and provides ample footholds for fears and insecurities.

• Are we all going to die?
• Maybe I deserve some of the AI philanthropy boom?
• Am I going to become part of the permanent underclass?
• Will I have a job?
• Will I fall behind if I don’t know how to use AI?
• What if I don’t have a large enough galaxy?

Above all, a sense of urgency. And it does seem like the urgency is in some sense warranted. It’s easy for questions of integrity to become an afterthought.

Give me your money!

Well, on an individual level, it seems important that people take the time to really reckon with all of this.

Insofar as I’ve been successful in becoming more sincere (which I make no big claim to), a big part of this has been through circling and other relating practices.

Circling as a practice is difficult to describe, but roughly, can you fully own what’s yours to own.

More generally though, I think there’s something really to be said to having someone to talk to, someone who you can be completely honest with (I don’t know exactly what would have lead me to eg. not cheat on a work task, though I imagine having someone to talk to would have helped a bunch).

And so this is what I have to offer, someone to talk to about all this - an exploration of what it means for you to be in integrity, where you're driven by things that you don’t want to be driven by, and what you do want to be driven by.

The above is perhaps kind of intense. Are you living with enough integrity?? No you’re not, you piece of shit. The AI apocalypse is your fault.

Sorry about that. I do have a positive vision for this kind of work, but it’s a lot harder to put words to.

The more I’ve come to a sense of personal integrity, the more I’ve come to hear the truth in such statements:

Worship is essentially an act of adoration, adoration of the one true God in whom we live and move and have our being. Forgetting our little selves, our petty ambitions, our puny triumphs, our foolish cares and fretful anxieties, we reach out towards the beauty and majesty of God. The religious life is not a dull, grim drive towards moral virtues, but a response to a vision of greatness. Thomas F Green, 1952